How Racism Cheated Atlanta’s
Black Teachers and Students
A review by Charlie Brover
None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators. (Beacon Press, 2019)
By Shani Robinson and Anna Simonton
Some of the 35 teachers and administrators jailed in the Atlanta "cheating" witch hunt trial.
All but one were African Americans. (Photo: Kent D. Johnson/Pool photo)
Which of the following statements about education in the United States is generally true? Choose the one best answer.
- Education powers upward economic and social mobility.
- Standardized tests provide an objective way to assess students.
- Good charter schools with high expectations can close the “achievement gap.”
- The Atlanta cheating scandal was the fault of misguided black educators.
- None of the above.
That’s correct. The answer is, “none of the above,” which is also the title of a book published this year by former Atlanta teacher, Shani Robinson, and journalist Anna Simonton. Their book exposes the dirty campaign and racist frame up that targeted Atlanta public schools and indicted 35 educators all but one of whom was black. The government threatened decades of hard jail time and sent black educators to prison. For what? For the “crime” of manipulating some scores on standardized tests. For the record, some surely did – under the tremendous pressure of the education “reformers” running Atlanta’s schools – while others were simply framed up, the accusations against them invented out of whole cloth. But what was behind it all was the vicious testing regime that victimized teachers, students and even principals, using rewards and punishments in the service of a regimented corporate “education” model.
Part memoir, part history, part legal brief, None of the Above is intensely personal even as it provides a history and analysis of the social and economic forces behind the national media sensation of Atlanta’s “cheating scandal.” Robinson wants readers to understand what it feels like to be an innocent person experiencing the extraordinary stress as a target of an all-out prosecutorial witch-hunt. As she faced up to 25 years in prison and endured public humiliation, her life was upended. But her life went on through romance, marriage, pregnancy, and the birth of her child during her trial.
None of the Above unfolds like a mystery novel. Readers don’t get the details of how Robinson was falsely indicted under RICO (Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization) conspiracy statutes until one-third of the way through the book. Young, talented and black, Robinson first presents herself as a wide-eyed guzzler of Wendy Kopp’s Teach for America (TFA) Kool-Aid. Over time, and as she gained experience teaching, Robinson became a sharp critic of the racism behind the corporate reformers’ agenda and practice. She describes the cultish TFA pep rallies and notes “that TFA, for all its talk of helping poor kids, was designed with the needs of privileged college graduates in mind” (None of the Above, page 7).
Kopp was a welcome guidepost in an educational landscape that was dominated by the idea that schools should be run like businesses. Kopp embraced that market model and reaped massive corporate backing for her program. As Robinson and Simonton point out, the TFA model justified and complemented the reformers’ idea that government funding of public education was largely wasted. After all, a bunch of “inexperienced young people who were in the pipeline from the Ivy League to the echelons of the business elite could be temporarily rerouted into schools where, by sheer force of leadership and management acumen, they would ramp up production of high achieving students.”
In 2007, fresh from her TFA cult indoctrination with its infomercial videos of children succeeding because of TFA “hard work” and “high expectations,” Robinson got a job teaching first grade at Dunbar Elementary, in Atlanta’s Mechanicsville, a once flourishing African American neighborhood that had become a community in dire straits. There she soon found out that the pep rallies and her 25 days cosseted in TFA summer training didn’t begin to prepare her for the job. Moreover she began to understand that TFA was an integral part of the “reform” business model for education that was stripping resources from the public schools and was characterized by toxic over-testing. Robinson and Simonton briefly outline the legislative history that resulted in George Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Obama’s Race to the Top (RTTT) with their pernicious testing regime. The market model requires a measurable “bottom line” to reward and punish, so the standardized test became the sole instrument to measure children’s achievement, teachers’ “value added,” schools’ and districts’ success.
What Happened
Like many other cities hungry for federal funding, Atlanta was test crazy. In 1998 the Atlanta Public School system (APS) brought in Beverly Hall to “turn around” the schools. In the early 1990s Hall was a deputy schools chancellor in New York City and then was hired by the state of New Jersey to “turn around” Newark schools in its racist takeover of the district. In Newark, Hall immediately laid off 500 employees, an act that became known as the “Beverly Hall massacre”; she tied teacher and administrator raises to student test scores and privatized the food service. Protests by teachers and parents ensued, but she was widely praised by the corporate reform movement. In Atlanta, Hall continued her hardline, test-centered managerial regime.
As a first grade teacher, Robinson was required to administer the Georgia state-mandated CRCT (Criterion Referenced Competency Test). She was relieved to learn that test scores for first and second graders didn’t count for AYP (Annual Yearly Progress). She was not in the testing pressure cooker that enveloped teachers in the higher grades. Her young students dawdled through the test, bored, confused and sometimes drew pictures on their answer sheets. When the test was completed, the testing coordinator ushered Robinson and two other teachers into the computer lab. Although the tests didn’t count, they nevertheless needed to be scored.
The testing coordinator instructed Robinson and the other teachers to erase “stray marks” from the test booklets as these marks would presumably confound machine scoring. This erasure procedure was required and clearly spelled out in the official CRCT test manual. The teachers also were instructed to clean up and complete students’ required demographic information. Robinson and the others dutifully complied. At the time Robinson thought nothing of it. But that scene would become the basis of her life-changing nightmare when she became a target of the sensational cheating scandal.
Under Beverly Hall, Atlanta’s test scores improved markedly. Suspiciously. The Georgia Teachers Union was first to blow the whistle on the testing irregularities as early as 2005. As the hapless inhabitants of Hall’s House of fear and trembling, they complained to her about the horrible pedagogical effects and the cheating that was inevitable under the test-centered regime. Their warnings were ignored. The Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC), Atlanta’s “paper of record,” investigated probable cheating on the 2008-9 CRCT. To establish widespread cheating a state agency used a statistical method comparing wrong-to-right erasures against the expected norm. The study concluded there was cheating.
Judge Jerry Baxter declared that the APS scandal was
""sickest thing that's ever happened in this town."
What about slavery? Jim Crow? (Photo: Kent D. Johnson/Pool photo)
From the politicians to the media to the legal establishment and corporate reformers, the scandal unleashed a tsunami of hysteria that went national. The innocent were carried along in the riptides of frenzy. Teachers were vilified daily. It was characterized as the crime of the century. Perhaps even centuries past. Sounding like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, Judge Jerry Baxter, proclaimed the presumed teacher-cheating the “sickest thing that’s ever happened in this town.” Slavery? Jim Crow? Nothing compared to changing answers on a multiple-choice test. Sonny Perdue, then Georgia governor, and now Trump’s agriculture secretary, allocated millions of dollars for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) to swoop in to cast a dragnet over the educators. And while the state of Georgia was screaming bloody murder about what educators had done to invalidate the test scores and “cheat the children,” they applied for and received $400 million in RTTT funding from the Obama administration based on those same scores.
Atlanta superintendent Beverly Hall, speaking with
school board members, January 2011.
Hall, once the darling of the corporate school "reform" forces,
pressured teachers to turn in high student test scores.
Hall died during the trial. (Photo: David Goldman/AP)
Hall, who was the creature of the corporate “reform” movement, suddenly became its central villain. Robinson recalls reading the GBI report that accused Hall of creating a culture of intense pressure to meet targets under the mantra of “no exceptions,” “no excuses.” Robinson remembers: “I had heard that saying before I ever worked for APS. ‘No excuses’ was the mantra of Teach for America and so many other school districts that had come under the influence of the education reform movement that advocated running schools like corporations” (page 79). Many educators certainly were driven by fear. When students didn’t jump over the designated testing hurdles, educators faced pay cuts, disciplinary actions, even termination and a future of unemployment. The test bullies scoured the schools to threaten any who might question or object to the testing regime.
There isn’t the slightest doubt that Hall and the other testing evangelists had created an environment that forced all teachers to teach to the test and that drove some educators to manipulate scores. But in the trial and media uproar, the standardized-testing regime and the cash-based systemof reward and punishment at the source of the corruption of educational goals and values were exonerated. Hall was never tried as she died of breast cancer before the trial. Atlanta black teachers, however, were subjected to a racist witch-hunt.
Witch-Hunt: A Crucible of Judicial Terror
The investigation, prosecution, and trial was a hot mess of corruption, misconduct, and hypocrisy. It was a classic witchhunt. The judge in Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials, says to those accused of witchcraft: “Confess or hang.” Miller was thinking of the McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunts, but the play could just as well serve as historical analogy to the Atlanta “cheating” scandal. GBI intimidated teachers and other educators who initially said they did not change answers. Prosecutors threatened them with long jail sentences, some times as much as 30 to 40 years. They offered immunity deals and reduced sentences to teachers if they “confessed,” named names, and told stories that fingered other teachers and educators. Robinson and two of her colleagues, along with an unknown number of others were falsely accused.
In 2013 the prosecution used RICO, passed in 1970 to go after the Mafia, to treat an entire school system as a criminal enterprise. They charged educators, many of whom did not know each other, as if they were a tightly-organized Mafia gang. Armed with false testimonies given under duress and the indiscriminate RICO conspiracy charges that extended criminal penalties, prosecutors indicted 35 educators on racketeering. It’s no accident that all but one were African American, because this was a racist prosecution.
RICO was passed as part of the 1970 crime bill that vastly expanded federal crimes and established prosecutorial procedures that allowed the government to punish their targets before trial. RICO encouraged prosecutors to overcharge to obtain confessions and “cooperation.” Investigative targets could be hit with huge bail and threatened with long prison terms as was done in the Atlanta case. RICO was such a successful prosecutorial tool that its sledgehammer tactics were picked up by states and expanded to all sorts of other “enterprises” beyond the mafia.
As broad and vague as the RICO statutes are, its conspiracy provisions are even broader. The concept of group crime in a “pattern of racketeering” is a license for prosecutorial misconduct. Any case that involves the use of the mails or the telephone and includes at least two violations over a 10-year period – even relatively trivial offenses – can be prosecuted as a “pattern of racketeering activity.” The harsh penalties are often wildly out of proportion to the severity of the crime. At the trial in Atlanta, RICO “expert,” John Floyd explained to the jury that as long as there were two or more people who “shared a common plan or purpose” they were guilty under RICO. He told the jury that the “conspirators” need not know each other and they were guilty if there could be an “unspoken, tacit understanding between two conspirators” (page 194).
The prosecutors claimed bonus money was a key motivation for teachers who raised test scores, but all the people brought to trial received only a total of $1,500. The reality is that those educators who did change scores were above all trying to keep their schools from being closed down. Far from cheating for financial gain, they were often the same educators working in under-resourced schools who bought supplies and sometimes food for their students. Nevertheless, the prosecution and media continued to yelp about “cheating for financial gain.”
Educators were led off in handcuffs in this monstrous show trial. Above: research
team director Sharon Davis Williams. (Photo: Kent D. Johnson/Pool photo)
As the most expensive trial in Atlanta’s history wore on, the prosecutors and Judge Baxter continued to press the accused black educators for a public “confession” and an agreement not to appeal in exchange for reduced sentences. Rather than be imprisoned and separated from their families, a number of those charged relented and accepted the public humiliation; some of them implicated others. Shani Robinson, who had taught for only three years and was the youngest of the group was confronted with a hard decision:
“I was facing twenty-five years in prison for something I didn’t do. I could make a false confession and receive a lesser consequence… [But] no one would know the truth of what really happened, how a broken and biased system had railroaded innocent people. If I stood up for myself and won, maybe that system would be held to account. Maybe it would be harder for a travesty of justice like this one to happen again in the future… I would not accept a plea deal. I was going to trial.” (page 137)
. . .
Even after the trial began, Robinson wrote: “I thought for sure I would be acquitted because I never received bonus money and my first-grade students’ test scores were just for practice – they didn’t count toward the district’s nor the federal government’s benchmarks for improving test scores.” At trial Robinson was convicted on the basis of false testimony. The evening before her sentencing, the D.A. offered the deal: public confession or go to prison. Like the protagonist in The Crucible (Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch trials) who refuses to confess falsely at the cost of his life, Robinson makes a political decision based on her social solidarity with her community of teachers and the political stakes for the future:
“I was afraid of prison, and wanted to avoid it at all costs... Then I thought about the educators who had done that thankless, unyielding, difficult, invaluable work for the better part of their entire lives, only to have their legacies tarnished about a conspiracy that never was. I thought about this strange demand for an apology, a public shaming, a concession that everybody against us and the public schools we championed had won.
“I said no.” (210)
Eleven black educators were eventually convicted on charges of racketeering and eight sentenced by Judge Baxter to jail time. The Fulton County courtroom was a bizarre scene as teachers and principals were led away in handcuffs, all of them first-time, non-violent offenders. Seven have sought a new trial in Fulton County Superior Court. Initially threatened with up to 25 years in prison, Robinson was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison, four years’ probation, 1,000 hours of community service, and a $1,000 fine. She is currently appealing her conviction.
Tip of the Iceberg
While None of the Above certainly makes a convincing case for Robinson’s own innocence and that of some of her colleagues, she does not deny that cheating occurred in APS. There was plenty of manipulation to raise test scores in Atlanta and just about everywhere else the toxic hyper-testing regime was instituted under NCLB and RTTT. We know that high-stakes standardized tests don’t assess achievement, and can’t assess critical thinking or learning generally. As educational researcher Diane Ravitch has said, the NCLB was a “measurement system” that had “nothing at all to do with the substance of learning.” But such tests do measure something – the absorption of a culture of regimentation and the acceptance by students of the authoritarian premise that the test makers have all the answers. As side effects, standardized tests produce compounded anxiety for students, teachers, and parents. And plenty of cheating.
Robinson and Simonton title one of their chapters, “The Pot Calling the Kettle Black.” Despite all the Cold Warrior complaints about “whataboutism” – their lame response when Soviet spokesmen would respond to imperialist accusations of “human rights” bv saying “So what about lynching in the South?” – the hypocrisy surrounding Atlanta cheating scandal is a example of where it is perfectly in order to say “what about …?” (fill in name of the city). What about the cheating in the “Texas Miracle”? What about all the cheating in Washington D.C. under charter school darling, Michelle Rhee? What about all the cheating investigated and documented all over the country? And in particular, what about decades of cheating the children out of the resources required for a quality public education?
Rod Paige became U.S. secretary of education bases on the
"Texas miracle" of rising student test scores.
Only later was it revealed that this "miracle"
was based on rampant cheating.
(Photo: U.S. National Archives)
In 1998 Houston’s reported test scores rose sharply and dropout rates fell. President Bush proclaimed it a “Texas miracle,” and the media prayed fervently at the altar of the standardized test. Rod Paige, Houston’s superintendent, was tapped to be Bush’s Education Secretary and commissar as this “Texas miracle” became the model of Bush’s 2001 NCLB testing regime. (Paige, it might be recalled, also gained fame – or notoriety – for labeling teachers unions “terrorist organizations.”) The Houston model tied incentives for schools, including cash, to test scores. A few journalists at the time reported evidence of widespread cheating and noted that Houston’s miraculous gains in test scores were not replicated on national tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The phony “miracle” was exposed a year after the NCLB went into effect when a Houston assistant principle told reporters how scores were inflated by diverting low-scoring students from testing and in some cases had them skip the tenth grade when the tests were given. The miraculous dropout rate was also shown to be a scam as many students who left schools were simply underreported as transfers and for other bogus reasons. Paige resigned in 2004. But like other religious congregations worshipping professed miracles, evidence did not create doubt in the advocates for NCLB. And when Obama and Arne Duncan took over, they implemented the Race to the Top, NCLB on steroids.
The corporate reformers who fashioned the testing pressure cooker were among those who hit Atlanta’s educators the hardest. In 2011, Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education said, “You really cheat the children; that’s the part that’s most disappointing.” He failed to mention the USA Today (6 March 2011) investigative report, “Testing the System,” published a few months earlier that found 1,600 cases of standardized test manipulation in six states and Washington D.C. Duncan’s failure to mention Washington D.C. was a particularly revealing example because it was the bailiwick of education “reform” sweetheart Michelle Rhee. Rhee closed schools, tied incentives to test scores and fired more than 600 teachers (241 in one day) for low student test scores. A subsequent USA Today (11 April 2013) reported that eight of ten schools where Rhee handed out rewards for high test scores were on the list of schools flagged for changing answers.
Michelle Rhee fired hundreds of teachers for low
student test scores, rewarded others
for rising scores based on cheating.
Exposed by a whistleblower lawsuit, Rhee got out of D.C. in a hurry. Of course, no RICO charges. Rhee went onto the cover of Time magazine instead and continued lucrative consulting for charter schools, including coming to Atlanta to spread her privatizing brand. The day after Duncan ignored
the D.C. case, pointing only to Atlanta, “news broke that dozens of
Pennsylvania schools, including 22 district schools and seven charter
schools in Philadelphia, had likely cheated on standardized tests” (page
81). Even the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that had done the original investigation into APS, used the same statistical method in 2012 to find wrong-to-right erasure irregularities in 196 school districts (page 90). No RICO charges.
So what about it? Why was it that only in Atlanta were educators threatened and charged with crimes of conspiracy under RICO statures subjecting them to decades of imprisonment? That is the question to which None of the Above devotes most of its political and historical attention. And the answer is: racism, even racist conspiracy. The “cheating” was a vehicle to batter the public schools, and “…in Atlanta it seemed that smearing public schools could fuel the fervor for private charters, which were playing an important role in lucrative real estate development that uprooted black communities….”
The Real Cheaters
The Atlanta cheating scandal didn’t happen in a vacuum. Robinson points out again and again that it was the accusers who had cheated the children in far more consequential ways. Public schools were systematically underfunded. Tax schemes and the corruption of local crony capitalism drained school funds into real estate boondoggles. The authors reveal the intricate connections between the history of Atlanta’s intentionally racist housing policy and the corporate-backed education “reform” campaign, specifically the connection between the real estate industry and the privatizing charter school movement. This history and analysis distinguishes None of the Above and makes it an important read for anyone who wants to understand the role of racism in the fight to defend public education.
Robinson and Simonton document the destruction of historically African American neighborhoods by super highway construction and the building of a sports stadium. These projects isolated and then demolished historically African American and mixed-race areas to the south and west of downtown Atlanta to make way for real estate speculation and gentrification. The neglect and destruction of public housing and mass incarceration, particularly with the racist “war on drugs,” ripped up the black neighborhoods and wrecked their schools. Robinson views this deliberate social wreckage through the eyes of a teacher:
“The concerted efforts by Atlanta’s political and business leaders to diminish the stability of black neighborhoods for their own gain undoubtedly had a lasting impact on the schools. Both the children who were uprooted and those who remained were increasingly deprived of the things a healthy community offers – accessible goods and services, economic opportunities, vibrant public spaces, and a supportive social fabric. Teachers and school employees were left to fill in the void, which would only expand in the years following urban renewal.” (page 31)
Atlanta defines the template for the history of deliberate residential racial segregation and the destruction of public housing. Atlanta was the site of the nation’s first public housing project, Techwood Homes, located just west of downtown Atlanta. President Roosevelt proudly officiated over the grand opening in 1935. Techwood was an attractive, well-constructed complex of six-hundred low rent apartments – for whites only! The historically mixed-race neighborhood of Tanyard Bottom was bulldozed for the racist project. When the government made cheap home loans available for whites in the 1940s and ’50s, the white residents of public housing headed for the suburbs.
In the projects, whites were replaced by black and Latino families unable to secure those government “free tickets” to long-term wealth accumulation and economic stability. This “white flight” was intensified by racist reaction to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling ordering school desegregation. As the racial character of public housing changed, it was consistently underfunded, neglected and its residents scapegoated as criminals, and with Reagan, as “welfare queens.” This pattern of deliberate segregation by government, real estate and insurance industry was repeated across the country. (See “American Apartheid by Design” [November 2019] on the CSEW website.) By the 1970s Atlanta had more public housing per capita than any other large U.S. city (page 54) Calculated neglect of maintenance and repair of Atlanta’s public housing stock was intensified until much of it was dilapidated and unlivable.
Following the iron rule of capitalism that the free market supposedly solves all problems, the regime of business-friendly Democratic Mayor, Andrew Young (see box on “‘New South’ Racism”) helped steer public funds that could have fueled rehabilitation of public housing into the private hands of greedy slumlords. Then, following suit, Clinton’s HUD Secretary, Henry Cisneros, hired developers to raze Atlanta’s public housing projects and replace them with privately managed housing. In the years 2007-2010, the years Robinson taught at Dunbar, Atlanta destroyed the last of its public housing and went from being the first city in the U.S. to have built public housing to the first to destroy all of it. (pages 63-67)
East Lake: Charters for Racism
Gentrification of Atlanta exemplified by example of East Lake Meadows public housing project (above), where over 600 housing units were torn down and their black residents removed....
(Photo: W.A. Bridges, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
None of the Above documents not only the history of the destruction of the Techwood and Clark Howell public housing projects, it also demonstrates how the charter school movement and racist real estate entrepreneurs worked hand-in-glove to destroy black communities. East Lake Meadows is the most stunning example of this racist collusion. Atlanta real estate mogul Tom Cousins bought the golf course near the public housing project, East Lake Meadows, in 1993. With the help of the Atlanta business and political leaders, he developed a plan to drive out black subsidized tenants. He changed the name to Villages at East Lake and began a campaign to attract white middle-class tenants who would pay market rates. He understood that such tenants were looking for a “good school.”
... to be replaced by upscale mixed-income housing, rebranded
"the Village at East Lake." (Photo: East Lake Foundation)
Supported by the school board and the local courts, the East Lake plan included taking over the local elementary school. The private East Lake Foundation contracted with a for-profit group connected to Edison Educational Management Organization run by Wendy Kopp’s husband, and thus the Drew Charter School was born, Atlanta’s first charter school. As predicted, wealthier whites moved in as black and Latino families were priced out. “Between 1995 and 2006, the average household income in the East Lake Neighborhood spiked 477 percent,” Robinson and Simonton note. This model of privatizing public housing coupled with privatizing public schools was heralded as a great leap forward for the real estate industry and corporate educational reformers. And it became a template for other areas of Atlanta. As None of the Above relates:
“The proponents of the East Lake model cited falling crime rates, climbing employment numbers, and improving test scores, claiming that these numbers amounted to neighborhood revitalization. In reality, what took place was a neighborhood replacement.” (page 66)
That process of gentrification, James Baldwin observed, is why urban renewal should be known as “Negro removal.”
James Baldwin: "Urban renewal is Negro removal.
" Billboard on I-285 tells the story.
(Photo: www.youwillberemoved.org)
The denigration of public schools is essential to the charter school advocates’ demands to takeover “failing schools” and their quest to get their hands on public funds for private purposes. Real estate developer Cousins set up a non-profit outfit called “Purpose Built Communities” to consult on replicating the East Lake model of privatizing public housing and public schools together. The “cheating scandal” in Atlanta weaponized their propaganda assault on public schools. As the trial went on with its relentless vilification of the public schools and black educators, the advocates for charter schools and privatization were supported in the media: “The ills of the cheating scandal,” notes Robinson and Simonton, “were increasingly counterposed with the promise of charter schools.” They note stories in the media like the one published in AJC that called the trial “a reminder of all that was sordid about Atlanta Public Schools” while heaping praise on Drew charter school as a symbol of “hope and renewal” (page 164).
The real estate interests and educational reformers came together to push charter schools to replace public schools throughout Atlanta. The model that most appealed to them was the wholesale establishment of charter schools in post-Katrina New Orleans. There the real estate interests prevailed in gutting public schools and historically African American neighborhoods at the same time. The state took over 90 percent of New Orleans public schools and turned them into charters. (See Mark Lance, “New Orleans Schools: Test Lab for War on Public Education,” Marxism & Education No. 5, Summer 2018). Of course, Atlanta did not have a natural disaster to capitalize on. But corporate reformers saw black Atlanta and its “cheating scandal” as a convenient cultural disaster. Georgia governor Nathan Deal ran for reelection in 2012 with an education agenda to adopt the Louisiana Recovery School District model (page 148).
The day the state rested its case against the educators, Deal announced legislation for a RSD-style Opportunity School District (OSD) that would take over “failing public schools” and turn them into charters. The OSD would enable state-authorized charters to get their hands on local taxes designated for public schools. Michelle Rhee set up a Georgia chapter of her hedge-fund-backed “Students First” lobbying outfit for state charters and the OSD takeover plan, pumping millions into the political campaigns of charter-friendly politicians. OSD supporters held legislative hearings to hear from RSD leaders sent around the country by the billionaire charter boosters of the Broad Foundation. Former Louisiana RSD head Paul Pastorek explained to Georgia legislators the union-busting advantages of RSD getting rid of “barriers” to instituting the model, namely “local school boards, collective bargaining, and [teacher] tenure” (page 188).
Atlanta’s teachers, students, and parents organized against the OSD to defend public education. The Georgia legislature passed the OSD, but it was rejected by 60 percent of Georgia’s voters in 2016. In Atlanta, however, the Cousins foundation and other corporate educational reformers poured money into a campaign to influence the school board to award contracts to privatizers like Purpose Built to take over schools targeted by Rhee. Atlanta is now deemed one of the most “charter-friendly” large cities in the U.S. As of 2015, “Atlanta had the highest proportion of independent charter schools which are publically funded but privately run of any large Georgia district.” Nearly one in five Atlanta students attends a charter school, mainly in black neighborhoods (“Atlanta Among the Most Friendly in U.S. to Charter Schools,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 9 December 2015).
One of the discordant notes in None of the Above occurs near the end of the book. After exposing in detail how the charter school movement was deeply implicated in the multi-pronged attack on public education in Atlanta, Robinson and Simonton nevertheless go soft on charters. No doubt thinking about the parents who opt to send their children to charter schools, they write: “The problem lies not in any flaw inherent in charters but in the intentional dismantling of public schools to increase the demand for charter schools.” But there is plenty inherently flawed in charter schools. It is inherently reactionary to shift public funds to private management. It is no accident that 90 percent of charters are non-union. The fight for public education must include sharp opposition to charters. We back off at our peril.
Defeat the Drive to Privatize Public Education
After the sentences and imprisonment of educators, some people began to recognize the harshness and disproportionality of the sentences even if they thought the educators were guilty. Education writers began to consider how the testing mania created a culture ripe for cheating. Comedian and sometime social critic Jon Stewart, for instance, whose mother was a public school teacher in New Jersey, asked: What about the consequences of the Wall Street subprime mortgage scam in 2008? Compared to the charges against the alleged cheaters, the bankers’ meltdown really did involve falsified claims, massive cover-ups, conspiracies, and astronomical sums of bonus money. It broke the financial backs of millions, particularly black and poor homeowners, and sent the global economy into a deep worldwide depression. But there were no prosecutions – not to mention RICO prosecutions – of any of the perpetrators.
As the trial in Atlanta wound down, the last lawyer for the defense, George Lawson, in closing argument tried to put the case in perspective and draw out the stakes: “It is not just APS that is on trial here today,” he said. “You see, public education is on trial today. It was on trial when we started in August. Public education will be on trial for some time, because there are those ... who believe that the dollars and cents we put into public education [are] not worth it.”
Today and for the last decade and more, the struggle for public education has been losing in Atlanta. But the city’s working class and African American communities have the power to send the privatizers packing. The Georgia Federation of Teachers (GFT) of the AFT is a relatively weak union, without the legally recognized bargaining power of many of its Northern counterparts. But as the recent wave teachers strikes from West Virginia to Oklahoma showed, the fight for public education can begin to strengthen the hand of teachers unions even in states with woefully underfunded schools. The GTF could lead powerful city-wide, class struggle to defend public education and the teachers union.
Public education is popular, as the privatizers are well-aware. The union can be the force that unites parents, students and Atlanta’s workers in defense of quality education and put an end to the corporate “reform” with its toxic standardized overtesting. Real educational reform would sharply reduce class size, integrate the schools, dump the charters, and significantly raise teacher pay. That is the “turnaround” Atlanta needs. But to unleash the power of the GFT, a class-struggle union leadership must be built. To be successful, educators and the working class as a whole must break from the clutches of the Democratic Party that has overseen the gentrification of Atlanta and the privatization of its public schools. In NCLB and RTTT, Democrats and Republicans have joined hands in the assault on public education. The struggle to defeat the privatizers and obtain quality public education for all requires the leadership of a workers party independent of both capitalist parties.
Reading None of the Above can be an infuriating and depressing experience as you follow the racist machinations of the government and business moguls. You will be moved by the terrible personal damage suffered by innocent black educators – I certainly was. Sometimes the writing in None of the Above reflects Robinson’s personal pain of black teachers being so harshly judged by the hypocrites and moralists who ignore the historical context of racism that shaped the witch hunt. And the hurt just gushes out when Robinson sums up the world her first graders faced:
“A world of decent-paying jobs outsourced to countries where companies could more easily exploit workers, close knit black communities unraveled by city planners and their corporate influencers, black homes lost to expressways, black parents in despair succumbing to addiction and locked in cages for profit, black children left to fend for themselves and treated like hardened criminals, black grandmas shot down in their own homes by police, a court system with a penchant for theatrics and an acquiescent media industry to feed its spectators, white politicians suppressing black votes and gunning for the criminal justice to swallow black families whole, and an education system telling black students to forget all that, just bubble in the right answer.” (page 43)
In their final paragraph Robinson and Simonton ask their readers to imagine a different kind of society, and they leave them with a bevy of “what if” questions:
Shani Robinson with her son, born during the trial.
(Photo: Twitter)
“[Imagine] if we had a governance system that afforded us control over the decisions that impact our lives. Can you imagine if we defined public safety not by the number of prisons and police but by whether everybody had a home, sustenance, and community? And what if the quality of education wasn’t determined by a test but by the ability of our kids to engage curiously,
creatively, and meaningfully with the world around them.”
You bet, we can imagine such a society. It’s called socialism, and it cannot be won as the authors hope by supporting “candidates who are serious about redistributing wealth.” Democrat Bernie Sanders’ plan to make charter schools “accountable” and “rethink the link between property taxes and education funding” will go nowhere against the bipartisan attack on the public schools. It’s going to take hard class struggle and revolutionary leadership that breaks through the capitalist framework.
Free Atlanta educators caught up in the racist frame up immediately! Drop all charges against Shani Robinson and all who are appealing conviction! Turn charters into public schools! For parent-teacher-student control of the schools. n
Black Teachers and Students
A review by Charlie Brover
None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators. (Beacon Press, 2019)
By Shani Robinson and Anna Simonton
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Some of the 35 teachers and administrators jailed in the Atlanta "cheating" witch hunt trial.
All but one were African Americans. (Photo: Kent D. Johnson/Pool photo)
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Which of the following statements about education in the United States is generally true? Choose the one best answer.
That’s correct. The answer is, “none of the above,” which is also the title of a book published this year by former Atlanta teacher, Shani Robinson, and journalist Anna Simonton. Their book exposes the dirty campaign and racist frame up that targeted Atlanta public schools and indicted 35 educators all but one of whom was black. The government threatened decades of hard jail time and sent black educators to prison. For what? For the “crime” of manipulating some scores on standardized tests. For the record, some surely did – under the tremendous pressure of the education “reformers” running Atlanta’s schools – while others were simply framed up, the accusations against them invented out of whole cloth. But what was behind it all was the vicious testing regime that victimized teachers, students and even principals, using rewards and punishments in the service of a regimented corporate “education” model.
Part memoir, part history, part legal brief, None of the Above is intensely personal even as it provides a history and analysis of the social and economic forces behind the national media sensation of Atlanta’s “cheating scandal.” Robinson wants readers to understand what it feels like to be an innocent person experiencing the extraordinary stress as a target of an all-out prosecutorial witch-hunt. As she faced up to 25 years in prison and endured public humiliation, her life was upended. But her life went on through romance, marriage, pregnancy, and the birth of her child during her trial.
None of the Above unfolds like a mystery novel. Readers don’t get the details of how Robinson was falsely indicted under RICO (Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization) conspiracy statutes until one-third of the way through the book. Young, talented and black, Robinson first presents herself as a wide-eyed guzzler of Wendy Kopp’s Teach for America (TFA) Kool-Aid. Over time, and as she gained experience teaching, Robinson became a sharp critic of the racism behind the corporate reformers’ agenda and practice. She describes the cultish TFA pep rallies and notes “that TFA, for all its talk of helping poor kids, was designed with the needs of privileged college graduates in mind” (None of the Above, page 7).
Kopp was a welcome guidepost in an educational landscape that was dominated by the idea that schools should be run like businesses. Kopp embraced that market model and reaped massive corporate backing for her program. As Robinson and Simonton point out, the TFA model justified and complemented the reformers’ idea that government funding of public education was largely wasted. After all, a bunch of “inexperienced young people who were in the pipeline from the Ivy League to the echelons of the business elite could be temporarily rerouted into schools where, by sheer force of leadership and management acumen, they would ramp up production of high achieving students.”
In 2007, fresh from her TFA cult indoctrination with its infomercial videos of children succeeding because of TFA “hard work” and “high expectations,” Robinson got a job teaching first grade at Dunbar Elementary, in Atlanta’s Mechanicsville, a once flourishing African American neighborhood that had become a community in dire straits. There she soon found out that the pep rallies and her 25 days cosseted in TFA summer training didn’t begin to prepare her for the job. Moreover she began to understand that TFA was an integral part of the “reform” business model for education that was stripping resources from the public schools and was characterized by toxic over-testing. Robinson and Simonton briefly outline the legislative history that resulted in George Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Obama’s Race to the Top (RTTT) with their pernicious testing regime. The market model requires a measurable “bottom line” to reward and punish, so the standardized test became the sole instrument to measure children’s achievement, teachers’ “value added,” schools’ and districts’ success.
Like many other cities hungry for federal funding, Atlanta was test crazy. In 1998 the Atlanta Public School system (APS) brought in Beverly Hall to “turn around” the schools. In the early 1990s Hall was a deputy schools chancellor in New York City and then was hired by the state of New Jersey to “turn around” Newark schools in its racist takeover of the district. In Newark, Hall immediately laid off 500 employees, an act that became known as the “Beverly Hall massacre”; she tied teacher and administrator raises to student test scores and privatized the food service. Protests by teachers and parents ensued, but she was widely praised by the corporate reform movement. In Atlanta, Hall continued her hardline, test-centered managerial regime.
As a first grade teacher, Robinson was required to administer the Georgia state-mandated CRCT (Criterion Referenced Competency Test). She was relieved to learn that test scores for first and second graders didn’t count for AYP (Annual Yearly Progress). She was not in the testing pressure cooker that enveloped teachers in the higher grades. Her young students dawdled through the test, bored, confused and sometimes drew pictures on their answer sheets. When the test was completed, the testing coordinator ushered Robinson and two other teachers into the computer lab. Although the tests didn’t count, they nevertheless needed to be scored.
The testing coordinator instructed Robinson and the other teachers to erase “stray marks” from the test booklets as these marks would presumably confound machine scoring. This erasure procedure was required and clearly spelled out in the official CRCT test manual. The teachers also were instructed to clean up and complete students’ required demographic information. Robinson and the others dutifully complied. At the time Robinson thought nothing of it. But that scene would become the basis of her life-changing nightmare when she became a target of the sensational cheating scandal.
Under Beverly Hall, Atlanta’s test scores improved markedly. Suspiciously. The Georgia Teachers Union was first to blow the whistle on the testing irregularities as early as 2005. As the hapless inhabitants of Hall’s House of fear and trembling, they complained to her about the horrible pedagogical effects and the cheating that was inevitable under the test-centered regime. Their warnings were ignored. The Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC), Atlanta’s “paper of record,” investigated probable cheating on the 2008-9 CRCT. To establish widespread cheating a state agency used a statistical method comparing wrong-to-right erasures against the expected norm. The study concluded there was cheating.
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Judge Jerry Baxter declared that the APS scandal was
""sickest thing that's ever happened in this town."
What about slavery? Jim Crow? (Photo: Kent D. Johnson/Pool photo)
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From the politicians to the media to the legal establishment and corporate reformers, the scandal unleashed a tsunami of hysteria that went national. The innocent were carried along in the riptides of frenzy. Teachers were vilified daily. It was characterized as the crime of the century. Perhaps even centuries past. Sounding like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, Judge Jerry Baxter, proclaimed the presumed teacher-cheating the “sickest thing that’s ever happened in this town.” Slavery? Jim Crow? Nothing compared to changing answers on a multiple-choice test. Sonny Perdue, then Georgia governor, and now Trump’s agriculture secretary, allocated millions of dollars for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) to swoop in to cast a dragnet over the educators. And while the state of Georgia was screaming bloody murder about what educators had done to invalidate the test scores and “cheat the children,” they applied for and received $400 million in RTTT funding from the Obama administration based on those same scores.
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Atlanta superintendent Beverly Hall, speaking with
school board members, January 2011.
Hall, once the darling of the corporate school "reform" forces,
pressured teachers to turn in high student test scores.
Hall died during the trial. (Photo: David Goldman/AP)
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Hall, who was the creature of the corporate “reform” movement, suddenly became its central villain. Robinson recalls reading the GBI report that accused Hall of creating a culture of intense pressure to meet targets under the mantra of “no exceptions,” “no excuses.” Robinson remembers: “I had heard that saying before I ever worked for APS. ‘No excuses’ was the mantra of Teach for America and so many other school districts that had come under the influence of the education reform movement that advocated running schools like corporations” (page 79). Many educators certainly were driven by fear. When students didn’t jump over the designated testing hurdles, educators faced pay cuts, disciplinary actions, even termination and a future of unemployment. The test bullies scoured the schools to threaten any who might question or object to the testing regime.
There isn’t the slightest doubt that Hall and the other testing evangelists had created an environment that forced all teachers to teach to the test and that drove some educators to manipulate scores. But in the trial and media uproar, the standardized-testing regime and the cash-based systemof reward and punishment at the source of the corruption of educational goals and values were exonerated. Hall was never tried as she died of breast cancer before the trial. Atlanta black teachers, however, were subjected to a racist witch-hunt.
There isn’t the slightest doubt that Hall and the other testing evangelists had created an environment that forced all teachers to teach to the test and that drove some educators to manipulate scores. But in the trial and media uproar, the standardized-testing regime and the cash-based systemof reward and punishment at the source of the corruption of educational goals and values were exonerated. Hall was never tried as she died of breast cancer before the trial. Atlanta black teachers, however, were subjected to a racist witch-hunt.
The investigation, prosecution, and trial was a hot mess of corruption, misconduct, and hypocrisy. It was a classic witchhunt. The judge in Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials, says to those accused of witchcraft: “Confess or hang.” Miller was thinking of the McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunts, but the play could just as well serve as historical analogy to the Atlanta “cheating” scandal. GBI intimidated teachers and other educators who initially said they did not change answers. Prosecutors threatened them with long jail sentences, some times as much as 30 to 40 years. They offered immunity deals and reduced sentences to teachers if they “confessed,” named names, and told stories that fingered other teachers and educators. Robinson and two of her colleagues, along with an unknown number of others were falsely accused.
In 2013 the prosecution used RICO, passed in 1970 to go after the Mafia, to treat an entire school system as a criminal enterprise. They charged educators, many of whom did not know each other, as if they were a tightly-organized Mafia gang. Armed with false testimonies given under duress and the indiscriminate RICO conspiracy charges that extended criminal penalties, prosecutors indicted 35 educators on racketeering. It’s no accident that all but one were African American, because this was a racist prosecution.
RICO was passed as part of the 1970 crime bill that vastly expanded federal crimes and established prosecutorial procedures that allowed the government to punish their targets before trial. RICO encouraged prosecutors to overcharge to obtain confessions and “cooperation.” Investigative targets could be hit with huge bail and threatened with long prison terms as was done in the Atlanta case. RICO was such a successful prosecutorial tool that its sledgehammer tactics were picked up by states and expanded to all sorts of other “enterprises” beyond the mafia.
As broad and vague as the RICO statutes are, its conspiracy provisions are even broader. The concept of group crime in a “pattern of racketeering” is a license for prosecutorial misconduct. Any case that involves the use of the mails or the telephone and includes at least two violations over a 10-year period – even relatively trivial offenses – can be prosecuted as a “pattern of racketeering activity.” The harsh penalties are often wildly out of proportion to the severity of the crime. At the trial in Atlanta, RICO “expert,” John Floyd explained to the jury that as long as there were two or more people who “shared a common plan or purpose” they were guilty under RICO. He told the jury that the “conspirators” need not know each other and they were guilty if there could be an “unspoken, tacit understanding between two conspirators” (page 194).
The prosecutors claimed bonus money was a key motivation for teachers who raised test scores, but all the people brought to trial received only a total of $1,500. The reality is that those educators who did change scores were above all trying to keep their schools from being closed down. Far from cheating for financial gain, they were often the same educators working in under-resourced schools who bought supplies and sometimes food for their students. Nevertheless, the prosecution and media continued to yelp about “cheating for financial gain.”
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Educators were led off in handcuffs in this monstrous show trial. Above: research
team director Sharon Davis Williams. (Photo: Kent D. Johnson/Pool photo)
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As the most expensive trial in Atlanta’s history wore on, the prosecutors and Judge Baxter continued to press the accused black educators for a public “confession” and an agreement not to appeal in exchange for reduced sentences. Rather than be imprisoned and separated from their families, a number of those charged relented and accepted the public humiliation; some of them implicated others. Shani Robinson, who had taught for only three years and was the youngest of the group was confronted with a hard decision:
“I was facing twenty-five years in prison for something I didn’t do. I could make a false confession and receive a lesser consequence… [But] no one would know the truth of what really happened, how a broken and biased system had railroaded innocent people. If I stood up for myself and won, maybe that system would be held to account. Maybe it would be harder for a travesty of justice like this one to happen again in the future… I would not accept a plea deal. I was going to trial.” (page 137)
. . .
Even after the trial began, Robinson wrote: “I thought for sure I would be acquitted because I never received bonus money and my first-grade students’ test scores were just for practice – they didn’t count toward the district’s nor the federal government’s benchmarks for improving test scores.” At trial Robinson was convicted on the basis of false testimony. The evening before her sentencing, the D.A. offered the deal: public confession or go to prison. Like the protagonist in The Crucible (Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch trials) who refuses to confess falsely at the cost of his life, Robinson makes a political decision based on her social solidarity with her community of teachers and the political stakes for the future:
“I was afraid of prison, and wanted to avoid it at all costs... Then I thought about the educators who had done that thankless, unyielding, difficult, invaluable work for the better part of their entire lives, only to have their legacies tarnished about a conspiracy that never was. I thought about this strange demand for an apology, a public shaming, a concession that everybody against us and the public schools we championed had won.
“I said no.” (210)
Eleven black educators were eventually convicted on charges of racketeering and eight sentenced by Judge Baxter to jail time. The Fulton County courtroom was a bizarre scene as teachers and principals were led away in handcuffs, all of them first-time, non-violent offenders. Seven have sought a new trial in Fulton County Superior Court. Initially threatened with up to 25 years in prison, Robinson was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison, four years’ probation, 1,000 hours of community service, and a $1,000 fine. She is currently appealing her conviction.
While None of the Above certainly makes a convincing case for Robinson’s own innocence and that of some of her colleagues, she does not deny that cheating occurred in APS. There was plenty of manipulation to raise test scores in Atlanta and just about everywhere else the toxic hyper-testing regime was instituted under NCLB and RTTT. We know that high-stakes standardized tests don’t assess achievement, and can’t assess critical thinking or learning generally. As educational researcher Diane Ravitch has said, the NCLB was a “measurement system” that had “nothing at all to do with the substance of learning.” But such tests do measure something – the absorption of a culture of regimentation and the acceptance by students of the authoritarian premise that the test makers have all the answers. As side effects, standardized tests produce compounded anxiety for students, teachers, and parents. And plenty of cheating.
Robinson and Simonton title one of their chapters, “The Pot Calling the Kettle Black.” Despite all the Cold Warrior complaints about “whataboutism” – their lame response when Soviet spokesmen would respond to imperialist accusations of “human rights” bv saying “So what about lynching in the South?” – the hypocrisy surrounding Atlanta cheating scandal is a example of where it is perfectly in order to say “what about …?” (fill in name of the city). What about the cheating in the “Texas Miracle”? What about all the cheating in Washington D.C. under charter school darling, Michelle Rhee? What about all the cheating investigated and documented all over the country? And in particular, what about decades of cheating the children out of the resources required for a quality public education?
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Rod Paige became U.S. secretary of education bases on the
"Texas miracle" of rising student test scores.
Only later was it revealed that this "miracle"
was based on rampant cheating.
(Photo: U.S. National Archives)
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The phony “miracle” was exposed a year after the NCLB went into effect when a Houston assistant principle told reporters how scores were inflated by diverting low-scoring students from testing and in some cases had them skip the tenth grade when the tests were given. The miraculous dropout rate was also shown to be a scam as many students who left schools were simply underreported as transfers and for other bogus reasons. Paige resigned in 2004. But like other religious congregations worshipping professed miracles, evidence did not create doubt in the advocates for NCLB. And when Obama and Arne Duncan took over, they implemented the Race to the Top, NCLB on steroids.
The corporate reformers who fashioned the testing pressure cooker were among those who hit Atlanta’s educators the hardest. In 2011, Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education said, “You really cheat the children; that’s the part that’s most disappointing.” He failed to mention the USA Today (6 March 2011) investigative report, “Testing the System,” published a few months earlier that found 1,600 cases of standardized test manipulation in six states and Washington D.C. Duncan’s failure to mention Washington D.C. was a particularly revealing example because it was the bailiwick of education “reform” sweetheart Michelle Rhee. Rhee closed schools, tied incentives to test scores and fired more than 600 teachers (241 in one day) for low student test scores. A subsequent USA Today (11 April 2013) reported that eight of ten schools where Rhee handed out rewards for high test scores were on the list of schools flagged for changing answers.
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| Michelle Rhee fired hundreds of teachers for low student test scores, rewarded others for rising scores based on cheating. |
So what about it? Why was it that only in Atlanta were educators threatened and charged with crimes of conspiracy under RICO statures subjecting them to decades of imprisonment? That is the question to which None of the Above devotes most of its political and historical attention. And the answer is: racism, even racist conspiracy. The “cheating” was a vehicle to batter the public schools, and “…in Atlanta it seemed that smearing public schools could fuel the fervor for private charters, which were playing an important role in lucrative real estate development that uprooted black communities….”
The Atlanta cheating scandal didn’t happen in a vacuum. Robinson points out again and again that it was the accusers who had cheated the children in far more consequential ways. Public schools were systematically underfunded. Tax schemes and the corruption of local crony capitalism drained school funds into real estate boondoggles. The authors reveal the intricate connections between the history of Atlanta’s intentionally racist housing policy and the corporate-backed education “reform” campaign, specifically the connection between the real estate industry and the privatizing charter school movement. This history and analysis distinguishes None of the Above and makes it an important read for anyone who wants to understand the role of racism in the fight to defend public education.
Robinson and Simonton document the destruction of historically African American neighborhoods by super highway construction and the building of a sports stadium. These projects isolated and then demolished historically African American and mixed-race areas to the south and west of downtown Atlanta to make way for real estate speculation and gentrification. The neglect and destruction of public housing and mass incarceration, particularly with the racist “war on drugs,” ripped up the black neighborhoods and wrecked their schools. Robinson views this deliberate social wreckage through the eyes of a teacher:
“The concerted efforts by Atlanta’s political and business leaders to diminish the stability of black neighborhoods for their own gain undoubtedly had a lasting impact on the schools. Both the children who were uprooted and those who remained were increasingly deprived of the things a healthy community offers – accessible goods and services, economic opportunities, vibrant public spaces, and a supportive social fabric. Teachers and school employees were left to fill in the void, which would only expand in the years following urban renewal.” (page 31)
Atlanta defines the template for the history of deliberate residential racial segregation and the destruction of public housing. Atlanta was the site of the nation’s first public housing project, Techwood Homes, located just west of downtown Atlanta. President Roosevelt proudly officiated over the grand opening in 1935. Techwood was an attractive, well-constructed complex of six-hundred low rent apartments – for whites only! The historically mixed-race neighborhood of Tanyard Bottom was bulldozed for the racist project. When the government made cheap home loans available for whites in the 1940s and ’50s, the white residents of public housing headed for the suburbs.
In the projects, whites were replaced by black and Latino families unable to secure those government “free tickets” to long-term wealth accumulation and economic stability. This “white flight” was intensified by racist reaction to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling ordering school desegregation. As the racial character of public housing changed, it was consistently underfunded, neglected and its residents scapegoated as criminals, and with Reagan, as “welfare queens.” This pattern of deliberate segregation by government, real estate and insurance industry was repeated across the country. (See “American Apartheid by Design” [November 2019] on the CSEW website.) By the 1970s Atlanta had more public housing per capita than any other large U.S. city (page 54) Calculated neglect of maintenance and repair of Atlanta’s public housing stock was intensified until much of it was dilapidated and unlivable.
Following the iron rule of capitalism that the free market supposedly solves all problems, the regime of business-friendly Democratic Mayor, Andrew Young (see box on “‘New South’ Racism”) helped steer public funds that could have fueled rehabilitation of public housing into the private hands of greedy slumlords. Then, following suit, Clinton’s HUD Secretary, Henry Cisneros, hired developers to raze Atlanta’s public housing projects and replace them with privately managed housing. In the years 2007-2010, the years Robinson taught at Dunbar, Atlanta destroyed the last of its public housing and went from being the first city in the U.S. to have built public housing to the first to destroy all of it. (pages 63-67)
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| Gentrification of Atlanta exemplified by example of East Lake Meadows public housing project (above), where over 600 housing units were torn down and their black residents removed.... (Photo: W.A. Bridges, Atlanta Journal-Constitution) |
None of the Above documents not only the history of the destruction of the Techwood and Clark Howell public housing projects, it also demonstrates how the charter school movement and racist real estate entrepreneurs worked hand-in-glove to destroy black communities. East Lake Meadows is the most stunning example of this racist collusion. Atlanta real estate mogul Tom Cousins bought the golf course near the public housing project, East Lake Meadows, in 1993. With the help of the Atlanta business and political leaders, he developed a plan to drive out black subsidized tenants. He changed the name to Villages at East Lake and began a campaign to attract white middle-class tenants who would pay market rates. He understood that such tenants were looking for a “good school.”
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| ... to be replaced by upscale mixed-income housing, rebranded "the Village at East Lake." (Photo: East Lake Foundation) |
“The proponents of the East Lake model cited falling crime rates, climbing employment numbers, and improving test scores, claiming that these numbers amounted to neighborhood revitalization. In reality, what took place was a neighborhood replacement.” (page 66)
That process of gentrification, James Baldwin observed, is why urban renewal should be known as “Negro removal.”
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| James Baldwin: "Urban renewal is Negro removal. " Billboard on I-285 tells the story. (Photo: www.youwillberemoved.org) |
The real estate interests and educational reformers came together to push charter schools to replace public schools throughout Atlanta. The model that most appealed to them was the wholesale establishment of charter schools in post-Katrina New Orleans. There the real estate interests prevailed in gutting public schools and historically African American neighborhoods at the same time. The state took over 90 percent of New Orleans public schools and turned them into charters. (See Mark Lance, “New Orleans Schools: Test Lab for War on Public Education,” Marxism & Education No. 5, Summer 2018). Of course, Atlanta did not have a natural disaster to capitalize on. But corporate reformers saw black Atlanta and its “cheating scandal” as a convenient cultural disaster. Georgia governor Nathan Deal ran for reelection in 2012 with an education agenda to adopt the Louisiana Recovery School District model (page 148).
The day the state rested its case against the educators, Deal announced legislation for a RSD-style Opportunity School District (OSD) that would take over “failing public schools” and turn them into charters. The OSD would enable state-authorized charters to get their hands on local taxes designated for public schools. Michelle Rhee set up a Georgia chapter of her hedge-fund-backed “Students First” lobbying outfit for state charters and the OSD takeover plan, pumping millions into the political campaigns of charter-friendly politicians. OSD supporters held legislative hearings to hear from RSD leaders sent around the country by the billionaire charter boosters of the Broad Foundation. Former Louisiana RSD head Paul Pastorek explained to Georgia legislators the union-busting advantages of RSD getting rid of “barriers” to instituting the model, namely “local school boards, collective bargaining, and [teacher] tenure” (page 188).
Atlanta’s teachers, students, and parents organized against the OSD to defend public education. The Georgia legislature passed the OSD, but it was rejected by 60 percent of Georgia’s voters in 2016. In Atlanta, however, the Cousins foundation and other corporate educational reformers poured money into a campaign to influence the school board to award contracts to privatizers like Purpose Built to take over schools targeted by Rhee. Atlanta is now deemed one of the most “charter-friendly” large cities in the U.S. As of 2015, “Atlanta had the highest proportion of independent charter schools which are publically funded but privately run of any large Georgia district.” Nearly one in five Atlanta students attends a charter school, mainly in black neighborhoods (“Atlanta Among the Most Friendly in U.S. to Charter Schools,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 9 December 2015).
One of the discordant notes in None of the Above occurs near the end of the book. After exposing in detail how the charter school movement was deeply implicated in the multi-pronged attack on public education in Atlanta, Robinson and Simonton nevertheless go soft on charters. No doubt thinking about the parents who opt to send their children to charter schools, they write: “The problem lies not in any flaw inherent in charters but in the intentional dismantling of public schools to increase the demand for charter schools.” But there is plenty inherently flawed in charter schools. It is inherently reactionary to shift public funds to private management. It is no accident that 90 percent of charters are non-union. The fight for public education must include sharp opposition to charters. We back off at our peril.
After the sentences and imprisonment of educators, some people began to recognize the harshness and disproportionality of the sentences even if they thought the educators were guilty. Education writers began to consider how the testing mania created a culture ripe for cheating. Comedian and sometime social critic Jon Stewart, for instance, whose mother was a public school teacher in New Jersey, asked: What about the consequences of the Wall Street subprime mortgage scam in 2008? Compared to the charges against the alleged cheaters, the bankers’ meltdown really did involve falsified claims, massive cover-ups, conspiracies, and astronomical sums of bonus money. It broke the financial backs of millions, particularly black and poor homeowners, and sent the global economy into a deep worldwide depression. But there were no prosecutions – not to mention RICO prosecutions – of any of the perpetrators.
As the trial in Atlanta wound down, the last lawyer for the defense, George Lawson, in closing argument tried to put the case in perspective and draw out the stakes: “It is not just APS that is on trial here today,” he said. “You see, public education is on trial today. It was on trial when we started in August. Public education will be on trial for some time, because there are those ... who believe that the dollars and cents we put into public education [are] not worth it.”
Today and for the last decade and more, the struggle for public education has been losing in Atlanta. But the city’s working class and African American communities have the power to send the privatizers packing. The Georgia Federation of Teachers (GFT) of the AFT is a relatively weak union, without the legally recognized bargaining power of many of its Northern counterparts. But as the recent wave teachers strikes from West Virginia to Oklahoma showed, the fight for public education can begin to strengthen the hand of teachers unions even in states with woefully underfunded schools. The GTF could lead powerful city-wide, class struggle to defend public education and the teachers union.
Public education is popular, as the privatizers are well-aware. The union can be the force that unites parents, students and Atlanta’s workers in defense of quality education and put an end to the corporate “reform” with its toxic standardized overtesting. Real educational reform would sharply reduce class size, integrate the schools, dump the charters, and significantly raise teacher pay. That is the “turnaround” Atlanta needs. But to unleash the power of the GFT, a class-struggle union leadership must be built. To be successful, educators and the working class as a whole must break from the clutches of the Democratic Party that has overseen the gentrification of Atlanta and the privatization of its public schools. In NCLB and RTTT, Democrats and Republicans have joined hands in the assault on public education. The struggle to defeat the privatizers and obtain quality public education for all requires the leadership of a workers party independent of both capitalist parties.
Reading None of the Above can be an infuriating and depressing experience as you follow the racist machinations of the government and business moguls. You will be moved by the terrible personal damage suffered by innocent black educators – I certainly was. Sometimes the writing in None of the Above reflects Robinson’s personal pain of black teachers being so harshly judged by the hypocrites and moralists who ignore the historical context of racism that shaped the witch hunt. And the hurt just gushes out when Robinson sums up the world her first graders faced:
“A world of decent-paying jobs outsourced to countries where companies could more easily exploit workers, close knit black communities unraveled by city planners and their corporate influencers, black homes lost to expressways, black parents in despair succumbing to addiction and locked in cages for profit, black children left to fend for themselves and treated like hardened criminals, black grandmas shot down in their own homes by police, a court system with a penchant for theatrics and an acquiescent media industry to feed its spectators, white politicians suppressing black votes and gunning for the criminal justice to swallow black families whole, and an education system telling black students to forget all that, just bubble in the right answer.” (page 43)
In their final paragraph Robinson and Simonton ask their readers to imagine a different kind of society, and they leave them with a bevy of “what if” questions:
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| Shani Robinson with her son, born during the trial. (Photo: Twitter) |
creatively, and meaningfully with the world around them.”
You bet, we can imagine such a society. It’s called socialism, and it cannot be won as the authors hope by supporting “candidates who are serious about redistributing wealth.” Democrat Bernie Sanders’ plan to make charter schools “accountable” and “rethink the link between property taxes and education funding” will go nowhere against the bipartisan attack on the public schools. It’s going to take hard class struggle and revolutionary leadership that breaks through the capitalist framework.
Free Atlanta educators caught up in the racist frame up immediately! Drop all charges against Shani Robinson and all who are appealing conviction! Turn charters into public schools! For parent-teacher-student control of the schools. n
Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here.