A high-level Atlanta Public Schools official allegedly advised principals to refuse to cooperate with a criminal cheating inquiry, instructing them to write notes telling state investigators to “go to hell.”
The episode, described in public records and in interviews, has triggered an internal investigation of a senior member of Superintendent Beverly Hall’s staff, according to documents obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
It also calls into question the district’s pledge to cooperate with state investigators who are trying to unravel a widespread cheating scandal. Obstructing a state criminal investigation can itself be a crime.
The district’s internal investigation focuses on Tamara Cotman, who supervises about 25 elementary and middle schools, mostly in southwest Atlanta. Sixteen were among the 58 Atlanta schools where the state found suspicious numbers of erased and corrected wrong answers on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test in 2009.
Cotman is the highest-ranking official to publicly face allegations related to the scandal since former Gov. Sonny Perdue appointed special investigators last August to determine whether Atlanta schools systematically cheated on the CRCT.
Late last year, Cotman convened a meeting with 12 principals from schools where the 2009 test scores were among the most suspect. By then, state agents had begun entering Atlanta schools to question teachers and administrators about cheating, and numerous district employees reportedly had confessed to changing students’ test papers, providing answers to students or watching others manipulate tests.
Cotman spent an hour denigrating the state investigation, according to an anonymous complaint sent to the superintendent and the Board of Education in early December, and corroborated last week by a participant in the meeting. Cotman concluded by ordering the principals to write, and then read aloud, their condemnations of state officials, the complaint alleged.
Cotman referred questions from the AJC to her attorney, George Lawson. In an e-mail Friday, Lawson said Cotman denies having expressed “any opinion or made any recommendation” to violate district policies. However, Lawson said, Cotman “has a right to express her personal opinions on any subject so long as she does not violate any policy or laws of the state of Georgia or of the United States.”
Even if Cotman suggested derogatory messages, her lawyer said, “it is not a violation of any rule, regulation or statute.”
He added: “I would not be surprised if many employees of the school district have not made such a statement during the investigation.”
A school district spokesman, Keith Bromery, declined to comment on whether Cotman retains the superintendent’s support. But he said Hall “has consistently advised all employees to fully cooperate” with investigators. The district’s inquiry, Bromery said in an e-mail, is “an ongoing investigation ... to determine the accuracy of the allegations.”
The anonymous letter accusing Cotman also noted that Hall “calls on all employees to fully cooperate” with the state inquiry. But at her “Professional Learning Community” meeting with principals, the letter said, Cotman was “openly hostile and critical” of Perdue; Mike Bowers, a former state attorney general who is one of the special investigators; and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which is assisting the inquiry.
“At one point she even distributed to each principal a sheet of paper that had printed at the top of the page, ‘Go to hell.’ She directed each principal to write a ‘Go to hell’ memo to the GBI. She then asked each principal to share aloud their memo.”
The letter to the superintendent and the school board came with a blank copy of the memo sheet. It appeared to be a pre-printed novelty item, with spaces labeled “To,” “From,” and “Date,” along with a checklist of reasons for damnation. One was, “It’s where you belong.” Another: “You just suck.”
The bottom section of the sheet is blank, beneath a heading that reads, “And while you’re there, be sure to ...”
After the principals read their messages aloud, according to a participant in the meeting, Cotman collected the sheets. It is not clear what happened to them afterward.
At least some of the participants in Cotman’s meeting saw no humor in the exercise.
“Is this the spirit of cooperation that Dr. Hall is expecting from her leaders, or just another example of a toxic culture that filters down to the schools by executive directors?” the letter to the district said. “Should principals be pulled out of their schools to participate in these intimidating practices?”
The letter was signed by a “concerned family member” of an unidentified district employee.
Another employee who attended the meeting told the AJC the letter accurately described Cotman’s statements, which included suggestions that the principals follow her lead and hire lawyers to represent them as the state investigation continued. The employee spoke on condition of anonymity, citing a fear of being fired.
At least two people who attended the meeting have confirmed the account to state investigators, according to another district employee familiar with the inquiry. That employee, too, spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.
The superintendent’s office received the anonymous complaint on Dec. 9. Five days later, the district hired a law firm to look into Cotman’s actions — thus inviting even more scrutiny from state investigators. They have repeatedly warned they would interpret any internal inquiry into CRCT-related matters as an attempt to obstruct their work and suppress information that might otherwise lead to prosecutions.
“Any attempt by APS to interfere with our investigation or to conduct its own investigation is obstruction, an attempt to influence witnesses, and tampering with evidence,” Bowers wrote to the district last fall. “APS may not under any circumstances investigate any employees in these matters during the pendency of our investigation.”
Bowers declined to comment last week.
Bromery, the district spokesman, said officials initiated the inquiry without notifying state investigators because the accusations against Cotman did not directly relate to their primary focus — the 2009 CRCT.
“This case,” Bromery said by e-mail, “is a personnel matter related to alleged actions that took place in late 2010.”
The lawyer working on the district’s inquiry, Halima Horton of the McGuireWoods law firm, declined to comment.
Cotman, 40, is one of several top officials that Hall recruited to Atlanta to carry out her vision for transforming the city’s long-struggling schools. She came from Wichita in 2004 as executive director of School Reform Team 4 — in essence, a regional superintendent based in the city’s southwest quadrant. Last year, state records show, Cotman earned about $161,000.
The district’s four executive directors, spread across the city to enforce mandates from the central office, have long engendered complaints from educators who say they exert intense pressure on principals to produce test-score gains by any means necessary. Some teachers have said in interviews that the principals, in turn, have threatened them with poor evaluations or even firing if they didn’t deliver the desired numbers.
Cotman oversees schools in some of Atlanta’s poorest neighborhoods. Many of them historically posted low test scores. But in recent years, most have satisfied the “adequate yearly progress” requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. In 2009, five of Cotman’s schools were among the 12 with the greatest proportion of classes flagged for wrong-to-right erasures. In 2010, when outside observers monitored testing, scores at those schools plummeted.
By all accounts, Cotman has aggressively pushed for higher test scores. In her biography on the district’s website, she describes her educational philosophy by quoting the avant-garde early 20th-century French poet Guillaume Apollinaire:
And they came! And she pushed them! And they flew!
Some educators chafed at Cotman’s intensity.
In 2009, a teacher at Harper-Archer Middle School complained to the district that Cotman had threatened staff members and targeted those who supported a principal she had forced out. The teacher reported that during one meeting at Harper-Archer, Cotman said she was so frustrated by slow academic progress that “she wanted to take some C-4 [explosives] and blow up the building, along with the staff, and start all over again with new staff.”
The district resolved the complaint by offering the teacher a transfer out of Cotman’s region.
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