Trump prosecutor helped send Atlanta teachers to jail in cheating scandal
Before Fani Willis became nationally known as the district attorney in Atlanta whose investigation into Donald Trump led to the criminal indictment of the former president and 18 others, she was a central player in another famous case in Atlanta: the prosecution of teachers and school administrators accused of cheating on standardized tests. And she is still working on the case, having tried but failed to put a teacher in jail this summer.
The case goes back to 2013, when a grand jury indicted Beverly Hall, the now-deceased superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, who was accused of running a corrupt organization that used test scores to financially reward and punish teachers. Thirty-four teachers, principals and others were also charged in the case — all but one of them Black — that centered around accusations that teachers corrected student responses on exams and provided answers to students, and that administrators covered up these actions.
The cheating scandal — one of a number across the country at the time — came during a time when standardized test scores had become the chief metric to evaluate teachers, principals, schools and districts because of federal policy during the Bush and Obama administrations. Teachers’ salaries and jobs were based in part on student test scores.
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In 2015, Willis, then an assistant district attorney, was one of three lead prosecutors who used the same Georgia law employed in the case against Trump and his associates for their efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. That law, originally intended to prosecute mobsters, is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO. In 2020, Willis won election as Fulton County district attorney, retaining involvement in the cheating case. Willis gave an hours-long opening statement at the 2015 trial, which lasted eight months.
Many of those charged in the cheating case pleaded guilty, saying they felt extreme pressure to elevate student test scores, and 12 went to trial. One was acquitted of all charges, and 11 others were convicted of racketeering and a variety of other charges. About half a dozen of them are appealing their convictions. Two of those convicted have already served prison time, two avoided prison by accepting a deal in 2015, and six others are still appealing their convictions.
This past June, retired Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter, who is still overseeing the case, agreed to reduce the sentence of former principal Dana Evans, who in 2015 he had sentenced to a year in jail — not for cheating herself but for failing to stop teachers from doing so. He reduced her sentence to probation and community service. Fulton County Senior Assistant District Attorney Kevin Armstrong told the court that Willis had instructed him to argue that Evans should be sent to prison, according to Anna Simonton, a journalist for the Appeal, a worker-led nonprofit newsroom covering the U.S. criminal legal system who co-wrote “None of The Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators.” Simonton covered the June 28 hearing in this piece.
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Earlier this year, some social justice groups, including the Georgia branch of the NAACP, had urged Baxter to agree to reduce Evans’s sentence, saying a prison sentence “does not serve the interests of the communities most affected.” The groups also called on Willis and other elected officials to “support a just resolution for the remaining six educators that requires no prison time, fines, or probation.”
The other co-author of the book is Shani Robinson, a teacher convicted at the 2015 trial who maintains her innocence.
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