ATLANTA (Reuters) - Eight former Atlanta public school educators were ordered on Tuesday to serve between one and seven years in prison in one of the nation's largest test-cheating scandals.
Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter gave three of the 11 educators who were convicted of racketeering this month 20-year sentences, ordering that seven years must be served in prison and the rest on probation.
Five more educators received five-year sentences, with two ordered to serve two years in prison and three to serve one year.
"There were thousands of children that were harmed in this thing," Baxter said during the hearing, after getting into heated exchanges with attorneys for the defendants.
"It’s like the sickest thing that’s ever happened to this town," he later said.
Another convicted educator was then ordered to serve six months of weekends in jail and five years of probation, avoiding a potentially harsher punishment by making a sentencing agreement with prosecutors.
After hearing the sentences given to the defendants who did not strike deals, the final educator to be sentenced cooperated with prosecutors and also apologized in court. She was sentenced to five years probation with no jail time.
Baxter had urged the former educators on Monday to consider plea deals that would limit their prison time in exchange for the defendants taking responsibility for the cheating.
Erasing wrong answers was part of the cheating by the educators, who were under intense pressure to meet test targets, prosecutors said during a nearly six-month trial.
Student achievement helped the former principals, teachers and administrators to secure promotions and cash bonuses.
Cheating was rampant throughout the Atlanta school district in 2009, state investigators found, exposing problems that raised national concerns about high-stakes standardized testing.
A Georgia grand jury in 2013 indicted 35 Atlanta educators, including former school superintendent Beverly Hall, on conspiracy and other charges.
Twelve of the educators ended up going on trial for the charges, and 11 were convicted. Hall died of breast cancer this year.
Sentencing has been delayed until August for one of the 11 guilty educators.
(Writing by Letitia Stein; Editing by Colleen Jenkins, Bill Trott and Lisa Lambert)
Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/1EBu22B
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