Book Review | Shani Robinson and Anna Simonton’s None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators by Kathryn Bateman

Shani Robinson, an Atlanta native, was a first-grade teacher in 2009 at Dunbar Elementary School in Atlanta Georgia, but by 2013, was a convicted felon facing twenty-five years in prison for racketeering charges from an alleged district-wide cheating scandal. None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators, co-authored by Robinson herself and Anna Simonton,narrates Robinson’s journey from Teach for America protégé, to counselor, to defendant in a large racketeering trial interwoven with the political history of Atlanta’s public schools. This history sets the current context in which children are being cheated of a quality public education, simply by being born black and in an urban setting. The authors summarize the main theme with the following quote:

The Atlanta Public Schools Cheating scandal was a distraction from the root problems that have harmed black communities since slavery. Underlying all of the political and economic developments that set the stage for the trial – school desegregation and the resulting turn towards privatization, federally sanctioned housing discrimination, urban renewal, the drug war, mass incarceration, displacement, and gentrification – is the legacy of forced, unpaid black labor generating white wealth. (p. 219)

While generations of institutionalized and systemic racism is not the center of the book, Robinson’s trial offers the public a step into the history of underprivileged schools. Though there are flaws in the presentation of evidence to support some of the authors’ claims, the book’s historical perspectives on systemic racism in the United States is succinct and a beneficial read for anyone trying to understand the complex system in which we as a nation are currently living and working.

Robinson and Simonton tell Robinson’s personal narrative chronologically, documenting her teacher training with Teach For America, her professional experience at Dunbar Elementary School, and her personal triumphs and challenges, including her relationship with her partner Moises, and the birth of her son, Amari. These details of Robinson’s personal narrative garners sympathy from the reader. She is portrayed as kind to her students, very social, well-liked among her colleagues, a faithful member of her church, and an overall family-oriented young woman. The narrative also highlights her life as a low-income, black daughter of a teacher and an activist, self-describing as a “good girl” (p. x.) This has the overall effect of setting up her innocence, a claim she makes repeatedly from the prologue through the epilogue in clear, concise wording: “I never cheated” (p. ix). At the conclusion of the book, Robinson has been convicted in court, but her case has been held up in appeals. This account is told through the first-person narrative of Robinson’s voice, whereas Simonton appears to have more so served to edit Robinson’s story into a cohesive whole.

Beyond the personal narrative, the authors excellently outline the systemic racism present in American public education, using Atlanta as a specific example. In Chapter 2, the authors describe the political moves made by Atlanta’s governing parties following World War II to break up black communities, the subsequent influx of drugs into black communities, and criminal justice inequities. Robinson states:

This was the world my students inhabited. 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 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 system to swallow black families whole, an education system telling black students to forget, just bubble in the right answer (p.43).

Here, the authors describe a variety of cultural features which inhibit the black community from flourishing. Each of these features is addressed in detail throughout the book between narratives of Robinson’s own experience with the judicial system. For example, the authors describe the actions of multiple actors to remove legal requirements to replace low-income housing with the same number of low-income units. In the late 1990’s a non-profit called the East Lake Foundation, founded by real estate mogul Tom Cousins, was able to replace three subsidized housing communities. This “renovation” displaced 80% or more of previous low-income tenants, depending on the community (p. 65-66.) Though this use of history is powerful in presenting a case for systemic racism in the Atlanta Public Schools that has disadvantaged schools with predominately black students, Robinson and Simonton would like to tie this to Robinson’s accusations of cheating. Their only evidence is that all but one of the actors charged in this case were black educators, even though other predominantly white schools and teachers had similar testing results to Robinson’s school, Dunbar.

According to Robinson, State policies around standardized testing under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have backed teachers into a corner. Bring scores up or lose your job and/or your school.

 A key piece of evidence Robinson and Simonton’s use to link systemic racism and the cheating accusations in Atlanta is in the educational inequities Robinson saw in Atlanta Public Schools as a teacher. A former Teach For America corps member, her opinion of the organization has soured over time, and she no longer believes in the program’s message. She believes charter schools contribute to the problems in Atlanta, particularly those charter schools being brought in by for-profit organizations. She sees charter schools channeling away already diminished funds from public schools. And finally, for the authors, the state standardized test itself is to blame. According to Robinson, State policies around standardized testing under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have backed teachers into a corner. Bring scores up or lose your job and/or your school. Though I agree with many of Robinson’s views on Teach For America, charter schools, and testing, she fails to provide empirical evidence to support these claims for these perspectives, which she does well in the areas of systemic racism in Atlanta. However, it should be acknowledged that empirical evidence of the negative side of Teach For America, charter schools, and testing on under resourced areas of the US certainly exists in the research literature, and supports the opining Robinson does within the book. She also fails to acknowledge the history of NCLB and charter schools, and the intention of these initiatives to provide equitable opportunities for students, though the implementation of these policies is certainly flawed .

Contrasting the documentation of the history of Atlanta’s public schools and systemic racism, the story woven by Robinson and Simonton regarding the cheating scandal is built less on empirical and historical research and more on Robinson’s perspectives, opinions, and feelings. This is an emotive device in the telling of Robinson’s story, positioning her as the victim and others, from her colleagues to national policy makers, as villains in her narrative. They explain in the prologue how all the Atlanta Public School members brought up on charges were black. Throughout the story, they return to one small portion of the story described at the close of Chapter 2 – the moments Robinson was called to the library by testing coordinator Lera Middlebrooks to erase “stray marks” from her first graders’ test booklets. Robinson’s charges hinge on whether or not she had changed answers while in the library with colleagues Rose Neal, Diane Buckner-Webb and Pamela Cleveland to erase the “stray marks”, like doodles, that her first graders had made in their answer booklets. This is the key moment in which the prosecution alleges that Robinson and the other teachers changed answers in their students’ test booklets as a means of personal financial gain and part of a larger district-wide scheme to raise test scores, a claim Robinson refutes vehemently.

Though the authors detail the history of systemic racism in America with documented instances, they do less of a fair job presenting the narrative within the cheating scandal. The narrative has a personal spin that Robinson is using to present herself as a victim. They call the trial judge, Jerry Baxter, a “clown” (p. 149.) Lena Middlebrooks, the testing coordinator at Robinson’s school who had asked her to erase the stray marks, is described early on as having a “loud, snarky attitude” (p. 44) and later as “imposing” (p. 119.) Rose Neal, the colleague who accused Robinson and other colleagues of cheating as part of her plea deal from her own charges, is depicted as “irritable and abrasive” and “calculating” (p. 44.) Robinson’s tales of the courtroom maintain her innocence, and those involved in accusing her have committed acts of misconduct, perjury, or are misinformed. Robinson’s depiction of her accusers as having something to gain from the downfall of these schools uses her narrative approach to establish this scandal as one incidence in a generational and systematic underprivilegization of black students in public schools.

Overall, this book is a good read for those delving into public schools for the first time – as either researcher or educator. None of the Above would make an excellent teaching tool for pre-service teachers in need of background on educational policy, particularly the often glossed-over, implicit policies which created inequities between schools. For researchers and policy makers, Robinson’s narrative provides insights into what policies like NCLB do in situ. There are grave impacts to the things research and policy bring into a school community, and as a community, we need to do better thinking about the whole culture and other policies in place, and most importantly, that these are real live human beings who are being asked to implement these policies. However, when reading this book, one should remember that the story is the singular perspective of the cheating scandal from the accused. Though Robinson maintains her innocence as a key tenant of the book, no other actors are given the opportunity to tell their tale, and courts have currently found Robinson and others guilty, though she awaits her appeals. This text is helpful for readers looking to learn more about the history of American education through a narrative but I would advise readers to supplement this with news articles or official documents to gain further insight into Robinson’s story of the cheating scandal.

Kathryn M. Bateman is a post-doctoral fellow at Temple University in Psychology studying the practices of geologist and engineers to develop drone artificial intelligence. She is a recent Ph.D. graduate of the Pennsylvania State University in Curriculum & Instruction – Science Education where her research focused on educational policy, teacher education, and earth science education.

References

Robinson, Shani, and  Simonton, Anna. 2019. None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators. Beacon Press.