The book that lay on Beverly Hall’s desk through years of acclaim and reproach at the Atlanta Public Schools contained neither business-school bromides nor educational platitudes.
It was “The Art of War.”
The millennia-old, pre-Machiavellian classic, by the Chinese general Sun-Tzu, lays out strategies for prevailing in any conflict through ruthless efficiency. Its eternal presence on her desk underscores Hall’s approach to her dozen years as Atlanta’s school superintendent: Schools were a battlefield. Test scores were weapons. Defeat was not an option.
An indictment issued Friday charging Hall and 34 other Atlanta educators with racketeering and other crimes sends the former superintendent into a new battle — this one in a courtroom. The case asks the court to render judgment not just on Hall and the other defendants, but also on the aggressive, sometimes-intimidating management style that she, her top advisers and their subordinates propagated for years.
A Fulton County grand jury accused Hall, other administrators, teachers and even a school secretary of participating in a criminal conspiracy to juice the district’s standardized-test scores for financial gain and professional recognition. By pushing subordinates to meet unrealistic performance targets, the grand jury alleged, Hall and a few of her most trusted advisers transformed a public school district, albeit one with a history of poor performance, into a criminal enterprise in which the primary victims were children.
Hall, 66, the national superintendent of the year in 2009, could face 45 years in prison.
Even setting aside criminal culpability, the indictment portrays a workplace with a toxic culture in which leaders routinely sacrificed their integrity to preserve the district’s image, not to mention Hall’s. Desired results, no matter how unlikely, drew little skepticism, grand jurors found. Truth-telling, on the other hand, could result in severe punishment. Employees who reported cheating put their jobs in jeopardy, and the indictment recounts an episode in which Hall lightly punished a cheating teacher but fired the whistleblower.
Through her lawyers, Hall denied the charges, as did other defendants, and the indictment provides no direct evidence that Hall ordered district employees to cheat on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, or CRCT. But it states that Hall did little or nothing to ferret out cheaters, and it alleges the superintendent and others took extreme actions to cover up wrongdoing.
“All warfare is based on deception,” Sun Tzu wrote.
If the indictment is accurate, Beverly Hall took his words to heart.
High fidelity
Judging by appearances alone, when Hall came to Atlanta in 1999, she could have been any mid-level educational bureaucrat. She was soft-spoken and quick to smile – grandmotherly, some said, even though she had no grandchildren at the time.
In private, though, Hall displayed a toughness that left few employees wondering what she expected of them, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found.
She assembled the district’s principals in 1999 and declared that she would eventually get rid of 90 percent of them. “I know how to swim with the sharks,” she said, an apparent reference to her decades surviving the political battles of school districts in New York City and Newark, N.J.
At the Atlanta district’s central office downtown on Trinity Avenue, Hall occupied a suite on the top floor, but even employees who worked in the building needed a special badge or help from a security guard to activate the elevator that ascended to the superintendent’s level.
Away from the office, she was accompanied by her district-paid driver and security guard. The former police officer earned more than $50,000 a year, plus that much again in overtime pay. Hall said she needed the driver for her protection.
Early in her tenure, the indictment suggests, Hall began pushing for higher test scores.

More from  Alan Judd, Jaime Sarrio and Heather Vogell/AJC

Posted by The NON-Conformist