A decade before she unleashed the sprawling case now entangling former President Donald Trump in Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis used similar methods to target an unlikely group: public school educators in Atlanta.
As an assistant district attorney in 2013, Willis turned heads in one of her first big cases: She helped convene a grand jury that indicted decorated Superintendent Beverly Hall and nearly three dozen other educators for cheating on state standardized tests. In the end, Willis brought a dozen cases to trial, with a jury convicting 11.
Last week, Willis invoked the same statute — Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act — to indict Trump and 18 others in an alleged plot to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
In doing so, she offered a reminder of her role in a divisive chapter in the city’s recent history. While the former president leveled accusations that Willis is, among other things, “a rabid partisan,” the cheating prosecutions left fissures in her own community, where many said she stood up for children but others accused her of turning her back on Black educators.
‘Cooking the books’
Hall, the Atlanta superintendent, arrived in the district in 1999, eventually leading what she would call a data-driven turnaround. She told observers that under her tenure, Atlanta schools were “debunking the American algorithm that socio-economics predicts academic success,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
By 2009, her efforts had earned her one of education’s top honors: National Superintendent of the Year. But the same year, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the first of several stories analyzing Atlanta’s results on the Georgia Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. The analysis found scores had risen at rates that were statistically “all but impossible.” It also found that district officials disregarded internal irregularities and retaliated against whistleblowers.
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