Part 3: Affidavit – What went down at Treem

November 6, 2020admin

Statement by whistleblowing teacher James Oliver
Thus Treem, when I was hired, was already a school in turmoil. What I would soon learn, however, was that it not only refused to stand up for the children sent to it, but it was also corrupt.

Week 1
Days 1 and 2
The first day I had no computer. It was suggested that the last substitute had left with it. The next day, I received a computer, allowing me to access Infinite Campus and look at classroom attendance and see which children had IEPs, etc.

Day 3
The third day Mrs. Katherine Robertt, the ARL supervisor and “learning coordinator,” came in to show me how lessons were taught using the i-Ready teaching software that the school administration had purchased for its Common Core curriculum. I did not understand how to explain it to the kids, because the method used in i-Ready is, you have to keep going backwards and forward, back and forth through the digital books. This confused not only the kids but even the teachers.

Mrs. Robertt, too, had trouble with that curriculum, in having to skip around in it. Ultimately, I was just shown where to find books in the classroom.

Later that same day, Mrs. Robertt came in again, went into the Infinite Campus grade book and printed out the classroom grades for the report card that was scheduled to go out that Friday, two days later.

After looking at the grades, she then called both the principal and the vice principal on the radio, saying that they needed to come to my classroom and look at what she had printed out.

When they came in, Mrs. Robertt had spread the test grades of each student across four desks in a square. Both admin approached the desks to look at the grades. My teacher’s aide (TA) sat down next to Mrs. Robertt.

Looking over the shoulder of Mrs. Robertt, I started thumbing through the tests and grades and saw all the F’s. I remarked, “I have never seen so many F’s.”

Mrs. Robertt jerked the tests from my sight and stacked them up. I thought that was strange, since normally administrators would want the new teacher of a class to see how that teacher’s class is currently doing.

Assistant Principal Sarah Cyprus stepped back and said, “I did not think it would be that bad.”

The principal, Yvette Tippetts, said, “We can’t show that.”

Tippetts then asked Cyprus, “What do you want to do?”

I thought this was strange also. I expected that, for some major educational failure like this, the administrators would start seeking the source of the problem, discuss how and where improvements were needed, talk about interventions, ask parents for help, etc.

Then Mrs. Cyprus said, “We can’t let the parents see the students hadn’t made progress since the beginning of school.”

Looking at me and the TA, she continued, “We have to change the grades on this report card, and then just let the students catch up with the grades.”

She was saying we had to conceal from parents the students’ actual lack of learning from the start of school and make it appear that they were not still making D’s and F’s — even though they obviously were.

At that moment, my first thought was that maybe this was a trick they were running to test me — to see if the new guy was a crooked teacher who’d go along with anything.

Mrs. Robertt then asked, “What about the tests for those grades and the past grades?”

Mrs. Tippetts said, “Don’t worry about that; we will do that later.”

Mrs. Cyprus then said, “We can make tests just on standards. We can make tests out of questions they have already got right before. [For] tests on standards, you can make one question or even 5 or 7.”

Mrs. Cyprus told the TA and me to look through the class grade book and try to find some test answers the kids got right. My TA and I looked through the gradebook and could not find many.

Mrs. Cyprus then said that they, the school’s administrators, would go to the three computers in the back of the room and look though everything the class had done. She said I could grade some of them later and post them in the grade book as they found them. She added that Mrs. Robertt would show me how to grade standards tests with a sample she would provide.

As they started on the back computers they were again saying they had to find some tests the students had taken, to see if they could find answers the students had gotten right.

The TA came to me and asked me what we were to do about this situation. I asked her if I heard them right — that they want us to erase the kids’ grades and give them A’s and B’s?

She confirmed that’s what she heard also. So I said, “I guess we’ll wait and see if they are really going to do that.”

During my break, the administrators stayed on those computers, so I went and told my second-grade chair and two other second-grade teachers what appeared to be happening.

Day 4
That next day, Mrs. Robertt came into my room and asked two students to pass out some tests she provided. Other students, looking at the tests, began to talk out loud.

“We already did these,” said several students. Others remarked that they know they will pass the tests. Mrs. Robertt smiled at the children and told me to tell them it was a test to see if they remember anything. However, she was very strict about me needing to return the test papers to her.

Walking around and looking at the papers, I said, out loud, “These are what you call standards tests? They have only a few questions on each test.”

Mrs. Cyprus then told me that they would grade the tests with the teacher’s assistant, and my job would just be putting the grades in the Infinite Campus grade book. They then turned and went to the three computers in the back of the room. I was only able to glance at the test papers, which, when completed, had been brought to the back table by the students.

When I came back from lunch, however, Mrs. Robertt, the ARL supervisor and “learning strategist,” was in my classroom. She asked me to come over to where she was sitting, grading their new, concocted tests, and asked me to help her by doing some of the grading. I again said, “I don’t understand that process.” But now I added, “And I wouldn’t touch those new tests with a 10-foot pole.”

She just kind of looked at me, and I walked away. But then she got on the speaker, talking to the vice principal and telling her I was refusing to help her change grades. So when the class came back in from lunch, the vice principal popped in and said, “I’m giving you your observation.”

Now normally they give you a day’s notice in advance of the observation. She, however, did it immediately. Then, once she left, in 15 minutes she called me in to her office, to go over my observation. As soon as I walked in, that’s when I heard what hostile vice principals always say: “Well, Mr. Oliver, it’s probably about the worst thing I’ve ever seen and —” blah, blah blah.

Day 5
On Friday, Oct 19 — the last day of my first work week at Treem — all of us second-grade teachers were waiting to see if the administrators were actually going to do it. That morning, Mrs. Robertt came in right before lunch and had the kids line up to go to lunch, putting a test paper in each student’s backpack (where I could not see it), and said, “Bring these home to your parents, but tell your parents we will have your report card next Friday.”

I reported that to everyone on my second-grade teaching team.

Week 2
Monday October 22 to Friday October 26
Every day of the next week, the principal, the vice principal, and the learning strategist/ARL supervisor came into my classroom and spent all day on the three computers in the back. The members of my grade-level teaching team kept asking me if the administrators were really were going to do what they’d already told the students, namely, that on Friday October 26 the kids would receive the forged report cards to take home to their parents, even though the cards were a week late.

The last hour of week 2
And indeed, on the last hour of that last day of the week —Friday the 26th of October 2018 — Mrs. Robertt came into my room right before I was to take my students out to the area where the parents pick them up. She handed me a stack of report cards. She said, “Hurry up and put these in your students’ backpack as they go home.” And she left the room.

As I stepped out of my classroom, Mrs. Robertt was not within sight. So I went and showed the graded report cards to my second-grade chair and two other second-grade teachers. Seeing the faked grades, they were amazed and angry. At that time, however, we had to hurry and get the students to their pick-up line. Then, as they waited in line for their parents, I gave out the report cards. My second graders started looking at their report cards, then were jumping up and down in line, shouting, “Wow, I have never made A’s and B’s before!”

Every teacher out there on the pick-up line knew this class had been making all F’s and just stared at me, as though I had engineered the grading fraud.

As I walked back to my room with my grade supervisor, she said she was angry. “I am going to their office right now and let them know that I know what they are doing.”

I said, “Wait a minute. First let me leave and make copies of everything — because they have been using my computer and my password. I am going to have to take time off and talk to the union about this, because I have not touched my computer, grade book or anything since I have been at Treem, and now that is a dirty computer. And I don’t want to have to be making those copies on Monday.”

That Friday, October 26, 2018, I left the campus, called the teacher union and left a message on Ron Lopez’s voice mail. It said he was out of town and folks should contact Mr. Alexander Roche.

I left a voicemail on Lopez’s voicemail anyway, to establish the time I made my report on what had happened.

The next two months
I also immediately took Family Medical Leave, as my mother, who had come to live with my family, was dying.

She finally expired on November 10, and it hit me very hard.

Still, over the next two months when school was in session and I was on leave, I would often sit with my union rep, Alexander Roche, and we would watch remotely, over the Internet, as Treem’s principal, vice principal and ARL supervisor worked busily inside my Infinite Campus grade book.

Now the fact that my mother had been a state and federal fraud investigator, and a stickler for honesty, really kicked in. On the day that Treem admin had told me and my TA that we’d have to change the classroom’s existing grades to A’s and B’s, Mom asked me to give her one more “last wish.”

She said, and I quote, “For what they are doing to those kids and parents, not just there but across America, you need to tell the world what all those bustards are doing.” The union, too, asked me to document what the Treem brass were doing.

So, as we watched them copy tests, delete actual grades, insert new grades, and change the dates and names of tests, I took screenshot after screenshot with my iPhone.

Through all of this time that I was out on leave, the union kept trying — through about six different scheduled, then broken appointments — to get CCSD management to meet with us.

But the superintendent’s office kept making excuses and would not meet.

Thus, by the end of the first week in January, my combined vacation time, Family Medical Leave and sick days were all exhausted. So, on the seventh, I had to go back to Treem. And since the principal, vice principal and ARL mentor/“learning strategist” already knew from the grapevine that I’d blown the whistle on them, the knives were out.

Still, from my second-grade chair I was able to learn what had happened in my absence.

She said that after the Friday I’d left Treem and contacted the union, on the next Monday she’d seen Principal Tippetts and Vice Principal Cyprus in the hallway and confronted them. She told them she’d seen the fake grades they’d posted and sent out to the parents, and was very upset with what they’d done. The two of them had then responded harshly, she told me, poking a finger in her face and telling her loudly to “MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS!” — add that, “We will handle Mr. Oliver’s room!”

What the second-grade chair went through

They’d also retaliated against her, she said, by ordering her into the grade-changing project — making  her print out tests where the children had gotten questions correct. Thus, she had been present during much of the “re-manufacturing” of the children’s grades.

First, it had taken the administration’s crew almost a month, she said, to search through Infinite Campus to find all the previous test problems that the students had gotten right. The idea was to make tests — which they’d call “tests on Standards” — that only asked questions the students had already gotten right, and for which they knew the answers.

Of course, these weren’t real Common Core standards tests.

A “Test on Standards,” under Common Core, is a key test intended to allow students to demonstrate that they’ve mastered, at their level, learning essential for success in college, career, and “life in today’s global economy.”

Tests on Standards can be given with three, four or more problems on each test, but not with only a single question such as one test Treem’s administrators came up with. (Evidently they did that because, on one “standards” test, the whole class could only answer a single question correctly — despite taking it over and over again for an entire month.)

According to my second-grade chair, the administrators would examine different math or reading tests and, when a student would have gotten a question right, they would put that question on a separate, fake, test overlay. And if that same student got three questions right on maybe seven or eight of the frequently repeated tests, those questions too would be added to his alleged “Standards Test” score — and then go into the grade book.

But even when that search was completed, she said, the kids’ tested performance was still far too low.

So the Treem bosses started drilling the kids, giving those same problems over and over again till kids could get three, four, or even eight right. That drilling is another reason these were not real standards tests. Real standards tests are given but a single time. The one exception for giving a test again is for a student who was absent on the test day and is taking a make-up test.

But even then — with all the repetition — all the students still couldn’t make better than D’s.

Finally, Treem admin gave up. It was then, it appears, that they erased all the Infinite Campus grades in all subjects, going back to the start of the school year. That appears to have been preparation for simply inserting completely new grades that would falsely portray a happy, progressive mastery leading up to the A’s and B’s they’d just sent out to parents.

The real problem at Treem, of course, was that few of the second graders had actually learned much of anything.

Nevertheless, the fake grades were entered into the gradebook from manipulated overlays. And the process that was used is actually shown in the screenshots I recorded [Editor’s note: These are shown in this series’ Parts 8, 9 and 10].

It’s the reason why there are so many tests on top of each other. It’s also why the tests on top of each other have the students’ names down the left side of the test in the grade book and also down the middle of the page.

The process explains why everything is not stacked evenly: When putting lots of grades into the grade boxes, the administrators’ crew had to frequently move

The process explains why everything is not stacked evenly: When putting lots of grades into the grade boxes, the administrators’ crew had to frequently move over to the side the overlays from which they’re getting the bogus grades. Also, when changing grades for an entire class — with 15 tests on top of each transparent page — it’s faster when the students are all being given the same grades. Which explains what you’ll see in many of the test-file-overlay screenshots: all students getting four out of four right, all students getting eight out of eight right, all students getting 11 out of 11, etc.

I was unable to find copies of any final tests that, supposedly, were given and thus, supposedly, were the sources of many of the grades that were entered into Infinite Campus during his absence.

This supports what my second-grade chair said: that Treem admin, increasingly finding their grade-falsification project much more burdensome than they’d expected, had, finally, simply resorted to wholesale insertion of faked grades.

Knives were out
Not surprisingly, the knives were out for me when I had to go back to Treem in early January. Not only had I blown the whistle on them, but, by refusing to change the classroom’s D’s and F’s into A’s and B’s, I’d thrown a monkey wrench into their scheme. Since I wouldn’t do it, they’d had to do all the grade-changing themselves, and, I was told, it took them two months.

So, on Monday, January 7, I went into my classroom and checked to see where the last substitute had left off. I had had only a day-and-a-half training back in October on the district’s new i-Ready curriculum, so I needed some help. But when I saw the learning strategist/ARL supervisor, she said she could not help me, but that I should wait for the vice principal.

Through the early morning Vice Principal Cyprus and Principal Tippetts would pass by but no one would come in to help me learn the new curriculum. So I waited all day.

Finally, at the end of the day, as I was in another second-grade teacher’s room, the principal and vice principal said they wanted to talk to me about the grade book, and in my room. Once there, the vice principal asked me if I knew how to put grades in the grade book. I said yes.

The principal ask me if I knew how to grade papers. I said if it is based on a 100-point test. The principal and vice principal handed me test papers, and the vice principal told me to grade and enter the grades from all of the tests so that report cards would be ready Friday.

The vice principal said, “You will see I graded some already to show you how. Grade the remaining ones and then put them in the grade book.

“We feel the kids are not getting the grades they should be getting, and it is not fair to them.”

I looked at what she had handed me, and said, “I would not know how to do some of those.” I had never seen any like them, with different tests and different scoring all on the same page.

For example, on a single page would be three different tests, with different numbers of problems or questions asked on each test. Also, various tests on the page would be under different Common Core standards.

So, I did not know how to score what I’d been handed — how many points to take off for each incorrect answer. One? Or do I add up the correct answers?

Nevertheless, the principal and vice-principal said they would come by the next day and have me sign a paper saying that they had explained what I had to do, and I would have to sign it anyway. They then left the room.

They were giving me everything they could, to do, even if I did not know how to do it, so they could write me up. One of these assignments was on Tuesday the 8th, I think, and they started giving me commands with memos as to what time to have it done and then direct me to sign it.

The test papers went back as far as early August and September, as well as the final tests of the Modules. But the grades were different now.

By Thursday, January 10, there’d still been no training. However, late in the day, Vice Principal Cyprus and Principal Tippetts entered my classroom again and handed me a Notice of Investigatory Interview. Vice Principal Cyprus said, “You can read it and we can’t tell you any information about it.”

It asserted I had embarrassed a student the previous day, though actually they had first come up with that particular allegation back in October, just after I’d refused to cooperate in the grade-faking.

I said, “I would never do that.”

Then I asked, “Can I have representation?”

They said, “There is the time, and you will have to make those arrangements yourself.”

But I signed it and they left.

What they apparently did not know was that, earlier that same day, I’d finally received word from my union lawyer.

Her message said:

So that was the effective end of my time at Treem Elementary.