ATLANTA — Sitting in the polished offices of a lawyer who specializes in corporate criminal defense, Beverly L. Hall looked tired.  It is not easy being the pariah of a major American city.  Dr. Hall, once named as the nation’s school superintendent of the year and a veteran of 40 years in tough urban districts including New York and Newark, now stands marked by the biggest standardized test cheating scandal in the country’s history.  As Atlanta tries to sort fact from fiction and get back to the business of educating the 50,000 children in its public schools, Dr. Hall is left to defend her reputation, prepare for any possible legal action and consider whether her philosophy of education and style of leadership brought her to what is the lowest point in her career.  “I will survive this,” said Dr. Hall, 65, in her first public interview since a scathing 800-page report by state investigators outlined a pervasive pattern of cheating at 44 schools and involving 178 educators.  “I feel badly for myself, but I feel just as badly for all the people in this district who are working hard,” she said. “Now everything they read and hear is negative. That is taking a tremendous toll on me.”  From 1999 to June, Dr. Hall was the forceful, erudite and data-driven superintendent of a once-failing urban school district that became a model of improvement.  During her reign, scholarship money delivered to Atlanta students jumped to $129 million from $9 million. Graduation rates, while still not stellar, rose to 66 percent, from 39 percent. Seventy-seven schools were either built or renovated, at a cost of about $1 billion.  Dr. Hall maintains that she never knowingly allowed cheating and does not condone it, but acknowledges that people under her did.  Still, the scope of the report — which she and others argue was overreaching and contained inaccuracies — shocks her.  “I can’t accept that there is a culture of cheating,” she said. “What these 178 are accused of is horrific, but we have over 3,000 teachers.”  The devastating report came in July. Two longtime government lawyers who were asked by the governor to investigate charges that answers had been changed on state standardized tests found that students had sometimes simply been given correct answers. In other cases, they said, staff members erased wrong ones and filled in the right ones. One school held weekend pizza parties to fix tests.  No criminal charges have been filed, but the district is scrambling to respond to two sweeping grand jury subpoenas. It will turn over at least 20 hard drives of information containing communication among school lawyers, board members and staff members, along with scanned records dating back to the 1990s, said Keith Bromery, spokesman for the district.  The report asserted that Dr. Hall, while not tied directly to cheating or the direct target of a subpoena, had to know about it or should have. She tried to contain damaging information, it said, and did not do enough to investigate allegations, especially after 2005 when “clear and significant” warnings were raised.  And she was, investigators and people who worked closely with her said, more interested in adoration than achievement. Some said they believed they would be ostracized if they did not deliver the results Dr. Hall wanted.  Dr. Hall says she tried to create a culture that demanded achievement, based on her core belief that every child — no matter his or her life circumstances — can learn enough to meet certain standards.  But even her supporters say that belief was so unbending that people would rather erase wrong scores — and reap the financial and workplace perks associated with improved test scores — than tell her children could not pass.  Others say she failed to consider the immense social problems facing some Atlanta schoolchildren.  “The problem came when every child was expected to reach an arbitrary standard that didn’t include a consideration of where they are coming from,” said State Representative Kathy Ashe, a Democrat.  All of which leaves Dr. Hall baffled.
Beverly L. Hall was once a hero to many Atlantans for her work as schools superintendent, but a test score cheating scandal has changed all that.