‘Circle of greed’: How a $1 million teacher scheme left hundreds of uncertified teachers in Texas classrooms

Educators paid to have someone else take the state certification exam and now are scattered in classrooms across Texas, prosecutors say.

Robert “Boo Lee” Williams was still seething days after a popular basketball coach and two assistant principals at Houston’s first two historically Black high schools were arrested in an alleged teacher certification scheme. “It almost got me in tears, man,” said Williams, a 1967 graduate of Jack Yates Senior High School in the city’s predominantly Black Greater Third Ward neighborhood, told CNN Friday evening. “We are fighting hard to overcome, to show that we are more than qualified. … I’m just being straight up with you.” And, prosecutors said, more than 200 people certified to teach paid to have someone else take the state certification exam and now are scattered in classrooms across Texas. “The most important thing to me is the ringleaders have been identified and are being rooted out of our home school district … and the fact that they held positions of power there, where they were held in esteem by the children, is the very worst part of this crime,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg told reporters Monday. “They didn’t deserve those kids’ respect and I think it leaves children feeling betrayed, not knowing who to trust.” The Houston Independent School District employees arrested were Vincent Grayson, a longtime teacher and head basketball coach at Booker T. Washington High School described by prosecutors as the scheme’s ringleader, along with Nicholas Newton, the school’s assistant principal and the alleged test taker who helped educators fraudulently pass hundreds of tests.