NYC & DC SHARE MAYORAL CONTROL OF SCHOOLS AND CORRUPTION IN SCHOOLS

Has anyone in authority finally come to the conclusion that putting mayors in charge of school systems in large cities is just going to lead to corruption as test scores and graduation rates become political tools to be manipulated?

In NYC, the NY Post publishes articles regularly exposing corruption scandals in New York City High Schools. In order to make graduation rates rise with students who have some great needs, principals do anything they have to in order to make sure students graduate The latest school exposed by the Post is repeat offender Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx which already removed a principal for playing games with the numbers but the new administration according to the Post is just as dirty as the old one.

From the Post:

This high school is a hooky player’s dream.

At DeWitt Clinton HS in the Bronx, kids who have cut class all semester can still snag a 65 passing grade — and course credit — if they complete a quickie “mastery packet.”

Insisting that students can pass “regardless of absence,” Principal Pierre Orbe has ordered English, science, social studies and math teachers to give “make up” work to hundreds of kids who didn’t show up or failed the courses, whistleblowers said.

“This is crazy!” a teacher told The Post. “A student can pass without going to class!”

One would think that a principal who is replacing someone involved in scandal would be careful to not try anything funny but those of us who have worked in the schools understand that the culture to pass students by any means necessary is widespread in NYC schools. Numbers need to look good for the Mayor who controls the schools to look like he is running the schools successfully. People who object are dismissed by the Mayor as being involved in a "hyper-complaint dynamic" in the schools. Mayor Bill de Blasio is wrong in my insiders opinion. There is a hyper-corruption dynamic in too many high schools, not a hyper-complaint dynamic.

New York City is not alone in this regard. Washington DC provides us with another lesson in what happens when a mayor runs a school system with no accountability other than an election every four years.

This is from AP via Earthlink:

A decade after a restructuring that stripped the decision-making powers of the board of education and placed the system under mayoral control, city schools in 2017 were boasting rising test scores and a record graduation rate for high schools of 73 percent, compared with 53 percent in 2011. Glowing news articles cited examples such as Ballou High School, a campus in a low-income neighborhood where the entire 2017 graduating class applied for college.

Then everything unraveled.

An investigation by WAMU, the local NPR station, revealed that about half of those Ballou graduates had missed more than three months of school and should not have graduated due to chronic truancy. A subsequent inquiry revealed a systemwide culture that pressured teachers to favor graduation rates over all else — with salaries and job security tied to specific metrics.

The internal investigation concluded that more than one-third of the 2017 graduating class should not have received diplomas due to truancy or improper steps taken by teachers or administrators to cover the absences. In one egregious example, investigators found that attendance records at Dunbar High School had been altered 4,000 times to mark absent students as present. The school system is now being investigated by both the FBI and the U.S. Education Department, while the D.C. Council has repeatedly called for answers and accountability.

"We've seen a lot of dishonesty and a lot of people fudging the numbers," said Council member David Grosso, head of the education committee, during a hearing last week. "Was it completely make-believe last year?"

Nobody who works in a NYC high school is surprised by anything that is occuring in DC. The only reason we don't see even more stories of playing with numbers in NYC is that teachers have basically been frightened into silence in many schools. Administration here is very skilled at scaring teachers and retaliating against them as this story on two teachers at Clinton who are facing 3020a dismissal charges shows. The UFT, which should be screaming the loudest, is, well, the UFT. Don't expect much from the Union.

The only way to solve any of this is to return integrity to the school system by making the truthfulness of the statistics more important than the actual rise or fall of the graduation rate. That can happen if the UFT becomes a real union again. We should be the whistleblowers, not the NY Post.