Bloomberg's DOE Manipulates Graduation Rates

The Mayor of Money has hailed graduation rate increases as another piece of proof that is education reforms have worked.

But just as the test scores were jive, just as the crime stats are jive, just as the emergency response times are jive - the graduation rates are jive too:

Dozens of struggling city high schools allowed students to use a mishmash of makeup assignments — sometimes requiring little or no work — to earn credits for classes they initially flunked, sources say and data show.

For the first time, the Department of Education has made credit-recovery data publicly available by school — and it shows nearly 40 schools awarded between 5 percent and 31 percent of their credits to kids through makeup work in 2011-12, while close to three dozen gave between 5 percent and 46 percent of their credits that way the previous school year.

Most credit-recovery programs occur over the summer, when students try to learn the course work that eluded them during the year.

But many shortcut programs also cropped up after the department started using credit accumulation as a factor in grading schools in 2007 — putting pressure on them to come up with quick fixes for credit shortages.

“It’s a big issue at the school . . . the reason the principal does this is to make our school look good on our progress report,” said a former teacher at the Academy for Language and Technology in The Bronx, where 13 percent of credits came from makeup work in 2011-12.

The ex-teacher said that students would use an online program called Apex to read passages and answer simple questions — but that no one would prevent them from looking up the answers.

“They just accumulate easy credits rather than learn anything,” the former teacher said.

As I've written before, if there were ever a true independent auditing of the Bloomberg Years, they would find so much manipulation of data and out-and-out fraud from these people that they would be frog-marching Bloomberg administration officials out for months in handcuffs.

The have phonied up everything, put in place policies that forces phonied up data ("Improve or you're fired!" tends to do that sort of thing), but the press has largely ignored the manipulation.

Certainly they have not blamed Bloomberg himself for any of this.

You can bet if de Blasio is elected in November, that will change.

In any case, no wonder Bloomberg is planning on having all the emails and other data from his administration erased before he goes.

That's a great way to ensure his fraudulent legacy never sees the light of day with the public.