Don't assume high school graduation fraud is only in D.C. It's not.
Fake progress is nothing to celebrate. Governors should use audits and exams to uncover which districts are really making gains.
Don't assume high school graduation fraud is only in D.C. It's not. Fake progress is nothing to celebrate. Governors should use audits and exams to uncover which districts are really making gains. Check out this story on USATODAY.com: https://usat.ly/2o68lFe
Nat Malkus, Opinion contributor Published 8:00 a.m. ET Feb. 17, 2018
High school graduates(Photo: Mark Felix, The Orange County Register, via AP)
Governors and state education leaders should learn from the scandal engulfing District of Columbia Public Schools officials and teachers. A recent report has brought to light that a third of DCPS 2017 graduates received diplomas in violation of district policy.
Fraud in DCPS, once lauded as a national model of education reform, raises serious questions for districts across the nation. After national test scores declined for the first time on record in 2015, officials turned to record-breaking graduation rates, celebrating DCPS in particular, as proof that aggressive education reforms were working. With so many school districts drawing on the same playbook, state leaders need to do more than hope the malfeasance revealed in DCPS is an isolated incident.
The report found that a third of DCPS 2017 graduates received diplomas in violation of district policy. One in five had excessive absences, with one in 10 missing at least half the school year. And 15% received credits through "credit-recovery" — abridged, easier-to-pass make-up classes for students who failed a course—even though the graduates never took the original required courses. Suspicious late grade changes, typically altering failing grades to passing, were another issue; there were over 4,000 in one school.
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Pressured to show progress from top-down reforms, DCPS developed a "whatever it takes" mentality to boost graduation rates, turning good intentions into fraudulent shortcuts. DCPS would have known if they had looked under the hood. Or simply listened to teachers. A 2017 Washington Teachers Union survey found that six in 10 DCPS high-school teachers reported school leaders "pressured" them into passing failing students, and 55% believed their school's graduation rate was inaccurate.
DCPS is in the news now, but the same pressures have been inflicted on school districts across the nation, raising a disturbing question: Is the scandal-rocked DCPS an outlier? Or is it the canary in the coal mine?
Many districts have dubious graduation-rate gains. New York City liberally used credit-recovery courses to push its graduation rate up 24 points from 2005 to 2015 and Los Angeles used them to raise its projected graduation rate from 52% to 82% in just three months. Prince George's County, Md., changed final grades and ignored excessive absences. Chicago used administrative shell games to move failing students into alternative schools. Nearly half of Camden, N.J.'s 2014 graduating class failed both required high school exit exams. The list goes on — but how long is it?
Hollowing out graduation requirements devalues diplomas, undermines teachers, and shortchanges graduates. More pernicious than that, it lets leaders celebrate progress when school systems are moving backwards. DCPS' absence problems progressively worsened over at least three years — seducing more and more students into an easy way out.
Many districts around the country are showing smoke, but as yet no fire. Who can be trusted to find out how far these problems have spread, and how to fix them? The federal government is too far removed from the more than 13,000 school districts to be effective, and with incentives to pad their numbers, districts cannot police themselves. The answer may be a partnership between governors and teachers' unions.
Governors are key. They want their students to be ready for college and a career, they want parents to be sure that their kids are prepared, and they want employers to trust in their states' diplomas. Even if governors like high graduation rates, they should care even more that those rates are legitimate. Governors should borrow Ronald Reagan's line: "Trust, but verify."
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While graduation rates can be useful indicators of performance, just like standardized test scores, there is a key difference. State tests are thoroughly validated, statistically and procedurally, against cheating. Graduation rates don't have similar safeguards.
Governors, meeting under the auspices of the National Governors Association, could easily develop standard practices to ensure the validity of district graduation rates. Annual audits of graduate attendance data and credit-recovery use, and possibly high school exit exams, could help uncover which districts are moving backwards and which are truly moving forward.
Standardized verification is a start, but governors need direct lines to teachers — the boots on the ground — to prevent new graduation-rate gimmicks. Teachers' unions are ideally suited to fill that role. Unions have healthy incentives to protect teachers from untoward pressure, and no perverse incentives to inflate numbers. They could administer regular surveys, as D.C.'s union did, so teachers' voices can keep officials honest.
Governors and teachers' unions should also join together to help the public to expect, and only accept, reasonable, confirmable progress. Just as with test scores, suspicious increases in graduation rates typically indicate malpractice either before the jump, or afterwards. Validating graduation rates like we do tests, with confirmation from local teachers, will return the trust we need to celebrate real progress.
Nat Malkus is a former public school teacher, a DCPS parent, and a Resident Scholar and Deputy Director of Education Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Follow him on Twitter: @natmalkus
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