Public Education and PR

New York City principals are letting students make up classes they failed in efforts to boost graduation rates. The “credit recovery” program gives students a chance to write essays or answer questions for class credit needed to graduate. This excerpt from The New York Times highlights the situation:

Dennis Bunyan showed up for his first-semester senior English class at Wadleigh Secondary School in Harlem so rarely that, as he put it, “I basically didn’t attend.” But despite his sustained absence, Mr. Bunyan got the credit he needed to graduate last June by completing just three essay assignments, which he said took about 10 hours. “I’m grateful for it, but it also just seems kind of, you know, outrageous,” Mr. Bunyan said. “There’s no way three essays can possibly cover a semester of work.”

Officials from the New York City Education Department stated that principals always find ways to help students graduate – whether it is summer school or repeating a class. Although officials reported no abuse of the credit recovery program, they stated that the program is not monitored.

Obviously principals want their schools to be portrayed in a positive light and have high graduation rates; but, I think the idea that students can make up school credit and graduate by responding to prompts such as “Research and list all the global environmental issues that science focuses on; and, what are some ways you, as an individual, can help?” is unbelievable.

I wrote before about discrepancies in reported graduation rates, and, it turns out, the United Federation of Teachers has received numerous complaints about the credit recovery and how it calls graduation stats into question. According to data from New York, the city’s most recent graduation rate data was 50 percent in 2006, which was up from 44 percent in 2004.

Schools need to do what’s best for one of their key publics (students) and not what creates the best image of their school. Perhaps officials from the city’s Education Department need to set forth standards that have to be met to obtain the necessary credit and start tracking the schools’ programs.

While letting more students graduate and being able to boast of higher graduation stats is nice for the students and schools, won’t those students be at a disadvantage later when they haven’t the necessary skills needed to succeed?