D.C.’s Graduation-Rate Scandal

Promising numbers were simply manufactured.

By Theodore Kupfer February 23, 2018

On October 2016, President Obama, triumphant, visited Benjamin Banneker High School in Washington, D.C. The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), having adopted a number of his key education priorities, had posted significant gains citywide in graduation rates: from near 50 percent in 2011 to 68 percent in 2016.

“What all these numbers mean,” Obama told the students, “is that more schools across D.C. and across the country are starting to catch up to what you guys are doing here at this school.” But while the high-achieving, highly selective Banneker was having real success, the rest of D.C.’s schools were not. What all those numbers actually meant was that DCPS was engaged in a massive scandal.

For years, D.C. public schools have been inflating their graduation rates by passing students who simply did not earn their diplomas. According to a recently released audit of DCPS, one-third of the class of 2017 — 937 students — graduated despite violating attendance and credit-recovery policies.

It is difficult to overstate the scale of the scandal: 21 percent of graduates passed despite excessive unexcused absences in their daytime classes; 11 percent of graduates missed half the school year; hundreds of students who missed daytime classes were improperly funneled into nighttime credit-recovery classes, and of these, a whopping 85 percent earned credit despite having three or more unexcused absences...........To Read More...