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A Philip Randolph High School is under investigation for credit accumulation fraud. (Credit: NYC DOE school web site)

A high school that posted suspicious swings in graduation rates in recent years is under investigation for giving students credits they didn’t earn.

Teachers and other staff members at A. Philip Randolph High School said they blew the whistle after seeing administrators abuse a practice that allows students to quickly make up credits in classes that they previously failed.

Department of Education officials said the Office of Special Investigations began probing A. Philip Randolph last month after Chancellor Dennis Walcott received several emails earlier this summer alleging illicit use of the practice, known as “credit recovery,” to artificially improve the school’s graduation numbers. After years of mediocre performance, the school’s graduation rate increased nearly 30 points two years ago and was one of the city’s highest.

This year, with less than a week before graduation day, school administrators ordered guidance counselors to enroll all failing seniors into online credit recovery courses so that they could graduate on time, one of the counselors said. She said the courses were crammed into one or two days and often went unsupervised.

When she and the school’s programming coordinators protested to administrators, they were rebuffed, the guidance counselor said.

“I said to them, ‘That is not right,’” she said. “You’re asking us to do something unethical.” (more…)

Three decades before he became a GothamSchools contributor, education lawyer David Bloomfield was a young teacher trying to organize his colleagues.

While working to unionize teachers at the New Lincoln School, a now-defunct experimental private school in Manhattan, Bloomfield got help from United Federation of Teachers founder and then-president Al Shanker. In the background of the photograph they took together is Paul Bradford, the UFT liaison assigned to New Lincoln who now heads the union’s retiree chapter on the West Coast of Florida.

Bloomfield sent us the picture after coming across it before the New Lincoln reunion held last weekend. “To go back and see my once-third-graders grow into adulthood and to be thanked for work done 30 years ago is a ‘Wonderful Life’ experience that, perhaps, only comes from teaching,” Bloomfield wrote in an email. “I felt like Mr. Chips!”

New rules for how students who don’t complete classes can earn make-up credit are open for public comment.

I wrote about the push to regulate so-called “credit recovery” programs, which critics say are less rigorous than regular high school classes, in April:

The proposed policy appears for the most part to codify practices that are already taking place in many city schools, said Stephen Phillips, a professor in Brooklyn College’s school of education who worked as a principal and superintendent in the city. The policy shows that [the State Education Department] is “trying to catch up some standards to what was going on” inside schools, he said.

SED is now asking teachers, administrators, parents, students and others to fill out a four-question “Make-up Course Credit Survey.“ 

Interim Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning Santiago Taveras told the City Council’s education committee last month that the city does not track schools’ use of credit recovery programs. (more…)

The mayor and chancellor say a post-mayoral control world would be fraught with litigation. But it’s not clear who would be filing the lawsuits.

Some of the most obvious potential litigants said today that as long as Mayor Bloomberg follows the new law, they want to stay out of court. They say they will trust that Mayor Bloomberg plans to respect the current law’s expiration if a new city school board is convened on Wednesday. That board would have only two mayoral appointees.

“If the mayor acts in good faith on that measure, at least changing the structure on top, then I think its wrong to foresee any potential litigation,” said Udi Ofer, the policy director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which has been agnostic on the principle of mayoral control.

But a DOE official said the city is worried most about litigation coming not from good-government groups but from individual teachers, principals, and vendors with gripes against the system.

“Every decision has a winner and a loser, and a loser would argue that the person who made the decision didn’t have the authority to do it,” the official said. For example, a teacher who was fired could argue that the principal who initiated his termination was not legally appointed, the official suggested. (more…)

By failing to set standards or even track the use of credit recovery in New York City schools, Chancellor Joel Klein has provided a convenient back door for students to pass courses and graduate without subject mastery. The State Education Department has now capitulated to this agenda by promulgating a draft policy based on unpublicized negotiations with the city Department of Education. If implemented, the policy would do nothing to stem this tide of empty credits but, rather, encourage credit recovery by officially recognizing and regularizing it but with inadequate controls and monitoring.

What is credit recovery? The term is sometimes used technically to denote a formal program, such as summer school, with specified content, attendance, and assessment requirements. But the term is widely applied to any effort to help students pass courses that they would otherwise fail because of incomplete or below-standard work. These students substitute the extra work for regular assessments by writing a paper, taking a test, or providing some other evidence of proficiency in a narrow course topic.

Under the new state policy, schools would need only create a committee (which would not include the student’s teacher) to approve a student’s customized credit recovery plan for a course. The same committee would then review evidence of student proficiency once the plan was completed. The State does not require minimum class attendance or proof that the plan addresses all subject matter deficiencies. If a teacher says a book report suffices to show proficiency, the committee would not need to inquire beyond the teacher’s word. No record of how many courses a student passed using CR would be maintained. There would be no monitoring of assignments’ rigor or the frequency of CR’s use by teachers, schools, or the system as a whole.

What is the problem, though, with giving students a second chance at passing or completing a course by filling in the gaps? (more…)

Elected parent leaders in Manhattan are asking the city to reverse multiple school decisions, including ones that the city has used to manage severe overcrowding in many neighborhood schools, because they say they should have been involved in making the decisions. The demand comes in a lawsuit filed yesterday, the second in three months against the Department of Education over its adherence to state law that requires parent groups to be consulted before some decisions are made.

Members of the Community Education Council for District 2, which includes the Upper East Side and most of Manhattan below Central Park, say the city violated the law by not consulting them when it made decisions about opening and closing schools and how students were assigned to district schools. With the city teachers union, they filed a lawsuit yesterday over about a dozen cases in recent years where the DOE failed to consult the CEC about major zoning changes (one case dates back to 2001).

The suit details the ways council members say the DOE brusquely informed them of its “unilateral” decisions after they had been made. Among them:

• The parent council learned about the closing of Bayard Rustin High School in Chelsea by looking at the DOE’s Web site, parents allege.
• It learned of the opening of another school via an e-mail from DOE official John White: “Good morning. Please see new addition of Quest to Learn School.” (more…)

Technology constraints prohibited me from live-blogging Friday’s Assembly hearing on mayoral control of the city schools, which (for those not following along) is the policy that in 2002 handed near-total education authority over to the mayor — and which is up for renewal this June.

The strong thrust of Friday’s hearing, the last of five that have taken Assembly members on a tour through the boroughs, was that lawmakers are not happy with the system they created. Some have become even less happy during the hearings in every borough over the last few months.

A few flubbed exchanges with lawmakers have not helped the Bloomberg administration’s case. One such embarrassing moment happened one Friday, when officials failed to produce the graduation rate for black males.

Here are some of the highlights from Friday:

• Thirteen Assembly members attended the hearing, one of the largest showings so far, and I didn’t hear any of them speak positively about mayoral control. Two members made their dissatisfaction most clear. “I can assure you that my opinion has changed a lot in these hearings,” Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell of Manhattan declared, after angrily chastising Department of Education officials during a question-and-answer session. “Talking to my legislative colleagues over the last three months, the question in my mind is no longer if we’re going to make any changes to the law. It’s going to be what changes are we going to make,” declared Mark Weprin of Queens. (more…)

When I reported last week about the total review of special education that is set to start soon at the Department of Education, I noted that a complaint was pending with the U.S. Office for Civil Rights against the DOE’s policies about admission to its new small high schools.

In fact, the civil rights office actually issued a decision on the complaint that same day. Based on an interview with the parent leader who filed the complaint and data provided by the DOE, OCR determined that it is not possible to conclude that the DOE excludes students who require special education services or English language instruction from its new small high schools.

The decision comes two and a half years after David Bloomfield, a past president of the Citywide Council on High Schools, filed a complaint alleging that the DOE’s policy allowing small schools to exclude at their start some students with special needs violated those students’ civil rights.

Kim Sweet of Advocates for Children of New York told me last week that OCR generally rules on complaints quickly. But the ruling itself suggests a reason for the delay: In its decision, OCR cited DOE data that showed that after three years, small schools enroll a higher proportion of students with special needs than other high schools.

In a statement, Bloomfield said the longitudinal data reflect a victory for advocates for students with special needs:

While disappointed in this result, I believe we were successful in prodding the NYCDOE to provide greater  educational access to special needs students and English language learners. The almost 3 year process of OCR deliberations clearly allowed the NYCDOE to improve its record of high school admissions, so I feel we have made our point.

David Bloomfield surprised some of his fellow critics of the Department of Education back in March when he testified before the City Council in favor of a slightly modified form of mayoral control.

But now that Mayor Bloomberg has won the right to run for a third term, Bloomfield, a Citywide Council on High Schools member and Brooklyn College professor, has changed his mind about maintaining mayoral control, he writes on his new blog:

I still believe my reasons for keeping mayoral control of the [Panel for Educational Policy] with power of removal are valid, but giving this Mayor continued ability to steamroll his education policies through the PEP would be blind to the present reality. The recommendations for change, though, might be constructive in order to restrain Mayor Bloomberg’s unfettered discretion. As a general matter, I currently favor rescinding mayoral control as an unfortunate but necessary response to the Mayor’s and Council’s term limits decision.

Bloomfield tells me he can’t think of any individual who’s gone public as changing his position on mayoral control because of Bloomberg’s term limits grab.

But others have predicted it would happen. At the Brooklyn Charter School Night last week, Anthony Weiner, a state congressman and mayoral hopeful who supports mayoral control, said he worried that Bloomberg’s term limits grab would undermine support for mayoral control among Albany lawmakers. Liz Benjamin of the Daily News reported in September that Mayor Bloomberg was confronting a “Sophie’s Choice dilemma,” because seeking a third term could hurt his chances at preserving mayoral control, a key legacy point.