The DOE Claims That Credit Recovery Credits Are Awarded Less Often. Do You Believe Them?

The DOE has found itself on the defensive as the abuse of the "credit recovery" program resulted in schools ignoring the stringent requirements and offering students an easy way to accumulate credits known as "easy pass".  After denying schools were committing academic fraud, the DOE, under intense media pressure, finally admitted that some schools were not following the rules. The Chancellor, clearly embarrassed after claiming that the accusations at John Dewey High School were unsubstantiated, only to admit that she was wrong, set up a group of her cronies to investigate the use of "credit recovery" and to take action if necessary.  Now it seems that the DOE claims that there is less "credit recovery" credits being awarded by the schools.   Do you believe that?  I don't and here's why.

The DOE press release omitted the fact that their statistics were based on schools "self reporting".  That's right, instead of the DOE requiring schools to report their "credit recovery" statistics and the type of "credit recovery" programs they used, the DOE only requested that schools voluntarily report the information.  In the DOE's age of accountability and data mining that has resulted in a bloated Bureaucracy, yet the DOE did not even bother to use their staff to audit the schools for the amount and type of "credit recovery" used.

The question is why didn't the DOE use its vast resources and expertise to determine the extent of the abuse of the "credit recovery" program?  The answer is simple.  The DOE choose not to know.  In other words they were able to use the "plausible deniability" defense when allegations were pouring in about the academic fraud used  to  raise the bogus graduation rate. Better to claim that there is no problem if you ignore the issue.  For the DOE it's not "children first" but to raise the graduation rate by any means possible and if that means academic fraud, so be it.