When Will School Officials Address The Grade-Fixing Scandal At John Dewey HS?

Rachel Silberstein -

The grade-fixing scandal at John Dewey High School is worse than we thought.

The New York Daily News has obtained school records revealing the brazenly dishonest tactics administrators used to make sure that students graduated.

One student, dubbed “King” by the News, apparently passed 11 remedial “credit recovery” courses, seven of them in core subjects, during the spring 2014 semester — despite state limits which allow students only three remedial courses for core subjects throughout their high school years.

The outlet’s Juan Gonzalez writes:

That’s not just breaking regulations, that’s smashing them.
Even more amazing, King appears to have passed those 11 remedial courses while carrying a regular load of nine other classes.
He received, for example, got credit for five courses during Period 0, before the start of school. Two of those, 9th grade global studies and health, list the teacher only as “Panel 111.” That’s the room number of Principal Kathleen Elvin.
King also managed to take Earth science 2, environmental science 2, and physcial education during the same period, and he received the same grade for all five courses — 65.

“It wasn’t credit recovery, it was fraud,” one Dewey teacher told the News.

Last month, the scandal broke that hundreds of failing Dewey students were given passing grades since as far back as February 2014.

“They devised all kinds of crazy and innovative ways to pass them. If a student played a game in the computer room on the computer, that was a credit,” Martin Haber, a former teacher at Dewey, told CBS Local.

Gonzales blasted Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña for failing to address the problem 15 months after the problem was first reported, and a Department of Education (DOE) spokesperson had little to add when we reached out for comment today.

“The integrity of our academic programs is of the highest importance and the DOE takes any allegations of this sort extremely seriously. This matter is under investigation,” said DOE spokesman Jason Fink.

Clarification: An earlier version of this article indicated that teachers were behind the grade-fixing plan. It was the administration of the school. The article has been amended to reflect this.