Well, it seems that disgraced former Principal Kathleen Elvin of John Dewey High School had her charges dropped by the State Arbitrator in her 3020-a hearing because the DOE apparently approved her "easy credit"plan to goose the graduation rate by 13%. Despite their own OSI investigator's document showing that packets of material, without instruction was used to give students multiple credits that violated State and City "credit recovery" requirements, the DOE approved all the credits and accepted the graduation rate without requiring these students to actually do real work. In other words, they agreed to the academic fraud of the"easy pass"system. Read the New York Post article Here.
The question that needs to be asked did the DOE realize that if they allowed these students who were academically unprepared to graduate without giving them real courses to make up, that they, in effect, approved Principal Elvin's "easy credit" plan? Obviously, the State Arbitrator believes so and dismissed the charges against her. It almost seems that the DOE did everything possible to sabotage their case against former Principal Elvin when they refused to provide an actual audit as evidence against the academic fraud. Was the DOE's failure to provide an audit simply incompetence or done with the purpose of not exposing the academic fraud that is not confined to only John Dewey High School? In fact a DOE task force found 36 high schools abused the"credit recovery" system and yet no disciplinary action was taken.
It seems to me that the DOE didn't want their systematic "credit recovery"program abuse exposed at the 3020-a hearing and deliberately sabotaged the case against former Principal Elvin. Moreover, had the DOE's"dirty laundry" of academic fraud wereexposed at the 3020-a hearing, it could mean the downfall of the Carmen Farina Chancellorship and a black eye to Mayor Bill de Blasio. Finally, it would also show that Carmen Farina's failure to "clean house"of the Bloomberg policymakers that permeate Tweed allowed the academic fraud to continue complete with a bogus graduation rate of academically unprepared students for the real world after high school.
The more the union leadership claims that the DOE has changed the more those changes are an illusion. It's still the same old Bloomberg DOE.