Popping Bloomberg-Klein's Final Balloon of Hot, Foul Air
The Times has documented in some detail the fraud designed to make Bloomberg-Klein look like miracle workers in producing soaring City test scores. After Bloomberg's reelection, the fraud was exposed, and the scores dropped like bowling balls from the top of the Empire State Building.
Klein's only remaining accomplishment, then, has become the steep rise in graduation rates during his tenure, but that, too, has already been demonstrated to be sham. Those rising numbers were accomplished with another Enronesque tactic called "credit recovery," a bogus scam to push up graduate rates by bribing CEO principals with big bonuses to do whatever was necessary to get students the credits needed to "graduate." All explained here by David Bloomfield for Gotham Schools in 2009, a piece entitled "Joel Klein's Race to the Bottom":
Klein's only remaining accomplishment, then, has become the steep rise in graduation rates during his tenure, but that, too, has already been demonstrated to be sham. Those rising numbers were accomplished with another Enronesque tactic called "credit recovery," a bogus scam to push up graduate rates by bribing CEO principals with big bonuses to do whatever was necessary to get students the credits needed to "graduate." All explained here by David Bloomfield for Gotham Schools in 2009, a piece entitled "Joel Klein's Race to the Bottom":
by David Bloomfield
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,
