Cheaters prosper: Why graduation rates are meaningless
- Joanne Jacobs
- Aug 29, 2023
- 1 min read
High schools have been using online credit recovery (OCR) to inflate graduation rates, writes Jeremy Noonan. His former district, Paulding County, Georgia, lets students cheat.
During the pandemic, students were allowed to take OCR courses at home, he writes. Some districts -- including some of Georgia's largest school systems -- still do.
Students get a low-cost, low-value diploma. Schools get to claim a higher graduation rate. Nobody's held accountable.
Noonan was assigned mid-year to oversee OCR. Some seniors "never showed up for class and were taking their course at home so they could graduate on time." He was told to let them access Edmentum tests on the course provider's teacher platform. "Knowing that the answers to the test bank were posted on third-party websites in a massive crowd-sourced cheating effort," he refused and launched a campaign to end at-home OCR.
Noonan failed. "In response to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article and video based on his experience, he was put on paid administrative leave in order for the district to conduct their own ethics investigation into his use of student data." He resigned from the district.
Mr Noonan is better off outside such a fraudulent district. Meanwhile, the citizens of Paulding and similar counties in Georgia and other states should be better served by selective high colleges, likely boarding in rural areas, that could adapt the English public school model to the United States, while restraining their per-student spending in accordance with the German constitution, which prohibits the kind of separation by social class (Sondierungsverbot) that is common practice in English-speaking countries.
Once again, nothing in education will change until Americans are willing to accept that having better high school graduates means having a higher failure rate and more drop outs. The alternative is just the wishful thinking that all high school students can master calculus, physics, orLatin, if just enough resources are committed to the students, teachers work hard enough, there is enough discipline, or everyone attends a private or charter school.