Give im some credit
Principal gives teen who cut class an easy pass
Grade-fixing is alive and well in city schools as administrators come up with tricky new ways to inflate their graduation rates — and few of the hundreds of cheating complaints ever get investigated.
The latest scandal erupted at the Secondary School for Journalism in Brooklyn when a student who had cut a required English class dozens of times and got a 45, the lowest possible failing grade for the class, walked on stage in a white cap and gown to get his diploma — even after a whistleblowing teacher cried foul.
Principal Marc Williams did not simply change the student’s grade in the class he had failed — a method used by other city administrators.
Instead, Williams added an English course to the teen’s transcript, and let him sit at a computer for a few days to take an online program, teachers said.
A whistleblower claimed a classmate sat next to the teen and helped him take the tests to get a passing grade of 65.
Told about the apparent cheating, the principal did nothing, sources told The Post.
“This was wrong,” said English teacher Kim Haynes, who protested the improper practices.
“He knew it was wrong and he proceeded with it.”
Williams also let the 17-year-old “make up” work for an online Participation in Government class he had cut many times and failed with a 55, insiders said.
He got help from the same pal, and received a passing 65, sources said.
Haynes sent an e-mail expressing shock and alarm about the teen’s online makeup course to Chancellor Carmen Fariña and other city and state education officials.
“We have a poster in our school that reads: ‘Integrity is what you do when no one is watching.’ I am appealing to someone to address this matter immediately,” Haynes wrote.
PTA president Annette Renaud said the school’s grade fixing is “truly unethical. The children who fail should go to summer school to make up the class,’’ she said.
“They’re not supposed to come in and do it in four days or whatever.”
The Department of Education said it will investigate the allegations.
Besides the added last-minute credits, about 20 seniors at the 217student Park Slope school took various online classes to help them graduate.
But the classes lacked teachers certified in the subjects to instruct or assist the kids — a violation of regulations, insiders claimed.
Haynes wrote in her letter to school officials that on June 19, during the last week of classes, she was stunned to learn from the failing student that the principal would pass him after the online course — which is supposed to last 18 weeks.
“I questioned how he could make up an entire semester” in a day or two, she wrote.
At a school meeting on June 21, Haynes told parents about the “lack of integrity” in the online classes, hoping Williams would do something.
But the next day, she still saw unsupervised “helping each other.”
One girl walked into the office to plead for assistance, she said.
“I might as well go home because no one is here to help me,” said the girl, who failed.
When the teen who had failed the English and government classes — but passed the online courses allegedly with a little help from his friends — strutted across the stage at graduation, the principal shook his hand.
Haynes congratulated the teen, but told him, “This was not cool. In the real world, things like this don’t happen.” said, she students
But things like this happen in the DOE.
At Dewey HS in Brooklyn, hundreds of students were put in bogus “Project Graduation” classes in 2013-14, getting credits without any instruction.
Assistant principals fixed grades, investigators found.
Despite a probe that confirmed the fraud, DOE officials failed to give records to an arbitrator, who then tossed charges against Principal Kathleen Elvin.
She was removed as principal but the DOE kept her on as a $157,000a-year bureaucrat.
“By not holding Dewey’s grade and credit fraudsters fully accountable for their misdeeds, principals now have a green light to cheat,” said ex-Dewey teacher Michael Klimetz, who was a whistleblower in the case.
After The Post reported gradefixing and quickie online classes at William Cullen Bryant HS in Queens in 2015, Chancellor Fariña launched a “Task Force on Academic Integrity.”
The DOE said it refers misconduct complaints to the city’s Special Commissioner of Investigation.
But of the 704 complaints of testtampering and grade-fixing the SCI has received since August 2015, it has investigated only 22 cases and substantiated three, a spokeswoman said Friday.
The rest were referred to the DOE and the state, where their status is unknown. repeatedly