Today's Daily News praises the city's 70% Graduation rate.  What a joke.  It is a mystery to me and every other teacher why none of the so called reporters never bother to investigate why this graduation rate keeps going up.  And, since they never report the truth behind these rates I will do so here.

Increased graduation rates work on the see saw principle, one side goes up while the other goes down.  Put a heavy weight on the down side to keep the other rates up.   Heavy cheating raises rates.  Education in NYC high schools is becoming non existent. When a special education student with a kindergarten reading and math levels suddenly scores 80's on regents exams something is very wrong.  A look into any community college will see too many classrooms filled with remedial students.

Cheating is rampant, not only in special education, but everywhere.  Credit recover programs, boot camps and other nonsense programs raise percentages but do nothing for education. It is time for newspapers to look at why graduation rates are going up instead of praising meaningless numbers.

These two kids slept their weight their way through high school, occasionally failing classes and then making them up the following term.  Luckily for them, no one said, "Poor baby.  Do these 75 problems online and you can make up the credit" or "Go to summer school for two weeks, just show up and the credit will be yours."  These kids were forced to take real classes and to do something that would probably be considered capital punishment today--they were forced to show competence in the subjects they failed.

I said these two kids were lucky and they were.  Both sleepers made it through high school and graduated with a diploma that meant something.  Both went on to college.  One is now a doctor, doing her residency at a major hospital in Queens.  The other is an aeronautical engineer, working for NASA.  Both of these kids are close to 30 years old, one of the last generation to get a real high school education.

We might have higher graduation rates today, but the late bloomers, like these kids, will not be so successful.  (Even kids who did the right thing will have a hard time do to the lack of education they received in high school.)  Pursuing a college education without the proper foundation will insure their failure, something I see every day.  How long will it take for the powers that be to realize this?  How many generations will be lost until things change?

Finally, what I and thousands of others have been saying for years. Anyone who doubts the validity of this should just pay a visit to any community college math class. And, it does not have to be a remedial one, although I will begin this post with a few thoughts on some of these.

Last semester I taught a second term remedial class at the college. We began with close to 30 students. From the 30, I managed to hold on to about 20 (and this took great effort). Out of the 20, approximately 8 got through and this was better than average. Many of the students had no idea as to what was expected. They were used to make up exams, extra credit, calculators and being allowed to be out as much as they wanted. They were used to not doing homework. In other words, they got used to being passed for doing nothing and they expected this to continue.

Now, the first real class for credit, the one that comes right after the remedial course, the course taken if the student scored at least a 75 on the algebra regents. Those students coming from the remedial class usually do okay in this class, not great but they manage to get through. Those coming from high school are usually not so fortunate. More often than not, this class is taken at least twice, sometimes more. The students cannot factor, or graph. They cannot even handle signed numbers, yet the high schools have determined they are competent enough to graduate. Even the pre-calculus course that comes next finds these students struggling. The foundation they needed in high school and earlier was never built. Like the buildings built on swamps, these students are tumbling down.

The high schools had to do this. If not, they would have had lower graduation rates and the city would have shut them down. Luckily, the colleges still have standards.

So now more money is being spent to generate reports showing what every high school and every college teacher has known for years. What a joke! What a travesty! What a waste! There will still be no real plan in place to help. Yes, there will be a change in curriculum and there will be something else to hold teachers accountable for but there will be nothing else. Nothing changes but the name of the game.