This spring, the D.C. public schools—under tight corporate reform control since 2007–were rocked by a scandal about graduation rates. It started when Ballou High School boasted about its 100% graduation rate, a story that was then celebrated by the local NPR station. After teachers blew the whistle, NPR returned to investigate and discovered that many of the graduates did not qualify for a high school diploma due to their long absences and lack of credits. This prompted a systemwide audit, which determined that a large proportion of the district’s graduates were unqualified. The system was cheating to boost its apparent (but false) success.

Emily Langhorne of the Progressive Policy Institute wrote an article for the Washington Post to declare, proudly, that charter schools were not implicated in the graduation rate scandal. In fact, she asserted, the charter numbers are audited, and every graduate is really, truly a real high school graduate.

“What’s happened in DCPS is tragic — not only that the number of students graduating declined but also that DCPS has been graduating students who aren’t prepared for life beyond school.

“Yet there is a story of real academic progress in the nation’s capital. It’s the story of the other public schools, the ones educating nearly 50 percent of public school students. It’s the story of D.C.’s charter schools…

“In 2017, D.C.’s 21 charter high schools graduated 73.4 percent of their students in four years. Since the PCSB audits every graduating student’s transcript, that number is an accurate reflection of student achievement.”

Unfortunately, this happy account leaves out some very important but inconvenient facts.

I turned to two experts on the District of Columbia Public Schools.

One of them, Mark Simon of the Economic Policy I statute, told me there had never been an independent audit of the graduation rate# at DCPS charter schools. Langhorne refers to an audit by the PCSB, the Public Charter School Board of the District of Columbia. This is not an independent agency. The data were supplied by the individual charter schools. The Progressive Policy Institute advocates for charter schools. No genuinely independent audit was ever conducted of charter school graduates.

I then turned to Mary Levy, a civil rights attorney and fiscal watchdog of D.C. schools for many years.

She wrote me that the Langhorne article was “highly misleading.” First, she agreed with Simon that there had been no independent audit of the numbers, unlike the audit of the public schools’ data.

She added: “About a third of charter school students leave their schools–and the cohort–before the date of graduation. The majority of 9th grade charter students do not graduate from charter schools. [The emphasis is hers.]

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Levy added:

We don’t know where those who leave charter schools in the 9th grade go–some surely transfer to DCPS (District of Columbia Public Schools), enlarging that cohort, some move out of DC, some drop out. We also know that DCPS 9th grade enrollment includes a number of students in their second year of 9th grade, due to insufficient Carnegie units, thus inflating the percentage based on Grade 9 enrollment. The extent to which this happens in charter schools is unknown.”

To see all the data download the excel file here.