The Governor of Maryland is calling for a criminal investigation into what he calls “widespread grade-changing practices” in the Baltimore City School system.
Governor Larry Hogan made the move after a report by the Inspector General for Education found that more than 12,000 grades were changed from failing to passing in four years’ time.
Governor Hogan sent letters to the United States Attorney for the District of Maryland and the Maryland State Prosecutor requesting that they launch a criminal investigation and that potential prosecution may be in order.
In his letter to the State Prosecutor, Governor Hogan writes,
“The report reveals egregious behavior by Baltimore City Public Schools employees, which, if proven true in a court of law, would seem to constitute criminal malfeasance in certain cases.”
Governor Hogan referred the case to the U.S. Attorney because the school system receives state and federal tax dollars.
The Governor asked him to investigate and “where appropriate, bring federal criminal charges against the persons who have perpetrated the fraud, waste and abuse.”
In the investigation by the IG’s office included 136 Baltimore City Schools grades 6 through 12. According to the report, Investigators found 12,542 failing grades that were changed from failing to passing between 2016 and 2020.
Investigators say that the central office pressured school administrators to change the grades, who then pressured teachers.
The IG report contains emails directing teachers to change failing grades to passing such as one email sent to an assistant principal saying,
“Please change the following students’ progress from failing to passing.”
As for the number of students that graduated that should not have, the Maryland Inspector General for Education Rick Henry said that it could be as high as 10% in some schools.
During a press conference Governor Hogan praised the hard work of the IG saying,
“I think there’s been an ongoing awareness of the problem and different people with the responsibility looking into it, but it took persistence and it took this IG, which we had to fight hard to get on board to, to gather the information, to do the finding of fact.”
Governor Hogan said that the school system has denied grade fixing allegations for years and “tried to sweep it all under the rug,” he added “None of this should be allowed to happen in any school system, let alone in one of the most highly funded large school systems in America. All involved in this culture of corruption must be held accountable.”
The office of the IG went through almost 600,000 pages of documents, but the IG thinks there are more documents with the same type of violations,
“We were relying upon Baltimore City to turn over the documents that we were asking for and we based our report on those documents that the city themselves turned over to us,” explained Henry. “having further access and more access, free access to the records might reveal even more.
In a statement Hogan said that there are legal and moral implications by school administrators who “appear more concerned with their own image than with the well-being of their students. Baltimore City children have been denied the education they deserve and robbed of opportunities to thrive and succeed. This scandal has broken the bonds of trust between city officials and parents, students and taxpayers.”
