How to inflate graduation statistics and make a school look successful

In my novel No Child Left Alive, I wrote about frustrated teachers who are pressured by upper-level administrators to pass students who are not doing the work and who have to deal with disruptive students immediately being returned to the classroom.

These things are not just the stuff of fiction. Before I had ever written those words, I had heard the same stories from educators across the United States- the pressures to graduate more students and to receive money for having those students in school have led to teachers (and students) being sold down the river by administrators seeking to make their own statistics look better.

In today's Washington Post, the story is told of a teacher who quit because of this nonsense:

But (ninth grade algebra teacher Caleb) Rossiter, a 62-year-old college professor and policy analyst, didn’t want his failing students removed from his class. He wanted them to do the work they needed to learn. Bad grades are a useful way to communicate that. Squelching his effort to sound an alarm seems in tune with the tendency of American high schools to let disengaged students slip through to graduation. Schools nudge slackers along with passing grades for limp performance or use shortcuts such as credit recovery courses, which deliver passing grades for just a few weeks of online work.

Rossiter told me he thought he was going to be fired “for refusing to raise to D’s the 30 percent of my students who earned F’s in the first quarter.” He said an administrator told him “this can’t be.” Rossiter said he was told “it would damage the school if grades were reported to the Charter School Board, showing that the students were ‘not on track to graduate’ — which of course they are not.”

Are these things happening the Joplin School District?

Any thoughts?