Another day, another K-12 education scandal.

The latest news: A state investigation has found that more than 1,000 Richmond public school students received credit for high school courses they shouldn’t have, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The lack of compliance with state standards affected more than 1,500 credit hours.

Among the six major “errors” identified in a Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) audit, which will be released later this month:

• Some students were awarded two credits when they should have received one. Most of these courses were in career and technical education classes.
• Some students received credit for taking the same class multiple times and for taking classes not approved by the state for credit.
• Some middle-school students took high school-level classes and received credit when those classes weren’t eligible for credit by the state.

Of the more than 1,000 students who earned credit when they shouldn’t have, writes the T-D, 300 are now seniors. Richmond schools have roughly 1,200 a year in the senior class, suggesting that roughly one in four students were affected.

Bacon’s bottom line: Are these just random errors, or do they reflect another example of how educrats game the system? Richmond city schools have long been criticized for having one of the highest dropout rates of any school district in Virginia, and school officials have been working to improve the numbers.

In 2107, the dropout rate was reported to be 17.08%. Stated Interim Superintendent Thomas Kranz in a press release at the time:

As we continue our work with VDOE, our expectation is that with their support we will be successful in achieving our ultimate goal of 100% On-Time Graduation Rate. We are committed to increasing our On-Time Graduation Rate by 5 percent and lowering our dropout rate for this school year.

Despite a system-wide dip in the on-time graduation rate that year, some high schools experienced improvement:

Armstrong High — 4 percentage point increase to 80.8%
Franklin Military Academy — 2 percentage point increase to 100%
John Marshall High School — 1 percentage point increase to 90.1%

There is a very easy way to determine if the errors reflect random bureaucratic ineptitude or a deliberate gaming of the system: Find out how many of the students receiving extra credits needed them to graduate on time. If the students getting the extra credits wouldn’t have graduated anyway, we may be talking about random error. But if the “mistakes” were putting a lot of students over the top, so to speak, there is a strong likelihood they were intentional.

My usual philosophy is never to attribute to evil intention what can be explained by simple incompetence. But given the prevalence of administrative cheating in Virginia schools, I’m tempted to suspend that principle and make the opposite assumption. If errors occur in the reporting of educational metrics, they aren’t accidental. Find out who benefits.

Oh, and one more thing. According to the T-D, Richmond is the only school district in Virginia under VDOE scrutiny. If it turns out that Richmond administrators figured out a trick for improving dismal dropout rates, their counterparts in other districts may have too. Whenever you see sudden, dramatic improvements in on-time graduation, it’s time to start digging.