This stuff, including forcing teachers to change grades or risk termination, goes on all the time:
Long considered to be one of the city's best remaining behemoth high schools, Lehman has had a checkered past. At the end of the 2007-08 school year, Lehman's veteran principal Leder resigned [3] after investigators found that he had paid two assistant football coaches overtime wages while they were at home.
Leder's replacement, Saraceno, arrived the next fall from the High School for Media and Communications, where she was principal. As part of a Department of Education program to lure principals to the city's most challenging schools, she was given a bonus and the title "executive principal." [4] At the time, this perplexed more than a few parents and teachers, who told the city's daily newspapers [5] that they couldn't understand why a school with a "B" on its latest report card needed to offer its new principal an extra $25,000 a year.
According to current and former teachers, Saraceno methodically set about increasing the school's 47 percent graduation rate by changing students' grades from failing to passing over the objections of their teachers and, in some instances, in violation of state regulations.
"Leder was not a perfect human. We had hoped that anybody would have been better," said a current teacher. "It turned out his replacement was much much worse. She has changed Lehman into a diploma mill."
Grade changing is not an entirely foreign phenomenon at Lehman. Teachers who worked under Leder said he sometimes asked them to change student athletes’ grades if their grade point average slipped below the minimum required for them to play, or if a student was mere points away from passing a class. But that process involved conversations with teachers in which Leder persuaded them to sign the paperwork, they said. Today, failing grades disappear from transcripts without warning, teachers said.
"Leder's corruption was at least confined to a cohort of 50 kids," said a former teacher who was one of eight math teachers to leave Lehman last year. Former and current math teachers said their department has borne the brunt of the grade changes, as it has the lowest pass rate within the school.
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Los Angeles Unified School District is looking at possibly shortening the school year in order to balance its budget.
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