Opinion: We’ve lost trust in D.C.’s high schools. New graduation rules won’t fix it.

Next month, the D.C. State Board of Education will vote on proposed revisions to the city’s high school graduation requirements after months of emotional and deeply divided public debate. 

These requirements were last updated in 2018, in the aftermath of a scandal involving Ballou High School graduates who had missed months of school. An audit then found that one in three of D.C. Public Schools' 2017 graduates received diplomas despite attendance and credit recovery violations. 

Revisiting graduation rules is ordinary work for a state, and this time around D.C. isn’t making changes in the wake of a scandal. Yet the underlying dynamics are still too similar. Four in ten students were chronically absent last year, yet graduation rates kept climbing anyway.

Community members have packed late-night hearings, offering sharply different visions of what a D.C. diploma should represent. On the surface, the debate is about whether Algebra II should be required for all students, whether D.C. should require four science credits while neighboring states like Maryland require three, and how much flexibility schools should have in structuring graduation pathways. 

Today, a student demonstrates readiness almost entirely through seat time, measured in “Carnegie Units,” the century-old accounting system that awards credit for hours spent in a classroom. The proposal before the board would let more students show what they know in other ways, by completing a paid apprenticeship with a local employer or passing the same industry certification exams that working adults take. This is a good thing. Hours in a classroom measure attendance, and for too long D.C. has let them stand in for readiness. 

But underneath these debates festers a more challenging question that has gone unanswered since the Ballou scandal: whether our education system truly produces trusted signals about workforce- or college-readiness.

A diploma is a public signal to families, employers, colleges, and students themselves that a young person is prepared for what comes next. It holds its value only as long as people trust it. In D.C. that trust is fraying, and no rewrite of the credit requirements will restore it on its own. New rules are only as strong as the city’s ability to carry them out.

A 2018 Washington Teachers’ Union survey found that 47% of responding D.C. teachers said they had felt pressured by an administrator to pass or change the grade of a failing student. D.C.’s four-year graduation rate reached 78.7 % in the 2024-25 school year, a record high and ten points above where it stood in 2018; yet the share of students meeting the SAT College and Career Readiness Benchmark hovered near 20 percent over the same period and fell to just 16 percent overall in 2024-2025. That’s far below the national rate of 40 percent.

Additionally, employers who served on the graduation requirements task force told us that they’re worried about D.C. graduates’ workforce readiness — particularly regarding literacy skills and punctuality.

Sure, no single assessment captures readiness fully, and many schools successfully support students into college, careers, and economic mobility even when standardized testing outcomes remain uneven. But when graduation rates, SAT benchmarks, workforce feedback, chronic absenteeism, and other readiness indicators diverge this substantially, we have a duty to investigate why — and to provide students with better support, not just stricter requirements.

The Office of the State Superintendent of Education should publish an annual readiness report next to the graduation numbers. The report should be broken out by ward and student group and built from data the city already collects, including SAT benchmark attainment, college enrollment within six months of graduation, industry credential and apprenticeship completions, and recurring surveys of alumni and employers (building on the alumni survey the city published for the first time last December). 

Other states already treat readiness as a headline number, with Texas grading its high schools partly on the share of graduates who demonstrate readiness for college, a career, or the military and tying bonus funding to those outcomes. Indiana, likewise, rebuilt its diploma around readiness seals for enrollment, employment, and enlistment. 

Revising the graduation requirements is worth doing, but it won't solve the trust problem. That can only happen when D.C. graduates are genuinely prepared for their lives after high school.

Allister Chang represents Ward 2 on the D.C. State Board of Education.