No Child Left Behind -- Not Even If They Really, Really Deserve To Be
In New York City, there are allegations of grade fraud, reports NBCNewYork. Failing students are getting their grades changed to passing ones to improve the graduation rate at a NYC high school:
The NYC Department of Education is investigating after some students and teachers say there has been a pattern of grade changing and other unusual practices at a Queens high school.Peter McGroary, a former student at William Cullen Bryant High School in Astoria, couldn't believe his eyes when he went to pick up his transcript.
"It said I had passed my gym class when I had failed," McGroary said.
McGroary, who dropped out of the school, admits that he was a no-show for his gym classes, yet he still passed the class somehow.
McGroary's gym teacher, Peter Maliarakis, says he didn't change the grade but believes someone else did.
...Maliarakis and others say grades are being changed to help the school get a better graduation rate, and that the pressure to change the grades of absent or failing students is coming from the school's principal. One school record shows a chronic absentee student who was averaging a 45 passing with an 85, simply for doing extra credit.
Why fix the problem when you can defraud your way to a solution.
Oh, wait -- because kids' whole lives, and not just your job and salary, are at stake?
The problem starts much earlier than high school, but not addressing it enables it in persisting.
And being able to "magically" change grades keeps kids who need extra help from getting it.
More about the school from Wikipedia (a page which sounds like it got some edits from some teachers or others involved with the school):
The school has 2,652 students enrolled; the ethnic make-up of the school is 48.3% Hispanic, 27.7% Asian, 2.5% White, and 19.7% African American. The school has a four-year graduation rate of 27% and an attendance rate of 89%[1]The school has a low progress report grade in comparison with its peer school, but it is also true that is serving a population of students with higher needs and a lot of freshman that entered the school are below proficient.
In 2010, New York City Department of Education gave the school a letter grade of C.[2] On April 26, PEP voted to close this school down, and a lot of good experienced veteran teachers are being rated unsatisfactory and others are being chased out with the purpose of hiring out of college teachers who may not be proven effective.
Mayor Bloomberg on his speech on January 2012 decided to close down this school together with other 23 schools under the turnaround model, although it was granted the transformation model at the beginning of 2011 without doing any negotiating. The turnaround model has not be proven effective in any district in the country, and research suggests that it may even be counterproductive.
On June 29, 2012 William Cullen Bryant High School was selected not to be closed down, by an arbitrator who deemed it unfit to close down the school. The school will retain its name, as well as its teachers if they chose to come back.
I suspect what we really have here are underperforming parents. The clue was the "higher needs" students comment.
A friend of mine teaches fourth grade "special needs" kids, which at first I thought meant she was dealing with kids who had autism or some of your other run-of-the-mill learning disorders. That's not what it is, at all. Essentially she's trying to teach the children of people who had no business having children in the first place. These kids come from poor, chaotic households where the struggle just to have the necessities.
Some of the parents are stereotypical welfare-dependent deadbeats. Kid after kid after kid, with nary a job in sight. Others are well-meaning and trying to work their way out of poverty, but don't have time to work three jobs and raise kids and haven't figured out that it's their serial breeding keeping them in poverty.
Not everyone starts out in life with money. But common sense would tell most of us to wait until we are off welfare or out of poverty BEFORE having kids. The idea that kids are a big responsibility and you should have the resources before you do it is completely lost on people who view them as an entitlement and aren't consistent with birth control.
So the burden falls to people like my friend and schools like these. How on earth do you think the tax base in that area could afford to keep some kid in school for 20 years? Why don't we stop saying the schools are leaving them behind and state the obvious, that it's their unprepared and otherwise incompetent parents who are leaving them behind? Otherwise they probably wouldn't be in a school like this to begin with.
What is the solution? I dunno - maybe put birth control in the water and only give the cure to people who can read at an eighth grade level and balance a checkbook?
Lessons learned: schools are no substitute for caring, competent parents.
Pirate Jo at July 12, 2015 6:58 AM
And yet Jo many schools want to be the parent when it suits them. The real solution is to drop the top down authoritarian model. You should voucherize all the students and let their parents pick whichever school they want. Then you don't even have to grade the schools. If parents like the service the school is providing (be it an education or simply day care) then that school will survive and thrive.
Ben at July 12, 2015 7:17 AM
So, a high-school diploma has just been devalued further. As if it needed the help. One of Obama's legendary gaffes is that he once said that everyone should go to college. That foot-in-mouth statement, years from now, might be looked at as prophetic and wise.
Patrick at July 12, 2015 7:17 AM
The "voters", NAACP, MSM, and SJW allow this because it gets the dems votes, black lives matter (ha ha ha), and because they truly truly can not comprehend reality.
After all, it takes a village, the Teachers Union, $15/hr minimum wage, and the rich paying their "fair" share to overcome the injustices created by decades of white privilege. (Can't we all get along?) (Story must be a FNC racist "news" story.)
Bob in Texas at July 12, 2015 8:07 AM
...decades of white privilege.
Because that's just a made up thing, right?
DrCos at July 12, 2015 8:59 AM
Pirate Jo: "I suspect what we really have here are underperforming parents."
If that Wikipedia article was written by someone who teaches at William Cullen Bryant High School, I'd say underperforming parents are only part of the problem.
Ken R at July 12, 2015 9:39 AM
The real solution is to drop the top down authoritarian model. You should voucherize all the students and let their parents pick whichever school they want.
Da fuq? With my tax money? Hell, no. SNAP recipients get strings attached of what they can get with public funds -- they don't get to pick a restaurant. If taxpayers are subsidizing your kid's schooling, they should get a say.
I suspect what we really have here are underperforming parents. The clue was the "higher needs" students comment.
Exactly. Not that some school administrators don't try to act in loco parentis, but often it's because there's damn little parentis going on at home.
Kevin at July 12, 2015 9:52 AM
If you want to retain control like this Kevin then this is what you get. A worthless piece of paper from a 12 year day care.
And DrCos, it is made up. Or don't you remember "Irish need not apply" signs.
Ben at July 12, 2015 11:20 AM
Why fix the problem when you can defraud your way to a solution.
Depends: did they follow the VA model and use their fraudulent results to get bonuses and pay raises? that's a win-win.
Also, Atlanta is on line 1, something about prosecuting such people. So, NYC, not the first...
I R A Darth Aggie at July 12, 2015 11:53 AM
"...decades of white privilege.
Because that's just a made up thing, right?"
re: Dr.Cros: White privilege is a croc! of lies in 2015. I remember white & black water fountains and wondering why.
6 decades later those spouting "white privilege" have smart phones, 50" tvs, great cars, and opportunities that white people did not even have in the 60's. (I was there Bubba so Bullshit.)
Bob in Texas at July 12, 2015 12:12 PM
@Kevin,
In a similar vein, after the 4th of July weekend, I heard about all the shootings that had taken place in Chicago. Including the 7-year-old boy whose father (the intended target) is a ranking gang member who has been arrested 45 times.
The mayor or some other government official opined that "the system" failed the poor kid.
NO, NO, NO!!! His PARENTS failed him! What the hell is wrong with that kid's dad, that he thinks he can be a gang banger AND a good parent? What the hell is wrong with that kid's mom, that she picks this kind of animal to be the father of her kid? There is nothing the system can do for a kid whose parents have the collective brain of a single glazed donut.
This blaming of "the system" when it is clearly the fault of the parents is really getting under my skin and crawling around lately. If you're going to hold "the system" accountable for everyone, you might as well just accept inevitable failure. But if you started holding parents accountable, you'd be staring in the face of a workable solution. I suggest we not flinch.
I mean what the hell is "the system," anyway? Like the mechanism by which we collect gas taxes and use the proceeds to pay for traffic lights and roads - in essence a giant cost-sharing arrangement - is supposed to somehow play a meaningful role in a child's life or be a substitute for good parenting.
I suspect that if you told that kid's parents they are to blame for his death, they would be completely outraged. In which case I say we strap them down and repeat it to them until they get used to hearing it. Do you want this problem solved or not?
Pirate Jo at July 12, 2015 12:57 PM
PJ this is not a problem libs/dems/a lot of blacks want to solve. The Teacher Unions don't want it solved. The pols don't want it solved.
Black kids have been screwed over in the schools since the '70's (I was there and saw how the libs LOVED sticking it to the Man! and the white conservatives loved their championship wins so pass that black boy!)
The policy was noted, reported on, complained about, but no action by AARP 'cause Brother Al and Brother Jesse were making a living and the mayor was smoking crack so go away kid you're bothering me.
Lots of reporting done about lack of parenting skills so nothing new being stated here. It's been whitey's fault for not putting enough money in schools (despite plenty of successful schools showing hard work/discipline produces good grades). Teacher Unions don't want to lose the purse strings.
AARP just is not involved. Pres Obama can't even bring up changing unnecessarily strict drug sentencing until now!!!!! He doesn't dare short circuit the education money trail. (Not sure what he believes in other than his own righteousness. Should have been a Baptist preacher.)
Stick w/it's whitey's fault. That horse has got a lot of mileage left in him.
Bob in Texas at July 12, 2015 1:16 PM
This blaming of "the system" when it is clearly the fault of the parents is really getting under my skin and crawling around lately. If you're going to hold "the system" accountable for everyone, you might as well just accept inevitable failure. But if you started holding parents accountable, you'd be staring in the face of a workable solution. I suggest we not flinch.
Agree with you completely, Pirate Jo, but we've reached the point of parental irresponsibiility where they demand "vouchers" from the government to spend as they wish.
Think about it: If a babysitter leaves a kid in a car to roast to death, there's no question what needs to be done, and who's culpable. But if a parent does it, we hear that it was a "tragic accident," that it could happen to anyone (patently false), and that we somehow need to build elaborate safety systems in order to make up for the fact that we're not willing to hold parents accountable for something as simple as taking their child out of the car.
Kevin at July 12, 2015 1:18 PM
Stick w/it's whitey's fault. That horse has got a lot of mileage left in him.
Maybe part of it is where I'm from - maybe I'm a demographic anomaly. I was born and still live in a low-population Midwestern state that is not part of the Rust Belt. There aren't really any "hoods" around here. All the black people I know are people I've worked with. Some of them in lower-paying service jobs and others in high-paying professional jobs, same as everyone else. I've never met a single gang-banger in my life. Not a single black person I know has anything against "whitey" - or, as far as I can tell, has any real opinion about "whitey" one way or the other. They just go to work every day and get on with life. A black lady I work with was so sweet to me when my pug died back in January - we were at work late and she gave me a hug when I was getting all weepy. She's a lawyer, for chrissake, not some welfare mom, and in addition to being nice is extremely good at what she does and highly respected.
So maybe I am biased because of my own personal experience - am I being anecdotal? But I just never meet actual black people in real life who have anything against "whitey" or any other race. And considering where I live, there are a lot of different races around here! The family next door is from Baghdad. The ones on the other side are Hispanic. There are Indian families on my street and several black people in my building. My shittiest neighbors are all white people (I am also white) - and that is consistent with how I grew up. There weren't many black kids in my school, but they all got good grades and were very nice and tended to be well-liked.
Shit, there are a LOT more white people in my state on welfare than any other race, which reflects the overall demographic, and who do they have to blame? This boils down to being irresponsible, crappy parents, plain and simple, I don't care what color coffee you drink.
What's sad is that when you look at people who grew up in rotten families, they seem to want to do better than their parents did. They try. They don't always succeed - sometimes, a lot of the same dysfunctions get passed down anyway, because people live what they have learned. But it seems like a lot of people are WORSE parents than their GRANDPARENTS were, and if people love their kids and want to be good parents, that is hard to understand.
Pirate Jo at July 12, 2015 4:20 PM
Kevin,
How are you planning to hold those parents accountable? You plan to take away every poor person's kids? Or maybe just the low scorers? Make a D or below and you can kiss mommy and daddy goodbye? Where will you house all those kids? Or do you just want to fine the parents? Kid scores a D or below and mommy has to pay the school $1,000.00? Nothing like taking money from people who already can't afford to lose it.
Holding the schools and the teachers accountable are fairly simple and well established. Do a poor job and you are fired. Just like everyone else.
Ben at July 12, 2015 6:36 PM
Holding the schools and the teachers accountable are fairly simple and well established. Do a poor job and you are fired. Just like everyone else.
Except that's not really the case. And how could it be?
Pirate Jo at July 12, 2015 7:21 PM
How are you planning to hold those parents accountable? You plan to take away every poor person's kids? Or maybe just the low scorers? Make a D or below and you can kiss mommy and daddy goodbye? Where will you house all those kids? Or do you just want to fine the parents? Kid scores a D or below and mommy has to pay the school $1,000.00? Nothing like taking money from people who already can't afford to lose it.
I have no interest in taking away anyone's children; in fact, I have no interest in anyone's children. The notion of making a parent write a check for a subpar grade is your idea, not mine -- though I do support fines and possible jail time for the parents of chronic truants.
More interesting to me is the fact we've reached the point where holding parents accountable is somehow farfetched or risible. It used to be the norm.
Kevin at July 12, 2015 9:04 PM
Shit, there are a LOT more white people in my state on welfare than any other race, which reflects the overall demographic, and who do they have to blame?
When you can blame whitey, blame RICH whitey.
lujlp at July 13, 2015 3:58 AM
As to how to fix the system? Easy.
Stop using taxpayer funds for everyone's schooling.
Free schooling til your 16 - what ever grade that happens to be.
Beyond that unless your GPA is high enough for you to deserve another few years on the tax payers dime you have to PAY for the privilege.
Teacher found to be cheating to massage grades should be blacklisted from ever teaching again.
As for kids with special needs, I know it sounds harsh, but if the parents need extra resources they can pay for it themselves.
When their kids go to college or get a job no one is going to give them a free one on one aid to navigate their lives in the real world.
lujlp at July 13, 2015 4:04 AM
Kevin,
Nice job of not answering the question. How do you hold the parents accountable??? You say you want them held accountable, how would you do that? I offered you two options. Give us a third, or a fourth. Do you send them a strongly worded letter? Or maybe a cookie bouquet? You could even shoot them in the head with an orbital laser. Or unleash winged monkeys to poop on their car.
I've given you five suggestions ranging from the excessively serious to the whimsical. You've stated a goal. How you plan on accomplishing it?
Ben at July 13, 2015 5:25 AM
"Except that's not really the case. And how could it be?"
Actually Jo, it is. It is a fairly simple and impersonal system. Teachers are ranked by the product they turn out, educated students. Schools are also ranked on the same product. Underperform compared to your peers for too long and you get a pink slip. If a school gets a pink slip everyone working at the school gets a pink slip.
Is it a perfect system, no. None of them really are. Big whoop. People get fired unfairly all the time. Want to make things better, hey I'm all ears. But the status quo was not acceptable. Saying 'I'm a teacher. You can't judge me. I'm magical.' is also not acceptable.
Ben at July 13, 2015 5:33 AM
"How do you hold the parents accountable??? "
Good question. I can't think of any way to do it without taking away at least some parental authority. And I personally don't want the government to have that authority. That situation is already bad enough as it is, with CPS peeking over fences into everyone's back yards.
Cousin Dave at July 13, 2015 7:31 AM
Nice job of not answering the question. How do you hold the parents accountable??? You say you want them held accountable, how would you do that?
Good question, but I doubt you'll like the answer:
1) Use KIPP-style parental contracts in public schools. If they're good enough for voucher schools like KIPP, they certainly should be good enough for public schools.
2) Mandate a minimum number of hours a parent or guardian must spend working with the school per semester.
3) Mandatory parent/teacher conferences.
4) If a child is disruptive or shows up to school unprepared to work, the child is taken out of class immediately and the parents are called to pick up the kid.
One certainly can make excuses for all of these -- what if the parent's job doesn't dovetail with the teacher conference schedule? How can you compel a parent to spend a few hours at the school?
It's not perfect. But it's a lot better than what we have now, which in many cases ends up being state-sponsored babysitting and an entitlement mentality where some parents think they're entitled to government vouchers to spend on private businesses.
Kevin at July 13, 2015 8:26 AM
So we don't hold the parents responsible. Because blood and turnips and all. But why hold the teachers responsible either? Some kids aren't equipped to learn, they come to school un-rested, un-fed, significantly behind grade level, having been taught not to care or try, ect. We either prioritize kids who need special service, and that might look like schools that are practically live-in, or we don't, and we let it go. Some kids will get left behind. Insisting that the teaching is the most important variable just makes the schools bad and discourages people with choices from going into teaching.
Allison at July 13, 2015 8:33 AM
I'll quote Ben here:
Is it a perfect system, no. None of them really are. Big whoop. People get fired unfairly all the time. Want to make things better, hey I'm all ears. But the status quo was not acceptable. Saying 'I'm a teacher. You can't judge me. I'm magical.' is also not acceptable.
Totally agree, and even more so when you replace the word 'teacher' with 'parent.'
Kevin at July 13, 2015 8:39 AM
"But why hold the teachers responsible either?"
Because they get paid for it? Seriously, we focus on the teaching becuase of all of the variables, that's the most important of the ones that we have any control over. Everything above that is (without draconian government measures) an independent variable. We know that some schools are better than others, even after you control for the makeup of the student body. That's not an accident. Even the educational establishment occasionally, belatedly has to confront this, e.g., they have largely gone back to the phonics method of reading instruction after decades of seeing "whole language" fall on its face to the point where it was impossible to ignore.
Now, the process of "teaching" isn't confined to teachers. Everyone, from the legislatures and school boards on down, has a role to play. Far too often, those other players don't take their roles seriously; either they come in with personal axes to grind, or they regard the job as a sinecure.
Cousin Dave at July 13, 2015 9:41 AM
"blame RICH whitey"
EXACTLY.
Here's a list of the many, many wealthy black CEOs exporting jobs to India and China:
1.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at July 13, 2015 10:13 AM
Right, Cousin Dave, but if the teachers don't control the curriculum, don't choose the books, can't require that the students show up and are awake, and in many cases can't even give them bad grades, how does holding them responsible for the outcome work?
Allison at July 13, 2015 11:17 AM
In my state they just stopped enforcing truancy laws. And there was a sympathetic article in the news about how it was just so hard for the poor to get their kids to school when so many of them need the kids at home as unpaid childcare for younger siblings.
Allison at July 13, 2015 11:20 AM
It is a fairly simple and impersonal system. Teachers are ranked by the product they turn out, educated students.
Ben, it seems you aren't looking at the situation as it IS, where the union system makes it nearly impossible to fire teachers, but are looking at the situation as you think it SHOULD be.
And even if you did away with all the union nonsense, I'm not sure how you hold teachers accountable for the points Allison makes. They simply cannot make up for bad parenting and are helpless in the face of the massive bureaucracy pervasive in the government school system.
Pirate Jo at July 13, 2015 11:50 AM
"Right, Cousin Dave, but if the teachers don't control the curriculum, don't choose the books, can't require that the students show up and are awake, and in many cases can't even give them bad grades, how does holding them responsible for the outcome work? "
That's what I meant actually. The people who decide the curriculum? They aren't doing their job. The people who choose the books? They aren't doing their job. The people who fix students' grades so the school doesn't lose its precious federal funding? They aren't doing their job. The people who lay off teachers so more money can be spent on administration? They definitely aren't doing their job. There is a subset of teachers who aren't doing their job, but there's also plenty of blame to go around: in a lot of cases, teachers are set up to fail.
(I will point out that often, all of the groups I named above are actually of the same tribe -- the ed-school tribe. If somehow America's current crop of ed schools could simply be made to vanish off the face of the earth, the country would be better off.)
Cousin Dave at July 13, 2015 12:40 PM
Jo,
I did look at the system how it is. That is why NCLB has the turn-a-round system. Essentially since you can't fire any one teacher you just fire the whole school. And honestly half the time it is the administration that is the problem or the entire school culture. I agree this isn't a perfect system. But it is the best we've been able to do at the moment.
If there were no consequences for these kids getting bad grades there would be no incentive for the teachers to falsify those grades.
The only solution for the problems Allison raised are vouchers. Don't try and make everyone do the same thing at the same time. Not everyone wants the same thing. What is good for some is bad for others. So give every parent a voucher and let them pick the school that works best for them. If all they need is a day care to warehouse their kids while at work, so be it. They chose that and they are responsible for the outcome. If they want lots of math and science but don't care about arts or music, so be it. If others want an artists colony, once again so be it.
Outsource the whole mess to the parents. They have a much better incentive to do well than a bunch of pencil pushers in DC. And once the monopoly is broken the union problems will take care of themselves.
Ben at July 13, 2015 12:48 PM
Kevin,
To boil your answer down, you want to kick problem kids out of school. I can live with that. Are you willing to close down schools like William Cullen Bryant High School when they have no students left? I hope you recognize the perverse incentive the school has to keep kids in. For many low performing schools you will still have grade and exam fraud.
Ben at July 13, 2015 12:54 PM
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