> Clifford Stroll has already addressed...

(Ahem.)

So....a kid I fired (he's 21) did not even know how to capitalize letters after a period. I was astonished. He was also very disrespectful and acted like I needed his non-existent skills. I was kind the real world will not be.

I asked a friend, who is a teacher why she was quitting. She told me that legally she is not allowed to fail any of her students. Yes you read right, legally she can not fail them.

Is there anything lower than an American school administrator?

They may not be allowed to be given a failing grade, but they have failed, and the students are not the only ones.

You will no doubt be appalled at this idea:

At Savannah River Site, we do not fire for lack of work. There is a protected demographic.

After a recent restructuring and layoff, I was asked by a facility manager about an operator he knew to have come to his facility from my group. He deduced my opinion from my reluctance to speak, but confirmed my impression with the statement, "She simply will not move at all unless I tell her to."

This person makes $32.10 per hour. On her behalf, thank you for those wages. Yes, other productive people - by any measure of achievement, by the way - were laid off instead of this lump.

So this is a good article, but I still see some ed-school quasi-intellecutalism sneaking through. Strauss seens to want to blame the problem on performance measurement. Yet, performance measurement is intended to prevent the very thing that Strauss is complaining about. The parents that are putting "stress, fear, and anticipation into their kids' heads to achieve a meaningless numeric grade" are not the parents of the kids that are failing. Being held to standards is not the problem. Not being held to standards is the problem. Strauss nails the syndrome -- "students are not allowed to fail" -- but still misses the diagnosis.

Not being held to standards is one problem.

Being held to standards that are not indicative of, and distract from, learning a useful trade or thinking skills is a bigger problem.

Children who are left adrift in a system where they chronically fail to perform have a host of big problems.

It's the dumbing down of Amerika. People who are stupid and have no book learning or common sense will not have the knowledge they need to question the government about ANYthing. That's the way the government wants it. Or, I should say, the people running the government. Congress is but a tool of the 0.1% of the people with the money who are really running things.

Is there anything lower than an American school administrator?

TSA supervisor?

So....a kid I fired (he's 21) did not even know how to capitalize letters after a period.

I address this in "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," which is coming out in June. Glad I did.

Also, I hired a new assistant recently. He's amazing, which separates him from 95 percent of the applicants. Few could think or write, and I include in that those who went to hoity-toity Ivy League colleges.

A friend of mine was telling me about his physics teacher in Nebraska. All the teachers were called into a meeting and told that they were required to give students points for showing up to class -- and that those points had to be worth one-third of the grade.

Yep, 30 percent of the grade was to be based on simply showing up.

The teacher stood up and said, "Well, then I suppose we're going to be giving all the desks diplomas now?"

When I went to school, it did not appear to be a problem for teachers to fail students. It was not uncommon for some students to stay an extra year or two if they really wanted their diplomas. As a good student, I always wondered why many of the students were not willing to work hard and make good grades. I found out why later. Those who were failing dropped out at age 16 and went to work at the refinery in my small town. Right away, they would start making more money than the teachers.

And I choose private school or homeschool for this reason. I actually EXPECT my child to EARN her grades. I know parents who think a C is an acceptable grade because afterall their child isn't failing and it must be because of their ADHD, special snowflake, food intolerance that they can't turn in their assignment. UGH

I read this and saw something a bit different. Most will see it as an administrator saying don't fail anyone. I see it as possibly an administrator telling her try something different with these students. With a teacher so proud and set in her ways she won't consider anything else.
She complains about meaningless " measurable" standards (which admittedly can be bad), but what is her alternative: Meaningless un-measurable opinions? Johnny fails because he doesn't appreciate and love Chaucer.
When she is claiming to be teaching wisdom, perhaps.

Is there anything lower than an American school administrator?

Judging from the article, American school parents.

read this and saw something a bit different. Most will see it as an administrator saying don't fail anyone. I see it as possibly an administrator telling her try something different with these students.

Here's the thing, though: It's not that these students are turning in poor work (because you can work with that!). It's that they're turning in NO work. She also said she had tried to communicate with the parents to no avail. As a teacher, you can't work with that (at least not without taking valuable time away from other students). You can't go into the kids' homes and make sure they do their homework. You can't take valuable class time sit with them one on one and make them do the homework they should have completed last night. You can't do the work for them.

"Johnny" isn't failing because he doesn't appreciate the subject matter. Johnny is failing because he's not handing in even the simplest of assignments. I get that Johnny may have some problems at home that make doing homework difficult. But what is a teacher to do? She says she's already making herself available for tutoring and for help before and after class.

She complains about meaningless " measurable" standards (which admittedly can be bad), but what is her alternative: Meaningless un-measurable opinions? Johnny fails because he doesn't appreciate and love Chaucer.

Johnny's not there to love Chaucer. Johnny is there to learn. I disliked most of my subjects in school, but whether I loved them is not the point.

This logic has led to the many Johnnys (and Janies) in the workplace who don't do their work because they don't appreciate it and love it.

Bottom line: Johnny fails not because he doesn't appreciate and love something, but because he couldn't or wouldn't do the work. And I have not one shit to give for either Johnny or his parents in that situation.

The flip side to the child who refuses to work is the lousy teacher who doesn't work. We have shitty standards that make no sense for real learning because there is a subset of unfireable "they are not allowed to fail" teachers for whom a lousy check the box standard is the only thing they can be coerced into providing for the students unlucky enough to fall into their care.

So the real problem is that the people truly responsible for the mess, namely shitty parents and shitty teachers, can't be held accountable for their failure directly. In most unionized schools (basically all the public ones) it is next to impossible to can a teacher for anything short of actual criminal activity. And layoffs are scheduled by seniority, cutting away young, enthusiastic teachers while older lousy ones are safe in their sinecure.

And of course there's no easy way to force parents to force their kids to put forth effort. So instead you set up a lousy standard and punish schools by cutting their funding if they fail to meet it, while simultaneously preventing schools from doing anything that actually improves the quality of their education.

Gathering up some different bits from all of the above:

Michelle: "Being held to standards that are not indicative of, and distract from, learning a useful trade or thinking skills is a bigger problem."

Quite true. I just get pissed at teachers who complain about having to "teach to the test". The purpose of the damn test is to check whether or not kids are learning! But yes, what's actually on the test is the devil in the details. If the test is testing on things that are irrevelant (or worse, just plain wrong), than it's worse than useless. Standardized testing is not without its problems. But so is the traditional grading system.

Flynne: "People who are stupid and have no book learning or common sense will not have the knowledge they need to question the government about ANYthing. "

Quite true. One of the top-10 rules in the Dictator's Handbook is: restrict access to education to knowledge. A stupid population is an easily baffled and cowed population.

sofar: "The teacher stood up and said, 'Well, then I suppose we're going to be giving all the desks diplomas now?'"

I don't know whether or laugh or cry. Maybe both.

Fayd: "Those who were failing dropped out at age 16 and went to work at the refinery in my small town. Right away, they would start making more money than the teachers."

Good point, and the skewing of the labor market that took place from about 1950 to 1980 is a part of the problem. However, the days of unskilled labor making $30/hour are just about over. There are still going to be industry jobs that make that kind of money, but they're either going to be skill or at least semi-skill jobs (e.g., operating or repairing machinery), or jobs involving very unpleasant/dangerous working conditions (oil drilling). The guy who drops out at 16 and then makes a comfortable middle-class living putting bolts into holes at GM is a thing of the past.

Kevin: "This logic has led to the many Johnnys (and Janies) in the workplace who don't do their work because they don't appreciate it and love it."

Quite true. This attitude (refencing back to a comment I made on a previous thread about the glut of applicants for lowest-grades elementary school teachers) of school is supposed to be a rainbows-and-fairies playground is part of the problem. Yes, there can and should be fun moments in school, but kids have to learn that the universe does not exist to entertain them.

Oberon: "We have shitty standards that make no sense for real learning because there is a subset of unfireable 'they are not allowed to fail' teachers... "

Yep. That's the thing that ought to piss everyone off about teacher's unions: they are perfectly happy to nail good teachers to the cross in order to shield bad teachers. But for some reason, without fail the good teachers all believe that the union would never, ever do that to them, until it does. Good teachers in NEA schools don't last long. They either try to move into admin/policy positions (depending on how much patience they have for tilting at windmills), or they take jobs at schools where the NEA has less influence, or they change careers. The American Federation of Teachers was somewhat of an exception when Albert Shanker ran it, but he's two decades gone now.

There was an agricultural professor that built up a statistics system that basically showed the bad teachers and bad students compared to the good ones.

It worked by looking at the grades and standardized tests results for the prior years by subject, the students and the teacher. It pretty much predicted, over time, how a particular student would do with a particular teacher.

From what I can tell it was pretty much buried by the unions.

This attitude (refencing back to a comment I made on a previous thread about the glut of applicants for lowest-grades elementary school teachers) of school is supposed to be a rainbows-and-fairies playground is part of the problem. Yes, there can and should be fun moments in school, but kids have to learn that the universe does not exist to entertain them.
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Reminds me of what the late media critic Neil Postman wrote in "Amusing Ourselves to Death":

"Children who watch Sesame Street will like school if school is like Sesame Street.....We would all be better off if TV got worse, not better."

And America's most famous tightwad, Amy Dacyczyn, once wrote (not verbatim): "Useful (i.e., profitable) hobbies can be fun or boring, just as useless hobbies can be fun or boring. When so many of us have such tight schedules, why not choose the hobbies that are both fun and useful?"

In the same vein, when kids finish their schoolwork and chores for the day, parents should be gently pushing them away from video games and toward useful activities (whether it's a house project or a useful hobby) and they also need to push kids toward books that are actually at their grade level or higher - including nonfiction. Otherwise, they shouldn't be surprised when the kids grow up to have no interest in school and little, if any, work ethic. Parents who openly hate their paid jobs and live for nothing on weekends besides drinking beer and watching TV are setting a bad example too. (Is it any surprise that unimaginative parents like that could never find jobs that they liked even SLIGHTLY?)

"Bottom line: Johnny fails not because he doesn't appreciate and love something, but because he couldn't or wouldn't do the work. And I have not one shit to give for either Johnny or his parents in that situation."

Or it could be a teacher who only cares about doing homework and not about learning anything. I am not saying it is definitely that, but that was the impression I got from this teachers writing.

The author starts blaming the parents for stressing over scores... but I doubt those are the parents of the kids who aren't turning anything in!

I dislike the way it goes from the system being the problem to all the parents being the problem. There are good parents out there, who are involved, who pay attention to the scores, but don't stress, and who even tell their kids when the schools are forced to do stupid things (like teach the food pyramid). Not everyone can homeschool or do private school, but not every parent has a special-snowflake mentality or is hyper-competitive!

Also, as I have mentioned here several times before, in a private well-esteemed university, my husband had a problem failing a student who not only failed to show for the final (and turn in most of the work), but failed to show for a MAKEUP final exam. What was the problem? FAILING wasn't a grading option. I think the closest was "no credit received."

The future of schools

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK0BMaUMmGw

She should have just said that her failing students may have drawn a picture of a gun, resulting in their expulsion.

"my husband had a problem failing a student who not only failed to show for the final (and turn in most of the work), but failed to show for a MAKEUP final exam. "

The university I went to had a built-in CYA function for the professors. In the case you described, the professor would assign a grade of "incomplete". This had no immediate effect on the student's GPA, and if the student arranged to complete the work, the professor could turn in a revised grade and the "incomplete" was wiped off the books. However, if the student did nothing, then after six weeks the incomplete automatically turned into an "F". It was made clear to students that the professors had no control over this, and if they had a problem with it, they had to take it up with the dean.