8 ms·

What Really Happened at the School Where Every Graduate Got into College

95 points by onewhonknocks 9y ago

HaoZeke 9y ago
This is crap. Here in India at least, attendance has nothing to do with college admissions. One can study better from home anyway. Also considering that it's a poor school, the teachers are surely not that great either. This is a puff piece. If the teachers taught better, students would come. This just shows how broken the system of failing due to low attendance is. These kids obviously worked hard in spite of school and that should be celebrated, not investegated. The teacher's attitude is weird to say the least. Good kids but didn't deserve to walk across that stage? The teacher ought to be sacked.
- aidenn0 9y ago
  FWIW, in Virginia (not far from DC, but under different laws), the school system I went to had a similar attendance requirement for passing, but it was in a gray area. There was significant legal precedent for disallowing failing students for non-academic (i.e. behavioral) reasons. They kept the policy in place just because very few parents would challenge the grade, but all who did would win.
- notyourday 9y ago
  American school system is absolutely bizarre. I'm from across the pond - I probably cut 80% of classes in my last year of school ( I ended up transferring to a magnet school in 4th grade ). Most of my "will likely succeed" peers cut between 20% to 40% of the classes that year. Our teachers did not care what so ever: you had to be in for the tests, there were no make up days, your grade was your grade which was an average of all tests given. Age classes were split into sections based on performance. If you were in 5A, you probably did better than you were in 5B and you were definitely miles ahead of 5D. At the end of the every year there was a reshuffling between the letters based on previous year results. No one, absolutely no one, wanted to go down a grade. If your grade was higher than the minimum, you got to take the final test before graduation. Achieving the minimum score on it allowed you to graduate. If you did not get there, you did not get to do it which meant another year of school. That was in all test subjects: literature, math, geography, chemistry, physics, biology, foreign language (addition only in our class). There was no curve. Hell, entire concept of a curve still baffles me. Results of the test: me - 2nd at 127% percent behind a girl who never cut a single class at 129%. Our of a graduating class of 142, 140 were taking the test, all 140 achieved the minimum 81% needed. All of people who cut classes that I knew scored over 94%. I did not realize how weird it was until I got to an American university.
ravenstine 9y ago
> The majority of Ballou’s 2017 graduating class missed more than six weeks of school If not for the investigation, would anyone have ever noticed?
- skookumchuck 9y ago
  I doubt many would want to notice, as they are deeply invested in the school system.
  - acjohnson55 9y ago
    What we're invested in is the idea that someone has found a magic bullet that can ease our consciences of the deep injustice done to kids in poverty. The semblance of success makes it possible to say, "well, I guess all those failing schools are failing because they're not doing what Ballou is".
    - skookumchuck 9y ago
      Public schools are very good at the facade of success - graduation rates, course descriptions, claims of excellence, glitzy buildings, education levels of teachers, money spent, committee reports, etc. But any measurement of educational results in students is relentlessly dismissed and attacked.
      - cinquemb 9y ago
        I think private schools use a lot of the same signals for success as public schools, however their students are often shielded from the downsides due to circumstances out of their control (their parents/family background), and upsides amplified.
        skookumchuck 9y ago
        Since parents are paying the tuition to private schools, the parents are in a strong position to demand results. Having paying customers makes for a very different dynamic.
pitaa 9y ago
The real question here is what colleges are admitting kids that can't read or write? Is affirmative action really so strong that these colleges accepted every kid from a HS where the average SAT score is in the 16th percentile? Or did the high school also help the kids fudge their applications?
- tatersolid 9y ago
  Some community colleges (and even a few state colleges) in the USA are required as part of their charters or funding to accept any student who graduates high school in that area for at least one “trial” semester.
- acjohnson55 9y ago
  There's very little likelihood affirmative action has anything to do with it. There are schools that are not selective as a matter of principle/mission/policy.
- dwnwudp 9y ago
  >183 students accepted to the University of the District of Columbia, the local community college. But only 16 enrolled this fall. It's almost as if the school got with each student to have him or her apply to the school. If the students were having trouble with reading, writing, and attendance, they probably wouldn't go out of their way to fill out a college app without oversight.
- scarface74 9y ago
  Why does it have to be "affirmative action"? Why is that the go to? Community colleges will often admit almost anyone who graduates but they have to take remedial courses.
berbec 9y ago
At my high school they pulled bs like this too. We all had to apply to our local community College, which had a 100% acceptance rate. They also had a 100% graduation by changing anyone who wouldn't pass to a junior.
- surfmike 9y ago
  Both sound like good ideas to me. Community college is generally better than ending your education in high school. And allowing people to graduate without passing their grade level seems like a bad idea. (Unless you're saying they were changed to juniors but then no longer went to the high school).
  - stickfigure 9y ago
    Unfortunately, it seems merely being accepted is the wrong metric. From the article: The school district won't know how many Ballou graduates enrolled in college overall until May, a spokesperson says. We know of 183 students accepted to the University of the District of Columbia, the local community college. But only 16 enrolled this fall.
    - zaroth 9y ago
      It seems to me, and the part of the story that’s missing, I would bet that the Administration applied on behalf of the “graduates” to the community college with a 100% acceptance rate. I think what’s most impressive is how they’ve convinced themselves their fraud is actually all in the best interest of the students.
  - gmiller123456 9y ago
    I think you misunderstood what he was saying. The school claimed they had a 100% graduation rate by retroactively claiming students that failed their senior year were juniors. Nothing really wrong with making students repeat grades until they pass, but doing it in such a way that you advertise a 100% graduation rate when 100% didn't graduate is deceptive.
taneq 9y ago
Is there anyone who actually genuinely benefits from this theatre?
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  Of course. Administrators, politicians, and activists benefit. Are there students who benefit? No.
  - acjohnson55 9y ago
    How do activists benefit?
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
      e.g. you can use items like this as support for "send everyone to college" as a societal goal. People like pushing the message that "with the right investment, even total idiots can be college material!"
- _rpd 9y ago
  > Playing by the game can have financial benefits. If an evaluation score is high enough to reach the "highly effective" status, teachers and administrators can receive $15,000 to $30,000 in bonuses. Fraud can pay very well.
  - peterwwillis 9y ago
    If their base pay is just above the poverty level, not really. There is not some mass of people out there clamoring to be teachers. The only ones teaching are the ones who will submit themselves to humiliation and abuse and work 80 hour weeks for the reward of barely reaching a middle class existence. Then they get told they will lose their job unless they pass people they know they shouldn't, and are routinely told that tests that students aced 10 years ago are so difficult the students can no longer pass. I agree that teachers should not put up with the charade, but it's totally unfair to put teachers' livelihoods at risk just because parents refuse to accept any responsibility and administrators cow down to political pressure.
seibelj 9y ago
When you financially incentivize teachers to hit measurable data targets, don't be surprised when they game the system to hit those targets. The same happens in every industry and job. If I were to tell software developers that their bonus was dependent on hitting story point metrics, they would suddenly be exceeding the story point metrics I desired, despite in reality the same amount of work being completed. The real problem here is that the stakes are the students' education, and in truth their futures. I wish I could think of some easy solution to this problem but it's so damn hard. I believe a lot of it comes down to the parents and their values, but that's a tough problem to fix.
- schoen 9y ago
  Your observation is related to something called Goodhart's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law I guess thinking about this increases my sympathy for search engines and spam filters not being transparent about the algorithmic bases for their rankings, even in a week when I've had some personal e-mail blocked as a spam false positive. The resources that are getting put into discovering how to game those scores are staggering. I assume there are also exceptions to Goodhart's Law in terms of metrics that effectively can't be gamed, or that otherwise better manage to align different groups' incentives.
  - seibelj 9y ago
    The best case in business is when you tell a sales professional that they will get a percentage of whatever business they bring in, judged the moment when it's in accounts receivable. It's difficult to game a wire transfer from another company. Education is very different than sales. I don't know what the solution is, especially when measuring "learning" itself is very difficult if not impossible.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      > The best case in business is when you tell a sales professional that they will get a percentage of whatever business they bring in, judged the moment when it's in accounts receivable. It's difficult to game a wire transfer from another company. I've seen the result of this. The salesperson oversells, and the engineering team death marches to attempt to build what the salesperson has already received their commission for. Incentives are tricky.
userbinator 9y ago
This reminds me of things like https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ and when I was (briefly --- thankfully) involved in teaching CS courses a few years ago. More than half the class clearly hadn't actually passed the prerequisites. Lots of begging for leniency and remarking, some extremely emotional appeals. It's a difficult situation because if you let them through, it only creates problems further down the line; and if you don't, then everyone questions your teaching ability (but strangely enough, not the learning ability of the students, which most certainly has a huge effect on how well they do.) I chose the latter and don't regret it --- and left that industry before long, although not before accumulating a pretty negative reputation, because my class' grades would always be a strongly bimodal distribution with one of the peaks well below the failing point. School district leaders, including Wilson, defend the use of makeup work, arguing they want to give students "multiple opportunities" to show they understand material. Contrast this with the attitude of some more demanding professions like piloting an aircraft: "If you don't get it right the first time, it could be the end of your career, or even your life."
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  > if you let them through, it only creates problems further down the line; and if you don't, then everyone questions your teaching ability (but strangely enough, not the learning ability of the students, which most certainly has a huge effect on how well they do.) American policy is dedicated to the principle that no two people differ in learning ability.
  - throwaway5752 9y ago
    "American policy is dedicated to the principle that no two people differ in learning ability." That would benefit from a reliable citation.
    - eadmund 9y ago
      Our government passed a bipartisan law, to great fanfare, entitled No Child Left Behind, which assumes that every child is capable of graduating … when of course that's complete nonsense.
Roritharr 9y ago
A german friend of mine always used to say:"In any other mission critical profession, if you are a doctor, a craftsman or an airplane engineer, if you fuckup something too badly, you will be forbidden to continue working in your profession for misconduct(atleast in Germany). In our job, people can ruin lives, destroy whole companies and then have that seen as experience on their CV." As horrifying the idea of career ending bugs sound to me, we probably need to appreciate the fact that there's a level where adding "coders" to the pool is doing more harm then good when we look at what it will do to the understanding of what's "acceptable".
- jacobush 9y ago
  I think the current state of affairs is an acknowledgment of the fact that we don't know how to engineer software systems.
wolfspider 9y ago
These numbers are not really that different than many underserved communities just this school’s spotlight in the media makes all of this seem shocking. Also let’s just be real here about the reality of future prospects among most people here in the U.S. but even more specifically the kids in the article- many of them know it just doesn’t matter. Not so much that things are desperate or hopeless but the goal at the end may not seem that great so they opt to enjoy their lives in that moment. I’m afraid still this played out scapegoating is the reason collectively everyone will look at a situation like this and think “Well this is why we can’t find super high achieving versions of these kids”. No, they exist and also there are plenty of other situations worse than this and different groups of people involved as well. The solution is actually really simple- stop pretending to be very inclusive while actually being very exclusive. Demonstrate how education can lead to a fulfilling life to these kids. Not speeches or abstract situations but real living examples, people they grew up around, etc.. Really you can only tell yourself so much that your “paving the road” to help people that come after you until the realization sets in this will be as far they let me go and everyone like me too. Just wait a few more years like this and we will see all sorts of people “gaming” all sorts of “systems”.
mathattack 9y ago
The line I abhor is this... "It is expected that our students will be here every day," said Jane Spence, chief of secondary schools at D.C. Public Schools. "But we also know that students learn material in lots of different ways. So we've started to recognize that students can have mastered material even if they're not sitting in a physical space." This is typical of the heads of failing schools. Yes, our kids can’t pass state exams. Yes, our parental survey complain of bullying. Yes our teachers complain in surveys about school leadership. But you’re just not measuring the learning that’s happening here.
- gowld 9y ago
  That particalur quote is just saying that they don't uphold the commonly seen philosophy (creditted to NCLB and friends' funding requirements) of automatically failing kids who can't get to school almost every day.
  - mathattack 9y ago
    Right. But it's worded very slippery. And per the rest of the article, most of the kids really aren't learning.
scarface74 9y ago
while this may be extreme, don't think that the same types of things don't happen in more affluent schools - special projects, make up work, multiple times to take a test, parents and administrators pressuring teachers, etc. The only thing I haven't seen in the more affluent schools is the tolerance for unexecused absenses and tardiness.
platz 9y ago
> Many teachers we spoke to say they were encouraged to also follow another policy: give absent or struggling students a 50 percent on assignments they missed or didn't complete, instead of a zero. The argument was, if the student tried to make up the missed work or failed, it would most likely be impossible to pass with a zero on the books. It sounds like the grading system is broken. Does a zero do the thing that we want it to do? Could there be a different metric, that doesn't weight a zero in a way that knocks students out like in an elimination tournament? What are the goals of grades? It seems like they are structured to rank students in a competition. That's great for the winners. But what do you do with the loosers?

95 points by onewhonknocks 9y ago

This is crap. Here in India at least, attendance has nothing to do with college admissions. One can study better from home anyway. Also considering that it's a poor school, the teachers are surely not that great either. This is a puff piece. If the teachers taught better, students would come. This just shows how broken the system of failing due to low attendance is. These kids obviously worked hard in spite of school and that should be celebrated, not investegated. The teacher's attitude is weird to say the least. Good kids but didn't deserve to walk across that stage? The teacher ought to be sacked.

aidenn0 9y ago
FWIW, in Virginia (not far from DC, but under different laws), the school system I went to had a similar attendance requirement for passing, but it was in a gray area. There was significant legal precedent for disallowing failing students for non-academic (i.e. behavioral) reasons. They kept the policy in place just because very few parents would challenge the grade, but all who did would win.
notyourday 9y ago
American school system is absolutely bizarre. I'm from across the pond - I probably cut 80% of classes in my last year of school ( I ended up transferring to a magnet school in 4th grade ). Most of my "will likely succeed" peers cut between 20% to 40% of the classes that year. Our teachers did not care what so ever: you had to be in for the tests, there were no make up days, your grade was your grade which was an average of all tests given. Age classes were split into sections based on performance. If you were in 5A, you probably did better than you were in 5B and you were definitely miles ahead of 5D. At the end of the every year there was a reshuffling between the letters based on previous year results. No one, absolutely no one, wanted to go down a grade. If your grade was higher than the minimum, you got to take the final test before graduation. Achieving the minimum score on it allowed you to graduate. If you did not get there, you did not get to do it which meant another year of school. That was in all test subjects: literature, math, geography, chemistry, physics, biology, foreign language (addition only in our class). There was no curve. Hell, entire concept of a curve still baffles me. Results of the test: me - 2nd at 127% percent behind a girl who never cut a single class at 129%. Our of a graduating class of 142, 140 were taking the test, all 140 achieved the minimum 81% needed. All of people who cut classes that I knew scored over 94%. I did not realize how weird it was until I got to an American university.

ravenstine 9y ago

> The majority of Ballou’s 2017 graduating class missed more than six weeks of school If not for the investigation, would anyone have ever noticed?

skookumchuck 9y ago
I doubt many would want to notice, as they are deeply invested in the school system.
- acjohnson55 9y ago
  What we're invested in is the idea that someone has found a magic bullet that can ease our consciences of the deep injustice done to kids in poverty. The semblance of success makes it possible to say, "well, I guess all those failing schools are failing because they're not doing what Ballou is".
  - skookumchuck 9y ago
    Public schools are very good at the facade of success - graduation rates, course descriptions, claims of excellence, glitzy buildings, education levels of teachers, money spent, committee reports, etc. But any measurement of educational results in students is relentlessly dismissed and attacked.
    - cinquemb 9y ago
      I think private schools use a lot of the same signals for success as public schools, however their students are often shielded from the downsides due to circumstances out of their control (their parents/family background), and upsides amplified.
      - skookumchuck 9y ago
        Since parents are paying the tuition to private schools, the parents are in a strong position to demand results. Having paying customers makes for a very different dynamic.

pitaa 9y ago

The real question here is what colleges are admitting kids that can't read or write? Is affirmative action really so strong that these colleges accepted every kid from a HS where the average SAT score is in the 16th percentile? Or did the high school also help the kids fudge their applications?

tatersolid 9y ago
Some community colleges (and even a few state colleges) in the USA are required as part of their charters or funding to accept any student who graduates high school in that area for at least one “trial” semester.
acjohnson55 9y ago
There's very little likelihood affirmative action has anything to do with it. There are schools that are not selective as a matter of principle/mission/policy.
dwnwudp 9y ago
>183 students accepted to the University of the District of Columbia, the local community college. But only 16 enrolled this fall. It's almost as if the school got with each student to have him or her apply to the school. If the students were having trouble with reading, writing, and attendance, they probably wouldn't go out of their way to fill out a college app without oversight.
scarface74 9y ago
Why does it have to be "affirmative action"? Why is that the go to? Community colleges will often admit almost anyone who graduates but they have to take remedial courses.

berbec 9y ago

At my high school they pulled bs like this too. We all had to apply to our local community College, which had a 100% acceptance rate. They also had a 100% graduation by changing anyone who wouldn't pass to a junior.

surfmike 9y ago
Both sound like good ideas to me. Community college is generally better than ending your education in high school. And allowing people to graduate without passing their grade level seems like a bad idea. (Unless you're saying they were changed to juniors but then no longer went to the high school).
- stickfigure 9y ago
  Unfortunately, it seems merely being accepted is the wrong metric. From the article: The school district won't know how many Ballou graduates enrolled in college overall until May, a spokesperson says. We know of 183 students accepted to the University of the District of Columbia, the local community college. But only 16 enrolled this fall.
  - zaroth 9y ago
    It seems to me, and the part of the story that’s missing, I would bet that the Administration applied on behalf of the “graduates” to the community college with a 100% acceptance rate. I think what’s most impressive is how they’ve convinced themselves their fraud is actually all in the best interest of the students.
- gmiller123456 9y ago
  I think you misunderstood what he was saying. The school claimed they had a 100% graduation rate by retroactively claiming students that failed their senior year were juniors. Nothing really wrong with making students repeat grades until they pass, but doing it in such a way that you advertise a 100% graduation rate when 100% didn't graduate is deceptive.

taneq 9y ago

Is there anyone who actually genuinely benefits from this theatre?

thaumasiotes 9y ago
Of course. Administrators, politicians, and activists benefit. Are there students who benefit? No.
- acjohnson55 9y ago
  How do activists benefit?
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    e.g. you can use items like this as support for "send everyone to college" as a societal goal. People like pushing the message that "with the right investment, even total idiots can be college material!"
_rpd 9y ago
> Playing by the game can have financial benefits. If an evaluation score is high enough to reach the "highly effective" status, teachers and administrators can receive $15,000 to $30,000 in bonuses. Fraud can pay very well.
- peterwwillis 9y ago
  If their base pay is just above the poverty level, not really. There is not some mass of people out there clamoring to be teachers. The only ones teaching are the ones who will submit themselves to humiliation and abuse and work 80 hour weeks for the reward of barely reaching a middle class existence. Then they get told they will lose their job unless they pass people they know they shouldn't, and are routinely told that tests that students aced 10 years ago are so difficult the students can no longer pass. I agree that teachers should not put up with the charade, but it's totally unfair to put teachers' livelihoods at risk just because parents refuse to accept any responsibility and administrators cow down to political pressure.

seibelj 9y ago

When you financially incentivize teachers to hit measurable data targets, don't be surprised when they game the system to hit those targets. The same happens in every industry and job. If I were to tell software developers that their bonus was dependent on hitting story point metrics, they would suddenly be exceeding the story point metrics I desired, despite in reality the same amount of work being completed. The real problem here is that the stakes are the students' education, and in truth their futures. I wish I could think of some easy solution to this problem but it's so damn hard. I believe a lot of it comes down to the parents and their values, but that's a tough problem to fix.

schoen 9y ago
Your observation is related to something called Goodhart's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law I guess thinking about this increases my sympathy for search engines and spam filters not being transparent about the algorithmic bases for their rankings, even in a week when I've had some personal e-mail blocked as a spam false positive. The resources that are getting put into discovering how to game those scores are staggering. I assume there are also exceptions to Goodhart's Law in terms of metrics that effectively can't be gamed, or that otherwise better manage to align different groups' incentives.
- seibelj 9y ago
  The best case in business is when you tell a sales professional that they will get a percentage of whatever business they bring in, judged the moment when it's in accounts receivable. It's difficult to game a wire transfer from another company. Education is very different than sales. I don't know what the solution is, especially when measuring "learning" itself is very difficult if not impossible.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    > The best case in business is when you tell a sales professional that they will get a percentage of whatever business they bring in, judged the moment when it's in accounts receivable. It's difficult to game a wire transfer from another company. I've seen the result of this. The salesperson oversells, and the engineering team death marches to attempt to build what the salesperson has already received their commission for. Incentives are tricky.

userbinator 9y ago

This reminds me of things like https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ and when I was (briefly --- thankfully) involved in teaching CS courses a few years ago. More than half the class clearly hadn't actually passed the prerequisites. Lots of begging for leniency and remarking, some extremely emotional appeals. It's a difficult situation because if you let them through, it only creates problems further down the line; and if you don't, then everyone questions your teaching ability (but strangely enough, not the learning ability of the students, which most certainly has a huge effect on how well they do.) I chose the latter and don't regret it --- and left that industry before long, although not before accumulating a pretty negative reputation, because my class' grades would always be a strongly bimodal distribution with one of the peaks well below the failing point. School district leaders, including Wilson, defend the use of makeup work, arguing they want to give students "multiple opportunities" to show they understand material. Contrast this with the attitude of some more demanding professions like piloting an aircraft: "If you don't get it right the first time, it could be the end of your career, or even your life."

thaumasiotes 9y ago
> if you let them through, it only creates problems further down the line; and if you don't, then everyone questions your teaching ability (but strangely enough, not the learning ability of the students, which most certainly has a huge effect on how well they do.) American policy is dedicated to the principle that no two people differ in learning ability.
- throwaway5752 9y ago
  "American policy is dedicated to the principle that no two people differ in learning ability." That would benefit from a reliable citation.
  - eadmund 9y ago
    Our government passed a bipartisan law, to great fanfare, entitled No Child Left Behind, which assumes that every child is capable of graduating … when of course that's complete nonsense.

Roritharr 9y ago

A german friend of mine always used to say:"In any other mission critical profession, if you are a doctor, a craftsman or an airplane engineer, if you fuckup something too badly, you will be forbidden to continue working in your profession for misconduct(atleast in Germany). In our job, people can ruin lives, destroy whole companies and then have that seen as experience on their CV." As horrifying the idea of career ending bugs sound to me, we probably need to appreciate the fact that there's a level where adding "coders" to the pool is doing more harm then good when we look at what it will do to the understanding of what's "acceptable".

jacobush 9y ago
I think the current state of affairs is an acknowledgment of the fact that we don't know how to engineer software systems.

wolfspider 9y ago

These numbers are not really that different than many underserved communities just this school’s spotlight in the media makes all of this seem shocking. Also let’s just be real here about the reality of future prospects among most people here in the U.S. but even more specifically the kids in the article- many of them know it just doesn’t matter. Not so much that things are desperate or hopeless but the goal at the end may not seem that great so they opt to enjoy their lives in that moment. I’m afraid still this played out scapegoating is the reason collectively everyone will look at a situation like this and think “Well this is why we can’t find super high achieving versions of these kids”. No, they exist and also there are plenty of other situations worse than this and different groups of people involved as well. The solution is actually really simple- stop pretending to be very inclusive while actually being very exclusive. Demonstrate how education can lead to a fulfilling life to these kids. Not speeches or abstract situations but real living examples, people they grew up around, etc.. Really you can only tell yourself so much that your “paving the road” to help people that come after you until the realization sets in this will be as far they let me go and everyone like me too. Just wait a few more years like this and we will see all sorts of people “gaming” all sorts of “systems”.

mathattack 9y ago

The line I abhor is this... "It is expected that our students will be here every day," said Jane Spence, chief of secondary schools at D.C. Public Schools. "But we also know that students learn material in lots of different ways. So we've started to recognize that students can have mastered material even if they're not sitting in a physical space." This is typical of the heads of failing schools. Yes, our kids can’t pass state exams. Yes, our parental survey complain of bullying. Yes our teachers complain in surveys about school leadership. But you’re just not measuring the learning that’s happening here.

gowld 9y ago
That particalur quote is just saying that they don't uphold the commonly seen philosophy (creditted to NCLB and friends' funding requirements) of automatically failing kids who can't get to school almost every day.
- mathattack 9y ago
  Right. But it's worded very slippery. And per the rest of the article, most of the kids really aren't learning.

scarface74 9y ago

while this may be extreme, don't think that the same types of things don't happen in more affluent schools - special projects, make up work, multiple times to take a test, parents and administrators pressuring teachers, etc. The only thing I haven't seen in the more affluent schools is the tolerance for unexecused absenses and tardiness.

platz 9y ago

> Many teachers we spoke to say they were encouraged to also follow another policy: give absent or struggling students a 50 percent on assignments they missed or didn't complete, instead of a zero. The argument was, if the student tried to make up the missed work or failed, it would most likely be impossible to pass with a zero on the books. It sounds like the grading system is broken. Does a zero do the thing that we want it to do? Could there be a different metric, that doesn't weight a zero in a way that knocks students out like in an elimination tournament? What are the goals of grades? It seems like they are structured to rank students in a competition. That's great for the winners. But what do you do with the loosers?