20 ms·

Student passes 3 classes in 4 years, ranks near top half of class with 0.13 GPA

• tadeegan 6y ago
  Sheeeeit boy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70eU840lc38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70eU840lc38
• frogpelt 6y ago
  The whole idea of public school created a new breed of parents who think their child's education is no longer their responsibility, that it is now the government's responsibility. Of course many parents--maybe even the majority of them--don't believe this but way too many do. This poor woman obviously has a lot on her plate but if your child is failing all his classes for 3 years, why would you assume everything is fine?
  • dgellow 6y ago
    Is it US specific? I haven’t seen this in other countries I’m familiar with, and they all have public schools for the vast majority of students since forever. But I’m maybe just not aware of the issue there.
• tohnjitor 6y ago
  This is thanks to "No Child Left Behind". Schools are incentivized to pass students up to the next grade no matter what. My wife was told by her school administrator that she was forbidden from failing students.
  • userbinator 6y ago
    Then these people eventually graduate, and some might even get hired as teachers, perpetuating the cycle of decline.
    • heterodoxxed 6y ago
      | some might even get hired as teachers What? How would you extrapolate that? The university system, for all its flaws, is very different from public high schools in a poor city.
  • shaftway 6y ago
    Mis-application of "no child left behind" is so rampant and so narrow-minded. I've heard a school administrator say that if one kid couldn't go on a field trip then none of the rest could. Otherwise that one child would have been "left behind"
  • gnicholas 6y ago
    It's just like the startup mantra: 'failing forward'. \s
  • idrios 6y ago
    That only explains why he graduated as a senior with such a low GPA. I think without No Child Left Behind he would have repeated 9th grade multiple times until he dropped out -- though I could be wrong. I'd say a part of the problem is that the school doesn't have enough funding in general, that class sizes are too big for a teacher to even manage a class or get to know their students well enough to understand them, and tailor how they teach to what the student knows. edit: I do agree No Child Left Behind creates a perverse incentive, just claiming that it's not what caused the problems at this school
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• spamizbad 6y ago
  On no parent conferences: Teachers only have so much bandwidth for parent-teacher conferences, so they likely prioritize students in the lowest quartile. Because her son was near the median, he likely wasn't performing poorly enough to merit one. School administrators might even have policies demanding such things.
  • huffmsa 6y ago
    There are only 120 kids in his class
  • skissane 6y ago
    > Teachers only have so much bandwidth for parent-teacher conferences, so they likely prioritize students in the lowest quartile. Different system and different country, but at our son's school, every child gets two parent-teacher conferences a year (one at the start of the year and one at the end). There is an online booking system, you go in and book a slot. They only go for ten minutes. The only way you don't get one is if the parents choose not to book one. And that's nothing new, I remember the same thing when I was a kid. The only thing that is new is online booking. If our son's school can do this, why can't this one? Incompetence? Underfunding?
    • spamizbad 6y ago
      Sounds like that's a system that requires parents to take the initiative and book the conference. If you don't book, are you forced into a slot?
      • skissane 6y ago
        They send out an email, saying the booking system is open. We have to go in and make a booking. No, they don't automatically allocate slots to parents who don't book. I don't know what would happen if you were expected to book a meeting but didn't book one. Actually we don't book the meeting because they have a different system for students on IEPs. If your child has an IEP, you don't book the normal meeting, the school contacts you to arrange a different one. That's because they bring a lot more staff to IEP student meetings than the regular parent-teacher meetings.
• eznzt 6y ago
  >“He didn't fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job. They failed. They failed, that's the problem here. They failed. They failed. He didn't deserve that.” Guess the race.
• cheeze 6y ago
  > His transcripts show he failed Spanish I and Algebra I but was promoted to Spanish II and Algebra II. He also failed English II but was passed on to English III. Reminds me of the scene in The Wire where they talk about social promotion
  • prvc 6y ago
    I think there are many reading this that are unfamiliar with that scene.
  • washadjeffmad 6y ago
    Scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mIqFTizGMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mIqFTizGMI
• bluefirebrand 6y ago
  The part that is baffling to me is, if there is a procedure in place to notify parents, and try to remedy the situation, how is it that almost half of the rest of the students have even worse attendance and worse grades? Something stinks about this story. We certainly don't have the whole picture here. Unrelated but when I read the article I assumed the school was a private school. I realize that doesn't really match up with "Single Mother of three working three jobs", but "Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts" does not sound like a public school to me.
  • dkhenry 6y ago
    The Baltimore city-wide graduation rate is 70%[1]. Its not at all unbelievable that this single school would be below 50%. Public education in the US is a failed system, and we have rewarded it by throwing more money at the problem. 1. https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2020/02/25/baltimore-city-schools-graduation-rate-went-down-slightly-in-2019-first-year-of-more-rigorous-graduation-requirements/ https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2020/02/25/baltimore-city-sch...
    • Retric 6y ago
      Extra money is rarely used to improve the schools at issue rather than testing and administration overhead. What I found interesting was: The district’s five-year graduation rate increased by .02 percentage points, to 75 percentage points overall. Since 2010, the four-year graduation rate has increased by 8.8 percentage points overall. “The new graduation requirements raised the bar for all Maryland students
    • umvi 6y ago
      > Public education in the US is a failed system Public education failed? Or these kids' parents' failed? Doesn't seem fair to force schools to pick up the slack of failing parents and families and then chalk it up to school failures when the kids still aren't attending. You could have a gold-plated diamond-studded high school staffed by nobel prize winners, and it wouldn't amount to any value for the kids if they don't go...
• pavlov 6y ago
  I have an 8-year-old child. Over the years she has already been in school in Finland (public), UK (somewhat fancy private), and USA (good public in Manhattan). The American school is striking in its emphasis on externally managed curricula, state-wide tests, etc. It feels like the teachers are competent but nobody trusts them. Other parents seem more demanding and aggressive than at the expensive private school in London. Any solution to America’s school woes probably isn’t going to include even more top-down control and parental involvement, as the system seems to be already overflowing with those.
  • harrisonjackson 6y ago
    The school mentioned in the article seems to have a huge lack of top-down control and parental involvement.
    • earthscienceman 6y ago
      Well, as someone deeply involved in education, these statements combined together highlight exactly the problem with America's educational system. Like many American institutions, it is extremely diverse in its methods and primarily focused on providing services to the wealthy. The parent comment here is correct in highlighting a problem that exists at the highest levels in our school system and the topic article is highlighting a problem that exists at the lowest levels. They are very different problems. However, they have the same root cause. What would actually solve this is a systemic shift in America's education system to a more centralized approach that promotes well researched methodologies and systems to be used across the country. We have phenomenal teachers and phenomenal schools that operate at extremely high efficiency. The problem is that this quality is extremely poorly distributed. This would be very unpopular with the wealthier members of society though, as it would make access to academic silo schools much less of a given for their children. And access to education, and the societal benefits that this access brings, is one of the primary motivators for wealthier Americans. You don't have to look farther than Hacker News. How often do you see titles here like "MIT students launch the Facebook of toilet paper", where MIT student is seen as a meaningful signal. Your child doesn't get the opportunity to be the beneficiary of that headline without first being purchased a top rate education at America's best high schools.
• MattGaiser 6y ago
  When people complain about high school diplomas not being worth anything in the job market, this is part of the reason why. It doesn't indicate even a basic level of skill.
  • monocasa 6y ago
    How does a school with such a low graduation rate prove that they give out high school diplomas to nearly anyone?
    • MattGaiser 6y ago
      > 4-Year Graduation Rate (Class of 2019) - 48% 48% graduate from this school. https://foxbaltimore.com/news/local/fast-facts-augusta-fells-savage-institute-of-visual-arts-in-baltimore https://foxbaltimore.com/news/local/fast-facts-augusta-fells...
      • monocasa 6y ago
        I'm still not seeing how an abysmal graduation rate is a sign that they give degrees out to anyone.
        • sbierwagen 6y ago
          Average GPA 0.13? Average SAT score 735?
          • monocasa 6y ago
            And has been stated, didn't get degrees at that level of performance. The piece we're missing is the actual curve of the student's performance, and I'm betting it's not linear, throwing information from simple averages out of the window. I imagine there's a distinct dropoff between the students who actually show up and get degrees, to the students who don't.
            • 6y ago
• throwanem 6y ago
  I've known any number of Baltimore schoolteachers. Hell, I used to drink for free thanks to some of them, on account of going to the same bar some days after work and being pretty good at Jeopardy. One I was acquainted with for something like a decade. They're no less likely to be good, dedicated people than those in any other profession - if anything, given the conditions they have to work with, probably somewhat more so. I'd find it difficult to say what exactly is the problem with Baltimore schools generally, especially in the face of a lot of people who've seen The Wire, know nothing else about my town, and yet somehow feel themselves qualified to dissect it anyway - that's not a shot at HN particularly, that's just what happens when Baltimore comes up for discussion anywhere that isn't Baltimore. But I can tell you what, and who, the problem isn't - I can, and I just did.
  • specialp 6y ago
    The problem isn't just the schools, it is the endless cycle of poverty and lack of mobility. For many of these students, school is the least of their concern. Just having food to eat or staying safe is hard. Combined with high single parent rates which is very hard, and just nobody to look up to. Schooling can only get you so far. Many of these kids need help outside of school with mentorship and staying out of crushing poverty. Otherwise they really don't have a chance even with the very best of schooling. I have no doubt that it is very difficult for these teachers. We try to quantify "failing schools" with standardized testing but that is not taking into account the students going into it. Then for the teachers working there they are demoralized and have a tough job as it is. I am not saying the schools are blameless but this is a more multifaceted and systematic problem than underperforming schools.
    • hc-taway 6y ago
      This is pretty much spot on. A common pithy complaint about US schools is that they're funded by property taxes, so it must be all that extra money the nice suburban schools get that makes them successful. Unfortunately, that's completely wrong. The worst-of-the-worst schools, especially in cities (maybe also out in the sticks, I have less visibility into that) get tons of extra money (state, feds, non-profit grants, et c.), such that they're not-uncommonly spending more per student than their "rich" counterparts, paying their teachers more, and so on. The reason that's so unfortunate is because if funding failing schools equally to "good" schools, or even somewhat better than them, made meaningful progress to solving the problem, that'd be a relatively easy thing to do. It turns out, instead, that any actually-helpful approach to fixing US schools amounts to "solve poverty". That's a much bigger problem, is much more expensive, is much more complex, and is far harder to sell, politically. One finds oneself immediately in the weeds of trying to fix US labor relations, wealth inequality, and our social safety net. But that's what has to be done to really fix the problems with our schools. Everything short of that is just a show put on so it looks like "we're doing something about it". [EDIT] instead of down-votes I'd love a pointer to a more tractable solution than "solve poverty", but everything I've seen so far indicates that's the only thing that's gonna work and that the wonderfully simple solution of "fund schools equally" has little or no effect. AFAIK the only thing we've tried that even kinda worked was so-called "bussing", but that was so wildly unpopular (and not just among the people you'd expect to have hated it) that I can't imagine anyone having the guts to propose it again.
• ng12 6y ago
  > As we dig deeper into her son’s records, we can see in his first three years at Augusta Fells, he failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days There are usually about 180 days in a school year meaning this student was absent more than than 50% of the time. At what point is it no longer the school's fault?
  • bendotero 6y ago
    But they passed him. I can't say whether his mother is telling the truth or not, but if she is, they passed him without even notifying her that he was absent so often. In either case, he at least should not have been moved from English and Algebra I to the level 2s of those classes. Of course he was going to fail the other ones. So something crazy is happening that a student who is that absent can still get promoted.
    • ng12 6y ago
      By and large schools are not allowed to say "this student never shows up, we're kicking him out". There's a laundry list of regulations and perverse incentives that ensure underachieving students fail upwards until they give up and drop out. What the school is hoping for is that he'll voluntarily drop out and - maybe - get his GED. That's usually the only out they're given.
    • macspoofing 6y ago
      >But they passed him Because schools don't fail kids or hold them back as a matter of policy, and honestly, that doesn't matter. That's not excuse for the mother not knowing what's going on. >hey passed him without even notifying her that he was absent so often Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but she should take an interest. She's raising him. And it isn't like he failed one test. It's years of failed classes and truancy. Are you telling me a parent wouldn't see the signs that would make them at least go and talk to his teachers to see what's going on?
    • ww520 6y ago
      There were pressure from parents to force schools and teachers to pass students no matter what. Remember SAT was removed as an objective measuring standard? That was not an isolated instance.
• arthurcolle 6y ago
  Reminds me of this scene from Animal House https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKS0GVvoE9I&ab_channel=russlander227 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKS0GVvoE9I&ab_channel=russl...
• koolba 6y ago
  The majority of this student's high school years were with Catherine Pugh as the mayor of Baltimore[1]. She was eventually convicted of abusing her power as Mayor and being bribed for $500K from the University of Maryland Medical System. The bribe was indirectly done by having the University purchase 100,000 copies of her self-published book to donate it to the Baltimore school system in exchange for her approving contracts for the University (including $4M for the CEO). Baltimore, like Philadelphia, Chicago, and a number of other large cities, has had the same political machine in power for the past 50+ years. It's a system where corrupt politicians compete and only the most corrupt gets to the top to seize power. It's no wonder the school children aren't learning anything. Their parents keep electing the same failures who never change anything. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Pugh#Resignation_and_criminal_charges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Pugh#Resignation_and...
  • anewaccount2021 6y ago
    Blue No Matter Who. Its why Andrew Cuomo would be re-elected tomorrow, as would Gavin Newsom. Indeed, if I were Andrew Cuomo, I would schedule an election ASAP - there's nothing like a vote mandate to erase any doubt.
  • robohoe 6y ago
    Yep, sounds like Illinois. There is currently a shift in power in Illinois after Michael Madigan's resignation [1]. We will see if "The Machine" is going to fall apart now or get injected with fresh blood. [1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-prem-mike-madigan-chicago-machine-politics-illinois-progressives-20210305-cmh33nn2svbajlkk7ma6omo4ee-htmlstory.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-prem-mike-madigan...
  • nojito 6y ago
    This has nothing to do with corruption. It’s that no state has proper truancy laws that have widespread support. You can’t educate kids if they don’t show up to class.
    • ghaff 6y ago
• umvi 6y ago
  Anecdata, but even here in Montgomery County truancy is rampant as well. My next door neighbor is a 7th grader who has attended his Zoom classes only 4 times since last March. Meaning, he was truant 99% of 2020. His mom is a single mom struggling with her own problems and can't forcibly homeschool him.
• jariel 6y ago
  Why do we live with this delusion that it has anything to do with the schools? They are the same facilities, programs, course materials and teachers as most other places. The students, an extension of the community are the differentiating factor. For a million reasons surely, but don't blame the teachers. It's completely bizarre all this talk about 'education' when students are not showing up, don't care a single bit about outcomes. That school could be a top prep school and outcomes would be similar.
  • trentnix 6y ago
    Because there is money and power in blaming someone else.
    • jariel 6y ago
      I think the reason is - we believe that the 'school' is the system that transforms students. While it is to some extent - it needs good inputs. The 'first order finger pointing' for failing students is reasonably schools. But once you understand they are the same systems that are in other places, and often the teachers in these places are heroes and part time social workers - you realize it's the inputs, not the system. It is not the schools responsibility to get students to show up when 70% of them don't want to show up. It's not the schools responsibility to be full time guidance counsellors, mentors, and provide every need. It's utterly ridiculous. They'd have to have 1 non-teaching staffers for ever 2 students just to cope. Not even a top prep school could handle that. The 'best performing schools' also have the most conscientious and engaged students. There are deep social problems in those communities, blaming the teachers is quite insulting.
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• t-writescode 6y ago
  The only reason this was noticed is because it was in Baltimore. I've heard of horrifying schools in middle-of-nowhere towns that will never get his kind of attention. Hopefully all-star teachers and principals, specialized in improving student performance in rough and poverty-stricken areas can come to this school with plenty of money and help this area succeed. Improvement is hard, incredibly time consuming and expensive. It will take *years* to bring up thriving students once more. This news article is a blessing of notoriety to help save this school. I hope we hear positive things in 7 or 8 years.
  • hc-taway 6y ago
    > I've heard of horrifying schools in middle-of-nowhere towns that will never get his kind of attention. The fact that practically all rural public schools are bad is what keeps us from living the remote-work dream of moving out to a quaint little town or cheap country house. If you're not rich enough for (good) private schools (bad private schools are more common than one might expect, though), and not daring enough to hope to luck into a good urban charter school, then you're basically stuck living in the 'burbs, even if you'd prefer either the city or the country/small-town to that.
• macspoofing 6y ago
  It's not the school. It's never the school. It's never the teachers either. Take the mother in the profile. Her kid has been failing most of his classes for years and she blames the school for not knowing that? >> He didn't fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job. They failed. They failed, that's the problem here. They failed. They failed. He didn't deserve that. No. She failed him. He failed himself too. But she neglected her responsibilities of raising him. You can't delegate raising your child to an education bureaucracy, even if it is staffed by well-meaning individuals.
  • Salgat 6y ago
    Yeah I can't help but wonder. She had no idea about his GPA, no idea about any of his class grades, seemingly never went to a parent teacher conference where she could learn this, and is shocked to learn he flunked out and has to go back to the 9th grade? For 4 years she had no idea what he was even doing, just assumed because he wasn't kicked out that everything was fine. The school should have done a better job of contacting and informing her, but she's the one who dropped the ball.
    • lambda_obrien 6y ago
      I work and my wife doesn't and our one kid exhausts us, and this lady worked 3 jobs and raised her kid alone. When whould she have the time to raise her kid? This is America's failure, every American failed here. It takes a village, but in America the village looks down on you and denigrates you rather than helping.
    • dlp211 6y ago
      She's working 3 jobs to provide basic subsistence for her and her children. We all failed here.
      • mythrwy 6y ago
        Where's the other parent? "We" collectively didn't decide to produce a child with no thought for their future. So I think some of us failed more then others.
• grumple 6y ago
  I understand that life is hard for a single mother with multiple kids and poor financial prospects - that's how I grew up. But how could a parent look at their child's report card every few months, see all Fs, and think they were doing "well"? Unless they weren't doing that (totally neglecting their duties as a parent). I place blame on both the parent (for taking, apparently, no interest in the child's education) and the institution (for moving somebody along without passing prereqs, not notifying the parent).
• idrios 6y ago
  > But in those three years, only one teacher requested a parent conference, which France says never happened An enormous amount of these kids come from broken families. I volunteered at a charter school in Cleveland, and would hear the exasperation in the school director's voice over parents who would pick up their kids while strung up on drugs, or not show up at all. There were also a number of great parents who were engaged with their kids, but this was also selection bias because the charter school was specifically for finding the students with the best chances of escaping the cycle of poverty in that area, and taking them away from the public school system. This article should be used for awareness, not fingerpointing. This is an extremely challenging problem
  • selimthegrim 6y ago
    Many years ago I volunteered for a day at East Tech HS and had to have the urine smelling stairwells and lack of mirrors in the bathrooms patiently explained to me.
• seibelj 6y ago
  Clearly the solution here is stronger unions and more money to these schools! How else will they improve?
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• jVinc 6y ago
  > He's a good kid. He didn't deserve that. Where's the mentors? Where is the help for him? Well obviously at the school but... > was late or absent 272 days. I feel like the story here isn't that the schools are failing parents, it's that parents are going to absolutely aburd lengths to try to blames schooles after the fact for their own failures. She ignore her childs education for 3 years, and so did her kid, and suddenly at the end of it she's going "whaaat!?" when they tell her that this has consequences.
  • nkrisc 6y ago
    As I recall from reading this article the other day, she's also working three separate jobs to support three kids.
    • xienze 6y ago
      I guess that’s too much working to check a report card say, once a year? I get being busy but the choice parents face isn’t “micromanage every aspect of your child’s education” and “do absolutely nothing.”
      • ethanbond 6y ago
        Is your theory that checking the report card once a year would’ve been a meaningful intervention of some sort?
        • prepend 6y ago
          It would have shown some minimal involvement. For me, I don’t think checking a report card once would matter. But never checking in three years is indicative of many other problems.
  • chrismcb 6y ago
    While I agree, I think there is blame to go around. As the mom said, she knew he was getting a failing grade, but thought it was OK when the kid was promoted to the next grade or next class. Why is it may now they are learning he is still in 9th grade? As there were indications he was promoted to 10th when he shoukdnt have been. And what about the other half the school?
• JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Folks are missing the bigger point: this student is in the top half of the class. This story isn't uncommon; its the norm there. Why? Because, probably, the school is unsafe for students. Never mind blamethrowing who is at fault for truancy. When half the class is late/absent half the time, what can the county do? It's take an army of truancy officers to even begin to address.
  • TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    Your larger point stands, but the phrase was "near top half". He was 62 out of 120.
    • mlyle 6y ago
      So presumably he was very close to the median performance.
  • maxk42 6y ago
    An army? There were 120 students in the class. Multiply by four classes and that's 480. Even if every student were truant a single truant officer could get to all of them within a single school year. Probably at most three or four of them would be all that's needed to stay on top of things there.
    • edbob 6y ago
      What about the political fallout from pressing truancy charges against hundreds of minority students? Truancy, at least in my experience, involves fines and/or jail time.
      • jswizzy 6y ago
        for the parent
        • edbob 6y ago
          That varies by jurisdiction. But it doesn't matter much in this case, as pressing charges against hundreds of minority parents is just as unacceptable.
• ARandomerDude 6y ago
  Me reading the headline: Wait, wha – oh. Baltimore.
• dantheman 6y ago
  Clearly that school is failing, maybe the should have classes that are one week long or two weeks long that are intensive so they can focus to pass those; when 50% of the kids are failing ever class clearly whatever is being done doesn't work.
• underseacables 6y ago
  This is a failure of culture. We have got to do more to bring people together and stop pitting races and cultures against one another. Black kids are wasting away in these types of schools because black education and responsibility culture lags behind everyone. Why? I don’t know but it probably has a lot to do with how we, Americans, have essentially been at each other’s throats for a very Long time. It’s horrible that it’s been allowed to happen, but I feel the only way to stop schools and our society failing these kids again is when we can speak to one another freely, openly, without fear of cancellation. Stop looking at each other as a potential threat.
  • civilized 6y ago
    In struggling school districts, every family should have the option of attending a no-excuses charter school. https://www.the74million.org/article/new-analysis-no-excuses-charter-schools-produce-huge-gains-for-kids-and-could-close-the-achievement-gap/ https://www.the74million.org/article/new-analysis-no-excuses...
  • GavinMcG 6y ago
    When you say "stop pitting races and cultures against one another" are you willing to acknowledge the history of redlining, white flight, and other economic forces that have helped drive black communities into poverty? Are you willing to consider long-term reapportionment of wealth to invest in those communities and families? I suspect those economic forces have a lot more to do with black kids wasting away than rhetoric. Rhetoric isn't what has this kid's mother working three jobs.
    • underseacables 6y ago
      Absolutely. As it stands now, people from different backgrounds don’t trust one another. Why invest in x if they’re just going to do Y; Why accept money from x because they’re just using it for y. Ask yourself: Why do you give money to a homeless person; or not?
  • exporectomy 6y ago
    We have a pretty giant clue. IQ predicts academic performance and no known intervention can improve IQ in a way that persists beyond teenage years. Black kids have significantly lower IQ before starting school than white kids so by that point, they're collectively already doomed. Whatever causes that isn't the school or education responsibility. Some researchers attribute it mostly to the behavior of the mother but there are many candidate reasons. Of course the problems compound with underperforming friends, corrupt schools, etc. So improving those may help but won't completely fix it.
• chmod600 6y ago
  Unfortunately, there are so many levels of failure here that it's hard to tell where to start. Perhaps the worst aspect is the fraud -- promoting the student to higher classes. Failures are best realized and corrected earlier. For that, the mother has a good point.
• ibn_khaldun 6y ago
  There a lot of terrible takes here from people who possess the intellectual gleam of a skinned cat. For one, the school is at fault because this isn't an isolated incident, the entire school is (statistically) dumb as the box that holds the bricks that are as dumb as what's generally implied. What alarm was sounded in that particular school and every school that is like it (there's no way that this is the only place that this is happening) before this story broke out. How long has this even been taking place (unqualified students being promoted to the next class and having to essentially start from their freshman year again if they intend to graduate)? How many kids on the streets in Baltimore (young men especially) are victims of this system? The community is at fault, for blindly getting behind anyone with black skin that waves a blue flag because clearly they have been no help. The trends of social media unfortunately champion these people when the communities themselves have no idea as to what they're motives even are. The culture of the community should be brought into question, because I can suspect with confidence that a majority of these students at these schools are being brought up in broken homes (either single-parent households, mom/dad is "shacking up" with a girlfriend/boyfriend who contributes nil to the household from a moral standpoint or if the child's parents are married, then the struggle to keep things afloat deters the nurturing of a healthy environment). Most of Hacker News is getting through their one, relatively plush job by the skin of their teeth without having to micro-dose MDMA to prevent themselves from shoving their garden hose in their car exhaust...so sit for a moment...put yourself in this black woman's shoes, with three children (who knows how old the remaining two are), potentially no spouse, three jobs and little social mobility. Much respect to this woman for actually speaking out, because I bet a lot of people in her community share the same sentiment as her son – they're embarrassed. It's an embarrassment on many levels! Most people in these situations lack the willpower to even stay abreast on what's going on their own house, so it's likely even more difficult for the community as a whole to muster up the courage and strength to address these multiple issues head-on and stay steadfast on them without being manipulated by politicians or celebrities once their efforts pick up steam. It's easy to blame the student(s) and their parent(s) if this was happneing somewhere else or to someone else. But in this particular case it's lazy and the greater effects of the environment as a whole are disregarded. Some of you have enough trouble juggling between sitting your own children in front of a computer screen for the afternoon and brown-nosing a superior who's one "Me Too" tweet away from the whole company having to fold and you being forced to spend 7 months baking sourdough bread and "finding yourself" while you wait for the next "Who Wants to be Hired?" post on Hacker News. It's unfair and repulsive to sit and read people turn into armchair critical theorist when the line between your ignorance and whichever blameworthy party that you can point a finger at is about as thin as Jeff Bezos' eyebrows. It's unfortunate because some of the top comments actually have compassionate observations, but everything in between (including the replies to these comments) is pathetic. Thots.
• pc86 6y ago
  > “Why would he do three more years in school? He didn't fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job. They failed. They failed, that's the problem here. They failed. They failed. He didn't deserve that.” I can't even begin to fathom the absolutely staggering level of entitlement required to say that your son with the 0.13 GPA didn't fail, but the school failed him. Certainly both are true but to accept no responsibility whatsoever is just amazing in the worst possible way. > As we dig deeper into her son’s records, we can see in his first three years at Augusta Fells, he failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days. Maryland requires 180 days per year. So he was late or missed 272 out of 540 required days. That's more than half of the required days over a three year period. It's downright criminal what happened to this kid, and apparently at least half of his classmates, but pretending he or his mother didn't do anything wrong is a stretch.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • snakeboy 6y ago
    To be fair, in an American high school it's unheard of that you would continue on to 10th grade if you failed any of the core classes in 9th grade, let alone 12th grade... I literally would not have believed it possible. Maybe there are other cases like this, but I wouldn't have believed it yesterday. So they're hit with an utterly unprecedented level of incompetence by the school, and she's a (single?) mother working 3 jobs. In that situation it's perhaps not surprising that the oldest has the least supervision among the three. I guess I'd just disagree that "staggering level of entitlement" is the correct description. I only see a depressing result and a family that's in a very complicated situation, and is rightfully angry at what just took place. Sure, teenagers should take some degree of personal responsibility, and parents for their children, but in a situation as complicated as this one, I personally wouldn't try to make that judgement from the outside.
• SkipperCat 6y ago
  "She has three children and works three jobs." In America, you're constantly punished for being poor. What kind of ethical society would make a parent spend that much time away from her children.
  • pc86 6y ago
    Nobody is making her do anything.
    • monocasa 6y ago
      Sure, she and her kids can just be homeless instead.
  • ALittleLight 6y ago
    To be fair number of jobs isn't the same as number of hours of worked. We don't know how long she's away from her child.
• mudil 6y ago
  My submission of the same link four hours prior to this one was flagged. Probably was deemed too controversial! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26359197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26359197 The truth of the matter is that this is an example of Democrat policies in action. In Baltimore, as many other major cities, you have Democrats in charge for many years. There are no Republicans in 300 miles. It is Democrats who continually insist how they care about these people and their children. And these Democratic politicians have full backing and foundational and educational support of not only teachers unions, but academic institutions, such as departments of education and other humanities, who suppose to solve these problems. Billions of dollars are spent on developing programs to improve lives of inner city kids and their parents. Imagine an analogy of doctors society responsible for the treatment of some disease, coming up with such results! What a disgrace, what a failure of our children!
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• vmception 6y ago
  Sounds about Baltimore
  • vmception 6y ago
    The entire "midatlantic region" is a carcass of a bygone industrial era, with many of the cities functioning as a satire on society. San Francisco should take better notes. I can offend two coasts, I'm not trying to make any friends here.
• ykevinator 6y ago
  Fox news
• sokoloff 6y ago
  To be effective, education has to be a partnership among the student, the parents/guardians, and the school. The article reads to me like there were significant failures across all three groups, not just the last.
  • xtracto 6y ago
    Right but who is responsible for what? Imho government should be responsible of providing a good quality school and learning experience. The guardian should be responsible of ensuring the kid is going to the school. If my production system breaks and I dont know as bour it because the 3rd party alarm service didn't work. My system is still my responsibility.
    • sokoloff 6y ago
      Exactly. That’s why I say all three failed. Fundamentally, the student failed to attend classes. They will suffer the most throughout life. Secondarily, the parent failed to apply a minimal standard of supervision of the process. She will suffer the second most (as she watches her son struggle more than is inherent in life because of his relative lack of education and maybe realizes her part in not helping him to avoid that). Thirdly, the school failed to follow its own basic policies and failed in sending appropriate communications. They will suffer the least, however. I mention the relative suffering, not to excuse the individuals but rather to clarify that they have the greatest investment in the outcome from schooling. If they waste this opportunity, they should not expect to get as good an outcome as if they capitalized on it. If the mom is upset with the school about him being put back three years and not upset with him about the fact that he has wasted three years of his life, I think it’s misplaced anger. (If she’s steaming mad about both things and only talking to Fox about the latter, that’s perhaps optimal, of course.)
• greedo 6y ago
  Watch Season 4 of The Wire (and the previous three seasons as well, it's arguably the best show ever put on TV). This is a multi-dimensional failure at all levels. It's a failure at the Federal level, where NCLB etc pervert education. It's a failure at the state level to provide and enforce educational standards, and to address systemic poverty. It's a failure at the municipal level where crime, corruption and bureaucracy failed. And it's a failure at the personal level where a mother and son aren't communicating, aren't taking care of themselves. This failure didn't just happen in the last three years to this young man. His path to failure started in kindergarten, in a dysfunctional society that didn't care about him on any level.
  • g9yuayon 6y ago
    Yet in the mean time we see this: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/05/07/12/28112238-8296195-image-a-27_1588849541261.jpg https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/05/07/12/28112238-8296195-... Nearly 50% of students in junior high schools will not be able to enter high schools in China. They will enter vocational high schools, in a way similar to those in Germany. And what do Chinese do? They do this: https://images.app.goo.gl/pKvyBtNtBgMhMK1T9 https://images.app.goo.gl/pKvyBtNtBgMhMK1T9 In the picture Chinese parents send their kids to math tutoring classes, and they stayed in the back of the classroom to study too, so they can help their kids after class. Yeah, laugh all you want, believing that training 5 hours a day for whatever bullshit sports is superior to doing algebra a couple of hours a day. But this is how some millions of kids fight to get into college and change their life, despite limited resource and all the struggles in their life. And the government? They make sure teachers can be fired. They make sure teacher's work can be measured. They make sure teachers will have a career ladder. They make sure teachers can have decent income especially pension. And states in the US (K12 education is the responsibility of individual states)? I'm sure they do a better job at K12 education. The US, after all, is a developed country, right?
    • vmception 6y ago
      yes, a wonderful dystopia. I can see you are cynical, the culture that appreciates sports will be less competitive than the culture that appreciates family involvement in STEM. if you change any rules in society, some cultures will be more competitive at it. Germans were a quirky precision obsessed culture long before it became useful in the industrial revolution. Some cultures from Asia are competitive in Western Society, whether it is strenuous manual labor or intellectual pursuits. The actual solution is related to pooling resources to improve society, as this makes it safer and more productive for all. Making it easier improves the fitness of society, as stressors harm society over multiple generations. So just talking about how one can stress themselves out to "make it out" is not productive. We can certainly appreciate it, but it is not a solution for society.
• kepler1 6y ago
  As maybe politically incorrect as it is to say this, but something about the values of the underclass are not working right. And I admit that it is combined with a support system that does not help them much, and jobs/financial systems that deprive them of time + resources to be parents properly. But the system of dumping more and more resources to try and make up for lack of family guidance/upbringing/discipline is clearly not going well. That system demonstrably fails often. How much can you compensate for failed families? Sometimes the conservative line of "family values" is not just right-wing noise. There is something to middle class sensibilities and passing down (or at least even being able to impart) supervision, parenting, and discipline to your kids. Otherwise, this is just going to continue and continue across generations of people?
• angmarsbane 6y ago
  What struck me was the Mom’s comment that she thought he was passing because he kept getting promoted to the next level / grade. It sounds like her expectation was that if he was failing, he would of been held back and that would of been the wake up call for both of them. I don’t think that is an unreasonable expectation. That IS what the rule used to be, if you didn’t pass you didn’t move on. The thing is the rules have changed, so the old reliable “signs of trouble” ex. Your child getting held back don’t happen and so the problem gets missed, or the severity of the problem isn’t caught until too late.
• Bancakes 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure "near top half" means "just below average".
• mclightning 6y ago
  Why does this headline gives me an Onion-news vibe? Is it newsworthy to pass 3 classes in 4 years? None of the information in headline sounds newsworthy.
• todd8 6y ago
  I grew up going to bad schools, not as bad as the schools are now but nevertheless quite bad. I was assaulted numerous times and robbed (at knife point once, once by a gang of seven) inside the school. My school work was often stolen or destroyed. I was a minority in the school, and me and my friends were often shaken down for protection money. My little brother had human shit smeared on his school locker right in the hallway of the school. The captain of my swim team was stabbed in the chest at a school basketball game and required open heart surgery to survive. There was the constant threat of violence and retaliation for any attempt to report problems to the school. I feel really bad for the kids going to schools like this. One-third of the kids ruin it for everyone else. They show up, don't do anything and make sure to pull everyone else down by being as disruptive as possible. They threaten the teachers and the other students. They destroy school property. They treat school as a place to hang out with others that simply prey on the physically weaker kids. This all happens right under the disinterested teachers noses. The most violent, the most criminal elements end up controlling the environment of the school. As a child, I didn't realize that this was unusual. I just believed that this Lord of the Flies style environment was what everyone was going through in school. My parents had grown up on farms and didn't understand what an urban school was like and so were of no help. I learned very little in these schools. What I did learn though was not to be on the streets after school let out. It was a rough neighborhood, and it was simply not safe walking home after school. Fortunately, there was a large, safe, well supplied public library very close to the school. I would hang out there reading after school until dinner time, and then when the gangs had thinned out I would make my way home. One thing saved me from this hell, books. At the library, seeking refuge from the thugs out on the street, I started reading and developed a love of learning on my own. I read every science and math book I could and decades of science periodicals, I asked my father to buy me paper so I could work on my diagrams and drawings of my ideas and "inventions" at home. Ultimately, I escaped Detroit, I went to MIT, and now I live a great life. For whatever reason, not everyone has an aptitude for learning math and science on their own, but these kids could be helped if the schools worked. I don't know the solution, but many of the schools in these urban school districts don't work, the schools should be torn down, and everyone that works at these schools should be fired. It is an American tragedy and something needs to be done.
• cwhiz 6y ago
  How delusional are these parents? Your son fails practically every class for four years, and is truant about half the time. And the parents think the school is to blame? How about you reflect on the awful job you’ve done raising this boy? You didn’t check up on his grades, and allowed him to skip class every other day. Absolutely horrendous parenting.
• fargle 6y ago
  "Who failed?", 400 hundred people ask, and argue. Just one failed. The student. "But who failed him?", they cry! His mother? His school? His city? His society? His economy? And all of them may have failed him. And yet he still managed to still fail all of them back times two. It's a shame that no one told him, and it's a shame they say it isn't his fault. But the real shame is that his is the life that's ruined now. And so it's a shame that no one ever said: "It doesn't much matter who failed who, when you fail you."