16 ms·

> 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

by 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.
m8s 6y ago
There is certainly shared responsibility from the student(s), and from the parents, but this also highlights a systemic breakdown in so many areas. A person should not need three jobs to support their family. Schools should have the necessary resources to help failing students. I could go on, but this whole thing just stinks.
- viklove 6y ago
  Probably an unpopular opinion, but if you're working multiple jobs you probably shouldn't go and have 3 children...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    To turn that position around, what is the appropriate number of jobs to have for someone with three children?
    - viklove 6y ago
      It's not so much about the number of jobs, but about the hours you're working. A single parent working 80+ hours a week can't raise 3 children without paid help. Even if there are two parents, they need to allocate time to mentor their children through life. If you don't have enough time to raise your children properly, that's 100% on you. Having children is a choice, and the costs of that choice should not be imposed on society at large.
      - nkrisc 6y ago
        > and the costs of that choice should not be imposed on society at large. Why not? Why do you accept that as truth? What's the alternative? There's no point in arguing what she should have done because we can't change the past, she's here with three kids, so what do we do now? Just let them rot or help them out? I mean I suppose we could just murder all poor people and be done with it, but that's not really a society I want to be a part of. When you see someone trip and fall, do you get down and tell them they should have watched where they were walking then kick them in the ribs before you walk off?
sergiotapia 6y ago
Two things need to be blown up and it's ashes scattered to the winds. 1. "No child left behind". 2. Common core. Which is inherently very racist and damaging to high performing kids.
- cyberlurker 6y ago
  Source for #2 please. I’m genuinely interested how anyone could call it racist.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - desine 6y ago
    https://youtu.be/LQ8Nr3_2724 https://youtu.be/LQ8Nr3_2724 Often the war on white privilege manifests itself as preventing white success rather than helping PoC. Families that help their children with math homework have been irritated that students often get no credit on math homework if they use the older arithmetic methods. Rather than allowing students to use any valid mathematical principles to learn, children are forced to use a new system that (in my opinion) generates extra work to achieve the correct result. I dated a teacher many years ago, long before the political climate shift, and she constantly ranted about how common core was slowing her students down. At the time I didn’t understand much (and didn’t ask her to elaborate much), but it’s been interesting seeing her rants validated the last couple of years. Common core makes sense when a student struggles with the traditional methods. But forcing all students to use it, and it’s historical background of being driven by racial issues, is a damning sign that it’s intentionally holding high performers (often White or Asian) back.
    - benjohnson 6y ago
      It also harms parents that only have a small amount of time to help their child with homework by pulling the rug out from under them. The parent's own knowlage is no longer of any use. I have enough time to get the nuance of common core and help my child but plenty of others don't have that luxury of time.
dmix 6y ago
It's interesting to square: > and was late or absent 272 days And the mother's statement: > 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. There's got to be far more than just the school failing here.
- jariel 6y ago
  "He didn't fail, the school failed him." It's almost ridiclous. If students don't show up, don't care, have absolutely no interest in paying attention, are more concerned with social structure etc. then a top prep-school would have the same outcomes. The blame and externalizations is part of the problem. The teachers are basically heroes. The families, students, communities are completely broken, that's the problem.
  - belltaco 6y ago
    >The teachers are basically heroes. What? Why are the teachers basically heroes for letting a student to the next grade while he's failing that much? And also not informing the parent about it? Huh?
    - jariel 6y ago
      ? This line of thinking is really insulting to teachers. Do you think for a moment the teachers have a right one way or the other to fail those students? What would happen when the teacher decides to fail 80% of a class? Do you think that's allowed? Not for a second. And 'informing the parent about attendance'? You think the parents generally care one bit? You think the parents don't know their kids are never in class? What kind of parent 'discovers' their kid has not been in school for 2 years?!? That it's the teachers responsibility to spend 4 hours on the phone every day as 70% of her class doesn't show up? It is the expectation that students: 1) Show up. 2) Paid attention. 3) Don't join gangs. 4) Try to finish the work. If they do those things, they will get an education. Beyond that, it's really hard for schools - a school can handle a 'small handful' of special cases, but not much more.
stormbeard 6y ago
Let's say there's a software tech lead and they've been code reviewing patches from a junior software engineer at your company. There are no tests, no CI to validate it, and it probably doesn't even compile... That tech lead approves that patch and that junior engineer deploys the code, taking down your site. Who is at fault here? The tech lead. Sure, the system is broken to have even allowed this situation to occur, but the tech lead failed everybody by approving those patches. This kid may have been absent and neglecting their studies, but the school kept promoting them to the next grade and didn't even attempt to take corrective actions by contacting the parent. They failed to do THEIR job and allowed for it to get to this point.
- ng12 6y ago
  Ok, except you're forgetting the CTO who doesn't believe in testing and will yell at the tech lead for wasting time writing them. And the CFO who won't approve budget for a CI system. And the CEO who just wants the feature pushed so he can sell it to clients whether or not it works. The system is broken and in cases like these the school is put in an impossible situation. And remember this isn't just one kid they're trying to deal with: it's more than half of the student body. So the tech lead probably has dozens of junior devs constantly pushing code that he has to deal with. You're probably right: the tech lead makes a nice scapegoat when a news article gets published that riles everyone up. Firing him won't solve the problem though.
  - ledauphin 6y ago
    this is spot on.
- john_moscow 6y ago
  >Who is at fault here? The tech lead. Now assume that the moment the tech lead calls out any of these issues, the engineer screams "racism" and the tech lead gets fired on the spot. And nobody will step in to defend the tech lead, because "you are defending a racist, hence you are a racist yourself".
- macspoofing 6y ago
maxerickson 6y ago
I was chronically late my last semester of high school. Didn't impact my grades any (I finished in 1998, roughly the start of the 'lock down' era and was fortunate enough to have a first hour teacher that didn't really care). I was probably late more than 1/2 of the time. (the point being that the count of 'late and absent' probably doesn't paint enough of the story)
- icedchai 6y ago
  Many people slack off their last semester of high school. I was in the top 2% of my class when senior year started. By November, I was accepted to college early, so stopped doing much work. My final semester was the only time I ever got a C. I still ended senior year in the top 5%.
rusabd 6y ago
It certainly school's fault. Maryland has truancy laws: https://www.peoples-law.org/truancy https://www.peoples-law.org/truancy Specifically: "Under Maryland law, a truant student is one who is “unlawfully absent” from school for more than: 8 days in any quarter, 15 days in any semester, OR 20 days in a school year." Also, "What happens when a student is found to be truant? The student will be referred to the county board’s system of active intervention. Note that each county must develop a system of active intervention for truant students. A school system representative will investigate the cause of the truancy. This representative may provide counseling or even notify the Department of Juvenile Services. " There is whole system designed to handle such cases and it failed miserably
- seiferteric 6y ago
  In general I agree, except he was in the top half of the class... So it sounds like at least half the school just routinely does not show up. So how does the system deal with a situation like this? I think it would completely overwhelm the school/local PD.
  - rusabd 6y ago
    Well, the school was fully aware what is going on and instead of taking any action as they are obliged to do they decided to do exactly nothing. The school might not be able to do much in this case, but the _school system_ has enough resources to change the situation.
    - civilized 6y ago
      What's your plan? Let's hear it
    - unishark 6y ago
      > ...they decided to do exactly nothing. They were very slow and weak about responding, but you're overstating. They did a few things over the three years, up to and including finally bumping the child back to 9th grade. The mother apparently did exactly nothing. Until the school's actions finally hit home hard enough.
inopinatus 6y ago
That is similar to my own attendance record for the final two years of high school, three decades ago. No-one came looking, then, either.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> 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? It is more, not less, the school’s fault if they aren't actively reaching out to parents with significant absences.
- Alupis 6y ago
  We don't know that was the case - and can very likely assume it's not the case. Progress reports show the number of absences and late days (at least all I've seen). So do semester grade reports. It's extremely unlikely a present and engaged parent doesn't notice report card after report card coming home with C's, D's and F's, and hundreds of absent days piling up. The article even states the parent claims to have been aware of all the failing grades, but somehow assumed her son was doing fine because he graduated to the next grade? How is that even remotely possible and not a major point of concern? What we likely have here is an absent parent complaining that someone else didn't raise her child correctly. Nobody ever claimed being a parent is easy... and working 3 jobs isn't an excuse to check out of your parental responsibilities.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > We don't know that was the case - and can very likely assume it's not the case. Since the article involves review of records which include contact requests initiate by school staff, and does not cover any regarding attendance/truancy from administration, we can most justifiably assume that, like those concerning class performance from teachers (other than the one teacher request that there is no evidence ever went beyond the school office), there was nothing. And we can be fairly certain, again, given the absence of remark on this being in the records, that despite absence far above the level that is legally defined a truancy in Maryland, the student either was not referred to the district by the school for truancy (most likely, as even a report without follow up would be reflected), or, if they were referred, the follow-up of either active contact by the district (if the school's own contact records did not show sufficient active effort) or referral to law enforcement (if the school's records showed all reasonable efforts at outreach had been exhausted or the districts own followup was unsuccessful) did not occur. Even if the parent was actively and willfully wrong here, the authorities at the school and/or district failed their duty that exists for the the benefit of the student and for the benefit of the other students whose education the occasional presence of the intermittently attending student would interfere with. So, while there is certainly a parental failure (the precise degree of culpability for which cannot be assessed from the information at hand), the parent is also completely correct (almost irrespective of the degree of their own culpability[0]) that school authorities failed her child (and, though she did not make this charge, in doing so they failed the public, as well, and the fact that her son was apparently fairly typical for the school tends to indicate that the failure by the school authorities was massive and systemic, not an isolated individual falling through the cracks.) [0] absent some bizarre scenario llke a massive, elaborate documentation fraud that provided a plausible legitimate narrative supporting the degree of absenteeism, which not only strains plausibly initially, but is implausible would not have been noted were it documented.
Someone 6y ago
I think the school’s to blame here, too, but it isn’t necessarily _that_ bad. “50% of days late or absent” can mean anything from being a second late every other day to being not at school half the days. That’s a range from almost no absences down to 50% of them.
tyingq 6y ago
I see equal blame. The school kept moving him up a grade, and into higher level classes, despite him failing the classes. They didn't actually "fail him" until the very end, all the way from Senior to Freshman.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  Eons ago, when I attended public school K-12 exactly one student was ever held back a grade. This was in spite of teachers constantly threatening recalcitrant kids with holding them back. The kids knew it was an empty threat and ignored it. The teachers passed them to get rid of them. It wasn't just one school, either. My dad being in the Air Force, we moved around a lot. The schools were the same everywhere.
lokar 6y ago
I'd like to see the breakdown by year. I could imagine he showed up more the 1st year, did not master the material, and then found the 2nd and following years impossible/pointless so stopped going.
rayiner 6y ago
A 50% absence rate is the same as for Bangladeshi school children who work 20-27 hours per week (in mostly rural Bangladesh, that means kids getting pulled out of school to work in agriculture): https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/bitstream/handle/1828/6968/Saqib_Najmus_MA_2015.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/bitstream/handle/1828/6968/Sa... (p. 20).
rhino369 6y ago
Both are responsible. Clearly she is not mom of the year. But promoting students as they fail all classes is just atrocious education. It’s warehousing.
cafard 6y ago
In 8th grade, a classmate was absent 100 days. This was in a suburb of Cleveland, solidly middle class, late 1960s. Most kids--as far as I knew--came from households with two parents. The kid was well dressed and well fed, just not in school much. Of course I have no idea what communication the school had with the family.

by ng12 6y ago

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.

m8s 6y ago

There is certainly shared responsibility from the student(s), and from the parents, but this also highlights a systemic breakdown in so many areas. A person should not need three jobs to support their family. Schools should have the necessary resources to help failing students. I could go on, but this whole thing just stinks.

viklove 6y ago
Probably an unpopular opinion, but if you're working multiple jobs you probably shouldn't go and have 3 children...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  To turn that position around, what is the appropriate number of jobs to have for someone with three children?
  - viklove 6y ago
    It's not so much about the number of jobs, but about the hours you're working. A single parent working 80+ hours a week can't raise 3 children without paid help. Even if there are two parents, they need to allocate time to mentor their children through life. If you don't have enough time to raise your children properly, that's 100% on you. Having children is a choice, and the costs of that choice should not be imposed on society at large.
    - nkrisc 6y ago
      > and the costs of that choice should not be imposed on society at large. Why not? Why do you accept that as truth? What's the alternative? There's no point in arguing what she should have done because we can't change the past, she's here with three kids, so what do we do now? Just let them rot or help them out? I mean I suppose we could just murder all poor people and be done with it, but that's not really a society I want to be a part of. When you see someone trip and fall, do you get down and tell them they should have watched where they were walking then kick them in the ribs before you walk off?

sergiotapia 6y ago

Two things need to be blown up and it's ashes scattered to the winds. 1. "No child left behind". 2. Common core. Which is inherently very racist and damaging to high performing kids.

cyberlurker 6y ago
Source for #2 please. I’m genuinely interested how anyone could call it racist.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- desine 6y ago
  https://youtu.be/LQ8Nr3_2724 https://youtu.be/LQ8Nr3_2724 Often the war on white privilege manifests itself as preventing white success rather than helping PoC. Families that help their children with math homework have been irritated that students often get no credit on math homework if they use the older arithmetic methods. Rather than allowing students to use any valid mathematical principles to learn, children are forced to use a new system that (in my opinion) generates extra work to achieve the correct result. I dated a teacher many years ago, long before the political climate shift, and she constantly ranted about how common core was slowing her students down. At the time I didn’t understand much (and didn’t ask her to elaborate much), but it’s been interesting seeing her rants validated the last couple of years. Common core makes sense when a student struggles with the traditional methods. But forcing all students to use it, and it’s historical background of being driven by racial issues, is a damning sign that it’s intentionally holding high performers (often White or Asian) back.
  - benjohnson 6y ago
    It also harms parents that only have a small amount of time to help their child with homework by pulling the rug out from under them. The parent's own knowlage is no longer of any use. I have enough time to get the nuance of common core and help my child but plenty of others don't have that luxury of time.

dmix 6y ago

It's interesting to square: > and was late or absent 272 days And the mother's statement: > 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. There's got to be far more than just the school failing here.

jariel 6y ago
"He didn't fail, the school failed him." It's almost ridiclous. If students don't show up, don't care, have absolutely no interest in paying attention, are more concerned with social structure etc. then a top prep-school would have the same outcomes. The blame and externalizations is part of the problem. The teachers are basically heroes. The families, students, communities are completely broken, that's the problem.
- belltaco 6y ago
  >The teachers are basically heroes. What? Why are the teachers basically heroes for letting a student to the next grade while he's failing that much? And also not informing the parent about it? Huh?
  - jariel 6y ago
    ? This line of thinking is really insulting to teachers. Do you think for a moment the teachers have a right one way or the other to fail those students? What would happen when the teacher decides to fail 80% of a class? Do you think that's allowed? Not for a second. And 'informing the parent about attendance'? You think the parents generally care one bit? You think the parents don't know their kids are never in class? What kind of parent 'discovers' their kid has not been in school for 2 years?!? That it's the teachers responsibility to spend 4 hours on the phone every day as 70% of her class doesn't show up? It is the expectation that students: 1) Show up. 2) Paid attention. 3) Don't join gangs. 4) Try to finish the work. If they do those things, they will get an education. Beyond that, it's really hard for schools - a school can handle a 'small handful' of special cases, but not much more.

stormbeard 6y ago

Let's say there's a software tech lead and they've been code reviewing patches from a junior software engineer at your company. There are no tests, no CI to validate it, and it probably doesn't even compile... That tech lead approves that patch and that junior engineer deploys the code, taking down your site. Who is at fault here? The tech lead. Sure, the system is broken to have even allowed this situation to occur, but the tech lead failed everybody by approving those patches. This kid may have been absent and neglecting their studies, but the school kept promoting them to the next grade and didn't even attempt to take corrective actions by contacting the parent. They failed to do THEIR job and allowed for it to get to this point.

ng12 6y ago
Ok, except you're forgetting the CTO who doesn't believe in testing and will yell at the tech lead for wasting time writing them. And the CFO who won't approve budget for a CI system. And the CEO who just wants the feature pushed so he can sell it to clients whether or not it works. The system is broken and in cases like these the school is put in an impossible situation. And remember this isn't just one kid they're trying to deal with: it's more than half of the student body. So the tech lead probably has dozens of junior devs constantly pushing code that he has to deal with. You're probably right: the tech lead makes a nice scapegoat when a news article gets published that riles everyone up. Firing him won't solve the problem though.
- ledauphin 6y ago
  this is spot on.
john_moscow 6y ago
>Who is at fault here? The tech lead. Now assume that the moment the tech lead calls out any of these issues, the engineer screams "racism" and the tech lead gets fired on the spot. And nobody will step in to defend the tech lead, because "you are defending a racist, hence you are a racist yourself".
macspoofing 6y ago

maxerickson 6y ago

I was chronically late my last semester of high school. Didn't impact my grades any (I finished in 1998, roughly the start of the 'lock down' era and was fortunate enough to have a first hour teacher that didn't really care). I was probably late more than 1/2 of the time. (the point being that the count of 'late and absent' probably doesn't paint enough of the story)

icedchai 6y ago
Many people slack off their last semester of high school. I was in the top 2% of my class when senior year started. By November, I was accepted to college early, so stopped doing much work. My final semester was the only time I ever got a C. I still ended senior year in the top 5%.

rusabd 6y ago

It certainly school's fault. Maryland has truancy laws: https://www.peoples-law.org/truancy https://www.peoples-law.org/truancy Specifically: "Under Maryland law, a truant student is one who is “unlawfully absent” from school for more than: 8 days in any quarter, 15 days in any semester, OR 20 days in a school year." Also, "What happens when a student is found to be truant? The student will be referred to the county board’s system of active intervention. Note that each county must develop a system of active intervention for truant students. A school system representative will investigate the cause of the truancy. This representative may provide counseling or even notify the Department of Juvenile Services. " There is whole system designed to handle such cases and it failed miserably

seiferteric 6y ago
In general I agree, except he was in the top half of the class... So it sounds like at least half the school just routinely does not show up. So how does the system deal with a situation like this? I think it would completely overwhelm the school/local PD.
- rusabd 6y ago
  Well, the school was fully aware what is going on and instead of taking any action as they are obliged to do they decided to do exactly nothing. The school might not be able to do much in this case, but the _school system_ has enough resources to change the situation.
  - civilized 6y ago
    What's your plan? Let's hear it
  - unishark 6y ago
    > ...they decided to do exactly nothing. They were very slow and weak about responding, but you're overstating. They did a few things over the three years, up to and including finally bumping the child back to 9th grade. The mother apparently did exactly nothing. Until the school's actions finally hit home hard enough.

inopinatus 6y ago

That is similar to my own attendance record for the final two years of high school, three decades ago. No-one came looking, then, either.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> 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? It is more, not less, the school’s fault if they aren't actively reaching out to parents with significant absences.

Alupis 6y ago
We don't know that was the case - and can very likely assume it's not the case. Progress reports show the number of absences and late days (at least all I've seen). So do semester grade reports. It's extremely unlikely a present and engaged parent doesn't notice report card after report card coming home with C's, D's and F's, and hundreds of absent days piling up. The article even states the parent claims to have been aware of all the failing grades, but somehow assumed her son was doing fine because he graduated to the next grade? How is that even remotely possible and not a major point of concern? What we likely have here is an absent parent complaining that someone else didn't raise her child correctly. Nobody ever claimed being a parent is easy... and working 3 jobs isn't an excuse to check out of your parental responsibilities.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > We don't know that was the case - and can very likely assume it's not the case. Since the article involves review of records which include contact requests initiate by school staff, and does not cover any regarding attendance/truancy from administration, we can most justifiably assume that, like those concerning class performance from teachers (other than the one teacher request that there is no evidence ever went beyond the school office), there was nothing. And we can be fairly certain, again, given the absence of remark on this being in the records, that despite absence far above the level that is legally defined a truancy in Maryland, the student either was not referred to the district by the school for truancy (most likely, as even a report without follow up would be reflected), or, if they were referred, the follow-up of either active contact by the district (if the school's own contact records did not show sufficient active effort) or referral to law enforcement (if the school's records showed all reasonable efforts at outreach had been exhausted or the districts own followup was unsuccessful) did not occur. Even if the parent was actively and willfully wrong here, the authorities at the school and/or district failed their duty that exists for the the benefit of the student and for the benefit of the other students whose education the occasional presence of the intermittently attending student would interfere with. So, while there is certainly a parental failure (the precise degree of culpability for which cannot be assessed from the information at hand), the parent is also completely correct (almost irrespective of the degree of their own culpability[0]) that school authorities failed her child (and, though she did not make this charge, in doing so they failed the public, as well, and the fact that her son was apparently fairly typical for the school tends to indicate that the failure by the school authorities was massive and systemic, not an isolated individual falling through the cracks.) [0] absent some bizarre scenario llke a massive, elaborate documentation fraud that provided a plausible legitimate narrative supporting the degree of absenteeism, which not only strains plausibly initially, but is implausible would not have been noted were it documented.

Someone 6y ago

I think the school’s to blame here, too, but it isn’t necessarily _that_ bad. “50% of days late or absent” can mean anything from being a second late every other day to being not at school half the days. That’s a range from almost no absences down to 50% of them.

tyingq 6y ago

I see equal blame. The school kept moving him up a grade, and into higher level classes, despite him failing the classes. They didn't actually "fail him" until the very end, all the way from Senior to Freshman.

WalterBright 6y ago
Eons ago, when I attended public school K-12 exactly one student was ever held back a grade. This was in spite of teachers constantly threatening recalcitrant kids with holding them back. The kids knew it was an empty threat and ignored it. The teachers passed them to get rid of them. It wasn't just one school, either. My dad being in the Air Force, we moved around a lot. The schools were the same everywhere.

lokar 6y ago

I'd like to see the breakdown by year. I could imagine he showed up more the 1st year, did not master the material, and then found the 2nd and following years impossible/pointless so stopped going.

rayiner 6y ago

A 50% absence rate is the same as for Bangladeshi school children who work 20-27 hours per week (in mostly rural Bangladesh, that means kids getting pulled out of school to work in agriculture): https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/bitstream/handle/1828/6968/Saqib_Najmus_MA_2015.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/bitstream/handle/1828/6968/Sa... (p. 20).

rhino369 6y ago

Both are responsible. Clearly she is not mom of the year. But promoting students as they fail all classes is just atrocious education. It’s warehousing.

cafard 6y ago

In 8th grade, a classmate was absent 100 days. This was in a suburb of Cleveland, solidly middle class, late 1960s. Most kids--as far as I knew--came from households with two parents. The kid was well dressed and well fed, just not in school much. Of course I have no idea what communication the school had with the family.