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> Another initiative headed for mandate status is a school policy that no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50% > And my direct supervisor repeatedly

> Another initiative headed for mandate status is a school policy that no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50% > And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we gotten to the point where standards are not allowed?

nerdponx 5y ago
I don't get it either. People have learning and thinking differences, we know that and have known it for years. Accommodating those differences is important. Living out a real-life version of Harrison Bergeron is not the only way to do it.
- api 5y ago
  Yeah but a real life version of Harrison Bergeron may be the cheapest lowest effort easiest to bureaucratize way to do it. Actually understanding and then adjusting to differences in learning style, cultural background, etc. is really hard work and is really hard to scale. It’s an art form not something that can be mass produced or reduced to a simple set of rules.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    The problem is that "learning style" is not a thing. There are good students and bad students, and there are students who can understand the material but lack the ability to sit still. So it's not like if you change "teaching styles" you will be able to get the slower student the same information as the faster student. The only way to do that is to do a disservice to the faster student. What you can do, is create tracks so that everyone is challenged but not put in a hopeless in a situation, and the disruptive students you need to either expel so their parents handle them or put them into some kind of separate environment where they don't prevent others from learning. That's going to result in large inequalities in outcomes because there are large inequalities in how fast students mature and what their learning capabilities are. Neither of these things -- student intelligence or student maturity -- is something that the teachers can influence.
    - zepto 5y ago
      > there are students who can understand the material but lack the ability to sit still These students would benefit from a different teaching style, no?
      - rsj_hn 5y ago
        If you define "teaching style" to mean things like being in the classroom, but that's not the usual definition. The usual definition is explaining things in different ways. The students around them (who can sit still) would benefit from not being in the same classroom as students who are disruptive, obviously. The disruptive students might benefit from something like shorter classes and time spent outside doing sports or other physical activities that don't require sitting. But let's not pretend that they will learn the same material. They will learn less material, at least until they mature enough so that they have more self-control and are able to sit still, which might not happen before they leave high school, or it may only happen in their senior year, etc. Thus you put them into a different high school entirely or at least a different diploma track.
        zepto 5y ago
        > The usual definition is explaining things in different ways. By that definition, what you say is true, but I haven’t heard anyone keep the definition that narrow for decades. Other styles for example, can include things like not changing subjects every hour, but rather continuing until the student is ready to change.
        rsj_hn 5y ago
        > By that definition, what you say is true, but I haven’t heard anyone keep the definition that narrow for decades. So the issue is that whenever anyone has come up with intervention based on "teaching styles", it has always failed. That is what I mean by "it's not a thing". Here's the APA, in the article "Belief in Learning Styles Myth May Be Detrimental". https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-styles-myth https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-sty... But if we extend the notion of learning styles to "some kids lack self-control" or "some kids have trouble keeping attention", then I think that's pretty obvious and is another symptom of some kids go through puberty at different times and to different levels of intensity, some people have different levels of self-control or time preference than others. That's just life. Then, the recommendation that kids who disrupt classrooms should be removed from the same classroom as kids who don't makes a lot of sense. Kids who can't sit still should be removed from the class in which they have to sit still, and maybe they can do some outdoor activity. Kids who struggle with a subject should be removed and put into a class where the subject is taught more slowly, etc. That allows kids to reach their potential rather than teaching just to the lowest common denominator. A world in which institutions are geared towards excellence rewards the society as a whole -- perhaps the student who struggles with math can do well in a vocational program and do really well in life. While allowing the kid who can do math really learn as much as they can, so we can have a society in which you can get your home renovated by a general contractor and you can have world class chip fabs, whereas right now, for both we need to import foreign labor since our domestic schools produce neither good vocational skills nor good math skills.
- mustafa_pasi 5y ago
  Well, people are funding schools through taxes. Then they send their kid to school. Then the school decides their kid is too stupid* to do much, so they get relegated to dumb class and their future career prospects get nullified. This is how it works in many countries where schools are segregated by learning ability. I make no judgement on how good or bad it is, but I get why people would be upset by this system. *or has some mental issues like ADHD or whatever, which a lot of countries do not even recognize as a thing
  - unishark 5y ago
    So rather than putting students that learn slowly into classes that move slowly, you keep them in normal classes where they drag along lost behind everyone else, and possibly drag the rest of the class down with them. I don't see how that is better for anyone involved, unless you think the credential is all that matters.
    - treis 5y ago
      Because in practice concentrating the problem kids into one class tends not to help them. They get warehoused and fall further behind before being dumped onto society at 18.
      - kyboren 5y ago
        So instead, let's put them with the high-achievers and force those high-achievers to do the teacher's job of tutoring them at the expense of their own educational opportunity. I can see why schools likes it. But it's terrible policy and hurts the higher-achieving students, who will be the backbone of our increasingly winner-take-all knowledge- and services-based economy.
        treis 5y ago
        That's quite the straw man you've built there. Nobody is talking about forcing the high achievers to do the teacher's job. The question is how we allocate the fixed amount of educational resources we have. You want us to choose the high achievers so that these early winners can turn that lead into even greater success later. Unstated in your post is what happens to those low achieving students. But it's pretty easy to assume that they're going to be the losers in the winner take all economy. The other option is to help the low achieving students so that more of them can participate in that winner take all economy. I'm not sure how to argue that this latter option is preferable since it seems so obvious to me that it's the right choice to make.
- treis 5y ago
  It's not mandating everyone be equal. It's allocating resources to those that need them most. Which is how I think we all do our jobs. You spend your time on the systems that perform poorly, not the ones that are working fine.
  - jimbokun 5y ago
    Or do you invest the most resources on the products, customers, and markets giving you the greatest return? Investing in the most talented can give society outsize returns in terms of innovation, skilled and talented public servants, captivating art, and scientific discoveries.
    - fumar 5y ago
      Do you have examples?
  - tomp 5y ago
    Even for people who do have this goal ("helping those who need it most") in mind, this reasoning doesn't make any sense. There's only so much resources you can invest into a single person. Their time is limited, so if their leaning rate is slow, there's really nothing else that can be done beyond some point to speed it up. Forrest Gump will never be Stephen Hawking. The reality is that this equity movement is motivated specifically by pushing down high-performers. They're removing (or wasting) resources just so that they don't get to the top 10-30%.
  - kevinventullo 5y ago
    > You spend your time on the systems that perform poorly, not the ones that are working fine. I beg to differ! If I have two products and one sells 100x more than the other, I don’t spend my time optimizing the unpopular one.
- jimbokun 5y ago
  > Harrison Bergeron Wow, I had never read that before: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html This really captures so much of the current thinking around "equity".
  - paulddraper 5y ago
    Written in 1961. And never more applicable than today. Fortunately, my K-12 education included it as assigned reading :)
brianwawok 5y ago
No child left behind. It’s been ruled that it’s better that all students get to 20-80% knowledge then some get 100% and some get 0%. Which is why many people choose to go to private schools if you want to not be limited by this.
- rkk3 5y ago
  > Which is why many people choose to go to private schools if you want to not be limited by this. Familiar with expensive Private schools Household names send their kids too in CA. It's generally harder to fail a student, sometimes explicitly impossible & against school policy.
- WanderPanda 5y ago
  I don‘t see the causal relationship between the 100%ers getting 80% and the 0%ers suddenly getting 20%
  - orn688 5y ago
    If you slow down the pace to help the "zero percenters" and only cover 80% of the material in the allotted time, the students who could have handled 100% of the material will be limited to 80%. And that slowdown still won't be enough to help the slowest learners much, so they'll still only learn, say, 20% of the material.
    - unishark 5y ago
      also spend lots of class time repeating background material students should already know.
    - brianwawok 5y ago
      Right. In fact you can find studies to back this up. In schools with blended ability levels, the worst students do better (pulled up by the higher students), but the best studends do worse. Good if you are in the bottom, bad ify ou are in the top.
- antihero 5y ago
anm89 5y ago
No one thinks it's a good idea for the students. They think it's a good idea for their career.
- api 5y ago
  In college a similar phenomenon is grade inflation where professors mark up grades to look like better professors or get better student reviews.
- cynicalkane 5y ago
  The system giving these rules is set up so the two are indistinguishable. Some people can't even tell the difference. Others can, but they keep quiet so their career isn't destroyed.
vladvasiliu 5y ago
This looks like a classic "what gets measured gets managed". If they have objectives like "X% of kids have to graduate", then either you improve the kids' skills, or you lower the requirements for graduation. For example, in France, the recent governments are extremely happy of the improvement in baccalaureate's success rate (the exam at the end of high-school). They never talk about the level, but older folks, who sat these exams a few decades ago, always lament that the courses have been dumbed down. Of course the government doesn't agree, but why would it?
- Yoric 5y ago
  For context: "recent governments" == "every government since 1981", iirc.
brighton36 5y ago
I've never understood school either. Now that I'm 40 years old, I understand it less. I think there was a generation of adults who were 'in on the rhetoric' at one point. Telling people that these are places of education, instead of a kind of reformation facility, akin to jail.
analog31 5y ago
Playing devils advocate for a moment, as grading works right now, a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam or missing a few assignments early in the semester. The motivation for that kid to progress any further is zero, yet they are imprisoned in the classroom for the duration of the semester. This hits very close to home for me, and I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience. I don't know the answer to this, but meanwhile, messing with the way school works is not exactly messing with success.
- siliconc0w 5y ago
  +1 I saw this a lot with friends who were less interested in school and would quickly bail on a class once they missed a test or assignment and I couldn't really blame them. For me the point of a Math class is to learn and demonstrate you understand certain concepts - it isn't to demonstrate some proxy of 'work ethic' because you sat in a desk somewhere on a regular schedule. So there should always be an avenue left open for for the student to learn and demonstrate the knowledge.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Caltech did it right. Professors were not allowed to grade based on attendance. If you could pass the final, you passed the class. If you could pass the final without even taking the class, you would get credit (although very, very few managed that feat!). I recall one student who flunked thermo. He filed a complaint that the Prof had it in for him, hence the F. The Prof provided evidence that he never did any of the homework, and flunked the midterm and final. Case dismissed. The student dropped out.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  Nothing is going to work while everything is paced by year. In 7th grade, in the fall you are taught X, so if you miss it the only solution is to take it next time: next fall with the next year’s 7th graders. In an ideal infinitely funded world, if you took 20% longer to learn X, you’d just go slower, not be left behind.
yaitsyaboi 5y ago
I think the 50% rule is okay. I get that it's annoying for the students who tried and got a 55%. But I suspect that the kids who would get score much less than a 50 are probably the least engaged and most disruptive. If a 50 can keep them statistically in the game, with a chance of turning it around and passing, that might be worth it. It's similar logic to not giving life sentences. People with no hope of a good outcome are harder to deal with. A kid with a 22% average that you have to deal with for 12 more weeks must be a nightmare. They have no incentive to try at all, or to let the class proceed in an orderly wat.
- refurb 5y ago
  You’re cheating that kid. They’re going to get pushed into the next grade and fall further behind until they graduate and can’t do basic math.
  - yaitsyaboi 5y ago
    I don't think theres a school district in the country that will advance a kid with a 50% average to the next grade. Idk if there's some arcane No Child Left Behind provision about kids who have been stuck for 3 years, but in general a 50% is a no go. And it's not like you can get 50s all year and get a few 80s and average it out. It takes a lot of really sustained effort to come back from that. Most kids won't. But at least it's mathematically possible for more of the year.
    - csa 5y ago
      > I don't think theres a school district in the country that will advance a kid with a 50% average to the next grade. You’re half right. Most school districts won’t let a student with a 50% average pass. That said, teachers will be pressed to give extra points for participation or extra credit or just to change the scores to get said kid over a passing level. Some teachers will do this unprompted just to make sure they don’t have to see the kid next year. Not to mention that there will undoubtedly be calls of some sort of discrimination if failing grades are common in any given teacher’s class.
    - 5y ago
spangry 5y ago
Because standards would hinder "equity" in educational outcomes. The SF Board of Education recently voted to end selective admissions for Lowell High School in favour of a lottery, citing lack of diversity and "pervasive systemic racism". The board positions are elected so these sorts of policies are presumably what the people of San Francisco want.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  There is an effort underway to recall members of the SFBOE: https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/ https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/ There is a father who has been out every weekend collection collecting petitions. On one occasion, someone tried to thwart the attempt by stealing some of the petitions. Even though there is clear video evidence and the public has identified the man, the police haven't arrested him, and SF politicians have not even mentioned the act. (Folks informed his employer, and he was fired.) I find this situation baffling.
  - adamredwoods 5y ago
    I am baffled why they are doing a recall? According to the site, the main reason states because their kids have not gone back to school. To me, that's not a good enough reason for a recall (recalls cost money). Public schools are under state and county health guidance.
    - rahimnathwani 5y ago
      The board could have opened schools months ago, but chose not to. The board opened some schools for a single day at the end of the school year, just to qualify for state funding to pay teachers. The board spent time (whilst schools were closed) deciding how to rename schools, something which has zero impact on educational outcomes. The board has a member who made racist remarks on Twitter and, despite not losing her position, is suing the school board: https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board-tweets/ https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board... These are other reasons to be dissatisfied. More concerning to some people is that becoming a member of the SFBOE is a common launching point for the SF Board of Supervisors.
mmarq 5y ago
The point of school is not to produce geniuses, but to take a mass of illiterates and turn them into semi-literate persons, also giving them time to mature as human beings before they are allowed into university or work. If an 18 year old person can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require their fellow countrymen to use subtitles, we can call it a success. If they can say what time is it in a foreign language, they will end up in the school hall of fame. As a plus, school may introduce people to topics that may interest them and then allow them to find their way in life: from playing an instrument, to gymnastics, to computer programming. Grades are a fixation of the school system and of all those involved, but they don't measure knowledge accurately. Some companies may not hire you if you have low marks or studied in a less than prestigious school/university, but that has not necessarily anything to do with knowledge and is likely to have something to do with class segregation. So there's a point in making them up. Vandalism being tolerated is instead a very serious issue the school should address.
- somethingor 5y ago
  > can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require his fellow countrymen to use subtitles This seems achievable by the 8th grade.
  - HDMI_Cable 5y ago
    Yeah, by this metric, school should stop when kids are 12.
    - rizzom5000 5y ago
      It raises the question, what are we getting for our money (in the US)? > In 2017, the United States spent $14,100 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 37 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries... https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
swiley 5y ago
Oh wow, so that effectively means C's are 50%.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
The problem is that parents make a stink when their special little snowflake is given a bad grade, or sent to the principal, or whatever. But parents don't make a stink when their kid doesn't learn, because the teacher is too busy dancing around the kids that s/he can't do anything about because their parents would make a stink. One disruptive kid can prevent 20 kids from learning. Look, the kid may have reason. His parents abandoned him, he's hungry, whatever. And it's not fair to just drop him because his parents did. But it's also not fair to let him keep everyone else from learning.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  In SF, the parents are absolutely not the cause here. The issue is a top-down mandate from the school board focus on equity to the detriment of all other objectives.
  - bob1029 5y ago
    The parents voted in the board, no?
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
      Barely anyone in SF (aka voters) is a parent. SF has the lowest % of households with children in the country.
co001de 5y ago
https://youtu.be/iKcWu0tsiZM https://youtu.be/iKcWu0tsiZM
LatteLazy 5y ago
Parents complain when their kid is "left behind" just because they refuse to keep up. Parents don't complain when their kid is bored but gets As because you're still teaching year 1 material.

nerdponx 5y ago

I don't get it either. People have learning and thinking differences, we know that and have known it for years. Accommodating those differences is important. Living out a real-life version of Harrison Bergeron is not the only way to do it.

api 5y ago
Yeah but a real life version of Harrison Bergeron may be the cheapest lowest effort easiest to bureaucratize way to do it. Actually understanding and then adjusting to differences in learning style, cultural background, etc. is really hard work and is really hard to scale. It’s an art form not something that can be mass produced or reduced to a simple set of rules.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  The problem is that "learning style" is not a thing. There are good students and bad students, and there are students who can understand the material but lack the ability to sit still. So it's not like if you change "teaching styles" you will be able to get the slower student the same information as the faster student. The only way to do that is to do a disservice to the faster student. What you can do, is create tracks so that everyone is challenged but not put in a hopeless in a situation, and the disruptive students you need to either expel so their parents handle them or put them into some kind of separate environment where they don't prevent others from learning. That's going to result in large inequalities in outcomes because there are large inequalities in how fast students mature and what their learning capabilities are. Neither of these things -- student intelligence or student maturity -- is something that the teachers can influence.
  - zepto 5y ago
    > there are students who can understand the material but lack the ability to sit still These students would benefit from a different teaching style, no?
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      If you define "teaching style" to mean things like being in the classroom, but that's not the usual definition. The usual definition is explaining things in different ways. The students around them (who can sit still) would benefit from not being in the same classroom as students who are disruptive, obviously. The disruptive students might benefit from something like shorter classes and time spent outside doing sports or other physical activities that don't require sitting. But let's not pretend that they will learn the same material. They will learn less material, at least until they mature enough so that they have more self-control and are able to sit still, which might not happen before they leave high school, or it may only happen in their senior year, etc. Thus you put them into a different high school entirely or at least a different diploma track.
      - zepto 5y ago
        > The usual definition is explaining things in different ways. By that definition, what you say is true, but I haven’t heard anyone keep the definition that narrow for decades. Other styles for example, can include things like not changing subjects every hour, but rather continuing until the student is ready to change.
        rsj_hn 5y ago
        > By that definition, what you say is true, but I haven’t heard anyone keep the definition that narrow for decades. So the issue is that whenever anyone has come up with intervention based on "teaching styles", it has always failed. That is what I mean by "it's not a thing". Here's the APA, in the article "Belief in Learning Styles Myth May Be Detrimental". https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-styles-myth https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-sty... But if we extend the notion of learning styles to "some kids lack self-control" or "some kids have trouble keeping attention", then I think that's pretty obvious and is another symptom of some kids go through puberty at different times and to different levels of intensity, some people have different levels of self-control or time preference than others. That's just life. Then, the recommendation that kids who disrupt classrooms should be removed from the same classroom as kids who don't makes a lot of sense. Kids who can't sit still should be removed from the class in which they have to sit still, and maybe they can do some outdoor activity. Kids who struggle with a subject should be removed and put into a class where the subject is taught more slowly, etc. That allows kids to reach their potential rather than teaching just to the lowest common denominator. A world in which institutions are geared towards excellence rewards the society as a whole -- perhaps the student who struggles with math can do well in a vocational program and do really well in life. While allowing the kid who can do math really learn as much as they can, so we can have a society in which you can get your home renovated by a general contractor and you can have world class chip fabs, whereas right now, for both we need to import foreign labor since our domestic schools produce neither good vocational skills nor good math skills.
mustafa_pasi 5y ago
Well, people are funding schools through taxes. Then they send their kid to school. Then the school decides their kid is too stupid* to do much, so they get relegated to dumb class and their future career prospects get nullified. This is how it works in many countries where schools are segregated by learning ability. I make no judgement on how good or bad it is, but I get why people would be upset by this system. *or has some mental issues like ADHD or whatever, which a lot of countries do not even recognize as a thing
- unishark 5y ago
  So rather than putting students that learn slowly into classes that move slowly, you keep them in normal classes where they drag along lost behind everyone else, and possibly drag the rest of the class down with them. I don't see how that is better for anyone involved, unless you think the credential is all that matters.
  - treis 5y ago
    Because in practice concentrating the problem kids into one class tends not to help them. They get warehoused and fall further behind before being dumped onto society at 18.
    - kyboren 5y ago
      So instead, let's put them with the high-achievers and force those high-achievers to do the teacher's job of tutoring them at the expense of their own educational opportunity. I can see why schools likes it. But it's terrible policy and hurts the higher-achieving students, who will be the backbone of our increasingly winner-take-all knowledge- and services-based economy.
      - treis 5y ago
        That's quite the straw man you've built there. Nobody is talking about forcing the high achievers to do the teacher's job. The question is how we allocate the fixed amount of educational resources we have. You want us to choose the high achievers so that these early winners can turn that lead into even greater success later. Unstated in your post is what happens to those low achieving students. But it's pretty easy to assume that they're going to be the losers in the winner take all economy. The other option is to help the low achieving students so that more of them can participate in that winner take all economy. I'm not sure how to argue that this latter option is preferable since it seems so obvious to me that it's the right choice to make.
treis 5y ago
It's not mandating everyone be equal. It's allocating resources to those that need them most. Which is how I think we all do our jobs. You spend your time on the systems that perform poorly, not the ones that are working fine.
- jimbokun 5y ago
  Or do you invest the most resources on the products, customers, and markets giving you the greatest return? Investing in the most talented can give society outsize returns in terms of innovation, skilled and talented public servants, captivating art, and scientific discoveries.
  - fumar 5y ago
    Do you have examples?
- tomp 5y ago
  Even for people who do have this goal ("helping those who need it most") in mind, this reasoning doesn't make any sense. There's only so much resources you can invest into a single person. Their time is limited, so if their leaning rate is slow, there's really nothing else that can be done beyond some point to speed it up. Forrest Gump will never be Stephen Hawking. The reality is that this equity movement is motivated specifically by pushing down high-performers. They're removing (or wasting) resources just so that they don't get to the top 10-30%.
- kevinventullo 5y ago
  > You spend your time on the systems that perform poorly, not the ones that are working fine. I beg to differ! If I have two products and one sells 100x more than the other, I don’t spend my time optimizing the unpopular one.
jimbokun 5y ago
> Harrison Bergeron Wow, I had never read that before: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html This really captures so much of the current thinking around "equity".
- paulddraper 5y ago
  Written in 1961. And never more applicable than today. Fortunately, my K-12 education included it as assigned reading :)

brianwawok 5y ago

No child left behind. It’s been ruled that it’s better that all students get to 20-80% knowledge then some get 100% and some get 0%. Which is why many people choose to go to private schools if you want to not be limited by this.

rkk3 5y ago
> Which is why many people choose to go to private schools if you want to not be limited by this. Familiar with expensive Private schools Household names send their kids too in CA. It's generally harder to fail a student, sometimes explicitly impossible & against school policy.
WanderPanda 5y ago
I don‘t see the causal relationship between the 100%ers getting 80% and the 0%ers suddenly getting 20%
- orn688 5y ago
  If you slow down the pace to help the "zero percenters" and only cover 80% of the material in the allotted time, the students who could have handled 100% of the material will be limited to 80%. And that slowdown still won't be enough to help the slowest learners much, so they'll still only learn, say, 20% of the material.
  - unishark 5y ago
    also spend lots of class time repeating background material students should already know.
  - brianwawok 5y ago
    Right. In fact you can find studies to back this up. In schools with blended ability levels, the worst students do better (pulled up by the higher students), but the best studends do worse. Good if you are in the bottom, bad ify ou are in the top.
antihero 5y ago

anm89 5y ago

No one thinks it's a good idea for the students. They think it's a good idea for their career.

api 5y ago
In college a similar phenomenon is grade inflation where professors mark up grades to look like better professors or get better student reviews.
cynicalkane 5y ago
The system giving these rules is set up so the two are indistinguishable. Some people can't even tell the difference. Others can, but they keep quiet so their career isn't destroyed.

vladvasiliu 5y ago

This looks like a classic "what gets measured gets managed". If they have objectives like "X% of kids have to graduate", then either you improve the kids' skills, or you lower the requirements for graduation. For example, in France, the recent governments are extremely happy of the improvement in baccalaureate's success rate (the exam at the end of high-school). They never talk about the level, but older folks, who sat these exams a few decades ago, always lament that the courses have been dumbed down. Of course the government doesn't agree, but why would it?

Yoric 5y ago
For context: "recent governments" == "every government since 1981", iirc.

brighton36 5y ago

I've never understood school either. Now that I'm 40 years old, I understand it less. I think there was a generation of adults who were 'in on the rhetoric' at one point. Telling people that these are places of education, instead of a kind of reformation facility, akin to jail.

analog31 5y ago

Playing devils advocate for a moment, as grading works right now, a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam or missing a few assignments early in the semester. The motivation for that kid to progress any further is zero, yet they are imprisoned in the classroom for the duration of the semester. This hits very close to home for me, and I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience. I don't know the answer to this, but meanwhile, messing with the way school works is not exactly messing with success.

siliconc0w 5y ago
+1 I saw this a lot with friends who were less interested in school and would quickly bail on a class once they missed a test or assignment and I couldn't really blame them. For me the point of a Math class is to learn and demonstrate you understand certain concepts - it isn't to demonstrate some proxy of 'work ethic' because you sat in a desk somewhere on a regular schedule. So there should always be an avenue left open for for the student to learn and demonstrate the knowledge.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Caltech did it right. Professors were not allowed to grade based on attendance. If you could pass the final, you passed the class. If you could pass the final without even taking the class, you would get credit (although very, very few managed that feat!). I recall one student who flunked thermo. He filed a complaint that the Prof had it in for him, hence the F. The Prof provided evidence that he never did any of the homework, and flunked the midterm and final. Case dismissed. The student dropped out.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
Nothing is going to work while everything is paced by year. In 7th grade, in the fall you are taught X, so if you miss it the only solution is to take it next time: next fall with the next year’s 7th graders. In an ideal infinitely funded world, if you took 20% longer to learn X, you’d just go slower, not be left behind.

yaitsyaboi 5y ago

I think the 50% rule is okay. I get that it's annoying for the students who tried and got a 55%. But I suspect that the kids who would get score much less than a 50 are probably the least engaged and most disruptive. If a 50 can keep them statistically in the game, with a chance of turning it around and passing, that might be worth it. It's similar logic to not giving life sentences. People with no hope of a good outcome are harder to deal with. A kid with a 22% average that you have to deal with for 12 more weeks must be a nightmare. They have no incentive to try at all, or to let the class proceed in an orderly wat.

refurb 5y ago
You’re cheating that kid. They’re going to get pushed into the next grade and fall further behind until they graduate and can’t do basic math.
- yaitsyaboi 5y ago
  I don't think theres a school district in the country that will advance a kid with a 50% average to the next grade. Idk if there's some arcane No Child Left Behind provision about kids who have been stuck for 3 years, but in general a 50% is a no go. And it's not like you can get 50s all year and get a few 80s and average it out. It takes a lot of really sustained effort to come back from that. Most kids won't. But at least it's mathematically possible for more of the year.
  - csa 5y ago
    > I don't think theres a school district in the country that will advance a kid with a 50% average to the next grade. You’re half right. Most school districts won’t let a student with a 50% average pass. That said, teachers will be pressed to give extra points for participation or extra credit or just to change the scores to get said kid over a passing level. Some teachers will do this unprompted just to make sure they don’t have to see the kid next year. Not to mention that there will undoubtedly be calls of some sort of discrimination if failing grades are common in any given teacher’s class.
  - 5y ago

spangry 5y ago

Because standards would hinder "equity" in educational outcomes. The SF Board of Education recently voted to end selective admissions for Lowell High School in favour of a lottery, citing lack of diversity and "pervasive systemic racism". The board positions are elected so these sorts of policies are presumably what the people of San Francisco want.

rahimnathwani 5y ago
There is an effort underway to recall members of the SFBOE: https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/ https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/ There is a father who has been out every weekend collection collecting petitions. On one occasion, someone tried to thwart the attempt by stealing some of the petitions. Even though there is clear video evidence and the public has identified the man, the police haven't arrested him, and SF politicians have not even mentioned the act. (Folks informed his employer, and he was fired.) I find this situation baffling.
- adamredwoods 5y ago
  I am baffled why they are doing a recall? According to the site, the main reason states because their kids have not gone back to school. To me, that's not a good enough reason for a recall (recalls cost money). Public schools are under state and county health guidance.
  - rahimnathwani 5y ago
    The board could have opened schools months ago, but chose not to. The board opened some schools for a single day at the end of the school year, just to qualify for state funding to pay teachers. The board spent time (whilst schools were closed) deciding how to rename schools, something which has zero impact on educational outcomes. The board has a member who made racist remarks on Twitter and, despite not losing her position, is suing the school board: https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board-tweets/ https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board... These are other reasons to be dissatisfied. More concerning to some people is that becoming a member of the SFBOE is a common launching point for the SF Board of Supervisors.

mmarq 5y ago

The point of school is not to produce geniuses, but to take a mass of illiterates and turn them into semi-literate persons, also giving them time to mature as human beings before they are allowed into university or work. If an 18 year old person can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require their fellow countrymen to use subtitles, we can call it a success. If they can say what time is it in a foreign language, they will end up in the school hall of fame. As a plus, school may introduce people to topics that may interest them and then allow them to find their way in life: from playing an instrument, to gymnastics, to computer programming. Grades are a fixation of the school system and of all those involved, but they don't measure knowledge accurately. Some companies may not hire you if you have low marks or studied in a less than prestigious school/university, but that has not necessarily anything to do with knowledge and is likely to have something to do with class segregation. So there's a point in making them up. Vandalism being tolerated is instead a very serious issue the school should address.

somethingor 5y ago
> can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require his fellow countrymen to use subtitles This seems achievable by the 8th grade.
- HDMI_Cable 5y ago
  Yeah, by this metric, school should stop when kids are 12.
  - rizzom5000 5y ago
    It raises the question, what are we getting for our money (in the US)? > In 2017, the United States spent $14,100 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 37 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries... https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

swiley 5y ago

Oh wow, so that effectively means C's are 50%.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

The problem is that parents make a stink when their special little snowflake is given a bad grade, or sent to the principal, or whatever. But parents don't make a stink when their kid doesn't learn, because the teacher is too busy dancing around the kids that s/he can't do anything about because their parents would make a stink. One disruptive kid can prevent 20 kids from learning. Look, the kid may have reason. His parents abandoned him, he's hungry, whatever. And it's not fair to just drop him because his parents did. But it's also not fair to let him keep everyone else from learning.

bpodgursky 5y ago
In SF, the parents are absolutely not the cause here. The issue is a top-down mandate from the school board focus on equity to the detriment of all other objectives.
- bob1029 5y ago
  The parents voted in the board, no?
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    Barely anyone in SF (aka voters) is a parent. SF has the lowest % of households with children in the country.

co001de 5y ago

https://youtu.be/iKcWu0tsiZM https://youtu.be/iKcWu0tsiZM

LatteLazy 5y ago

Parents complain when their kid is "left behind" just because they refuse to keep up. Parents don't complain when their kid is bored but gets As because you're still teaching year 1 material.