> "I have three times as many students as usual failing—instead of one or two, I have three to six. I have some students who have done no work the whole first g

> "I have three times as many students as usual failing—instead of one or two, I have three to six. I have some students who have done no work the whole first grading period," Mark Wenning, a biology teacher at Lowell told The New Yorker. "I don't think some of these students would be doing well at any high school, which makes me wonder why they wanted to come to Lowell." Two things about this quote stand out to me: 1. That doesn't really seem like all that big of a jump in fail rates. Sure, technically that's a 200% increase, but how many students are there total? Even going back to the overall figure across the whole student body, a jump from 8% to 25% varies considerably in significance depending on the total population size. 2. Wondering why the students want to go to Lowell begs the question: it presumes that it's indeed them who want to go to Lowell, and not - say - their families making that decision on their behalf.