Designed Mediocrity
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Graduation rates vs. student competency...
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/05/why-teachers-are-fleeing-public-schools
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Very well written. I heard many of those complaints from my former girlfriend.
But in a sense we did it to ourselves by putting too much blame on teachers and schools for poor student performance. They’ve responded the way any bureaucracy would.
"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."
-Cormac McCarthy -
(can't find the article right now)
Addressing Jon's point about bureaucracy...
Chicago's Public School Union Shill Mayor Brandon Johnson is praising keeping a school open.
It was build to have about 900 students.
It has 34.
It has 36 administrators.Found it - my numbers were off - a bit:
When looking at March staffing levels — the most recent numbers available — Richard T. Crane Medical Prep High School on the city’s Near West Side would lose the most. Crane, which enrolled 264 students at the start of the school year, would lose about 14 of its nearly 60 staffers next year compared to this past March, according to Chalkbeat’s analysis.
On the flip side, Douglass High School in the west side neighborhood of Austin — where just 35 students were enrolled this year — would get the largest increase. It’s slated to add nine people to its staff of 23.
Guess what neighborhood Mayor Johnson lives in.
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Very well written. I heard many of those complaints from my former girlfriend.
But in a sense we did it to ourselves by putting too much blame on teachers and schools for poor student performance. They’ve responded the way any bureaucracy would.
@jon-nyc said in Designed Mediocrity:
But in a sense we did it to ourselves by putting too much blame on teachers and schools for poor student performance.
Because graduation rates became the standard by which education was measured. I think one thing that pushed that benchmark was an increasingly complex society where the jobs available to a high school dropout payed less and less. Very hard to have a spouse, let alone children or own your own home, when you are a janitor or a laborer on a construction site.
We then shoved that policy into the universities. Look at college dropout rates...How many of those students had no business being there? And of the ones who did graduate, how many had useless majors propelled by inflated grades? There are now so many college degreed people out there, I see a college degree is now a prerequisite for a car salesman.
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The first shock to me was the “make-up work” policy. My school let students skip assignments and miss deadlines until the end of the semester, then let them do the work at the last minute to avoid a failing grade. When I objected, stressing the importance of personal responsibility, the assistant principal replied, “Is it your job to teach chemistry or to teach responsibility?” She didn’t care to hear my answer: “Both.”
This is actually just a misunderstanding of the human learning process. The sleep cycle is where the brain incorporates information learned in the previous day. Learning every day continually, experiencing and doing something every day continually, even if only for a short time during that day, will always be orders of magnitude more beneficial to the educational process than cramming an entire day's worth of hours at the last minute.
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Next came the “curving” practice, which dictated that I convert a raw score on a test by multiplying the square root of it by ten. Hence, a score of forty-nine, an F, would be “curved” to seventy, a C minus. When I refused to curve grades, the principal had my department chair make the changes covertly. When I found out, I objected once again, and the principal rebuked me for “denying these children the opportunities all of us had.”
The phrase "grading on a curve" was meant to refer to a normal distribution, your classic bell curve, where the top x % got one grade, the next top y % got another, and so on, so each class had the same "curve" of grades, if plotted on a chart where the x axis was the grade and the y axis was % of students with that grade. The sort of "curve" this teacher describes is a log transform of the original grades, which flattens, but retains shape. Everybody can still get an A in this method.
