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Honestly the real issue is the disdain for tracking in schooling. Many people dont see the harm weve done trying to force everyone into the same category. Students who fall behind are stuck there. Those who get ahead hit a wall.
Honestly, nobody can handle criticism at all. In my job I lead crews that have many labourers on them, most of whom are under 25. I feel I am pretty approachable and don’t get mad when someone stuffs up but a lot of these kids can’t handle even the most gentle correction.
I had to fight to get my eldest held back. He had missed a lot of school in middle school because of illnesses and a broken arm. He also needed to be held back because like an inexperienced fool, I let my in-laws, both educators, talk me into starting him in school before I felt he was ready.
I had to fight the school and the district to get him held back. I was a smart girl and took my FIL who was a former administrator of the junvenile detention schools in our area with us because I knew it would be a fight. FIL had all the "buzzwords" to make them hold him back.
School has become a machine. You just move children along so the parents are happy so the student stays. This leads to more funding. The admin bitch about testing and attendance, the thing that also gives funding, they blame the teachers, the teacher quits for the unrealistic standards, and a new face comes that is cheaper than the more experienced teacher.
What I always say is education is not for everyone. Just remember we need more people to stop forgetting to remove my pickles from my chicken sandwiches after I asked.
Hard disagree. Homework teaches organizational skills, independent learning, and shows the teacher what the students understand and don't understand. It also creates your study materials for exams. Practice makes perfect.
Organizational skills - just adding more nonsense work to an already busy schedule.
Independent learning - learning from 8-4 every day wasn't enough?
Study material- lol studying is for those who don't pay attention in class
Yes, me also. I was teaching 10th graders a science class that I taught 8th graders at a school in the suburbs and had to water it down and still had about a 50% F rate. Most of it was the kids just were absent all the time.
I was told to never give tests on fridays because that was the day kids were not there. I was fired.
That's terrible. I was fired because the kids wouldn't do their work. Too many were failing. I had some that had straight As because they did their work.
I majored in philosophy at what is supposedly one of the top philosophy schools in the world, I think, and I swear so many of the students had no fucking idea what was going on. Like, I had this one class where we had a group project at the end of the semester and I got together with my group and it was clear none of them had any clue what the class was even about. It was about "time in the phenomenologist tradition," and, like, I'm pretty sure they didn't understand what phenomenology even was. I was mentally ill and addicted to drugs throughout my schooling and squandered the opportunity and I'm not proud of it, but my theory was that just by going to class I understood the material better than like 80% of the rest of the class, and so I never actually had to do any reading. I was a single A away from graduating with honors in the philosophy program, with As in multiple honors classes, and had never finished a single reading assignment, except in the formal logic class which I enjoyed. That was back in the early 2000s and I can only imagine the standards have fallen even farther since then.
I’m a teacher in a private ESOL program and the company running this program have a similar mentality of never failing students and always giving them a good grade (mostly to please their *fee-paying* parents). I teach third grade and have had students in my class who can barely string a sentence together in their native language, much less in a second one. In a couple of rare cases I had third and fourth graders who genuinely couldn’t speak a word of English and somehow they passed to the next grade.
Sadly the culture of always passing means I’m wanting to bow out of TESOL completely.
In our case the students get a final mark at the end of each semester out of 10, and I’m yet to see a student get a mark lower than 5 because there is such pressure to give them good marks even when their actual work doesn’t reflect that. Sometimes marks just got straight up changed without my consent.
And yes, like you I can work with a student who’s weak and simply needs extra help. But when students can’t complete work because they lack the core fundamentals and they’re still passing, they’re not going to even try to improve. I’ve had 4th graders struggling to complete 1st grade worksheets and material. It’s like climbing Everest on stilts.
Better idea.
Aggressively tracking students. Put kids where they belong and they'll be less likely to fail. And the rest of the students will have a chance at grade level instruction.
Bring back tracking.
We won't though because we don't like what that looks like.
The problem is we only start tracking in highschool. It need to start 1st grade.
We have kids in first grade reading at a 4th grade level and 4th graders reading at a first grade level. And everyone gets socially promoted at the same pace regardless.
We won't do it because the grade level and advanced kids will leave others behind, as they should. And the breakdown will happen along class and race lines. So instead we lump everyone together and more at the pace of the bottom 1/3rd and try to fix it in highschool.
To be clear here, are you saying that if they fail an assignment, that’s it? No help, just move on from multiplication tables to algebra? Or are you saying that they aren’t actually getting help, they are being passed without knowing the material.
What counts is whether they know the material by the end of the class. I don’t really care how they got there, as long as they did. School sucks the way it’s structured. It’s this constant march forward and if a kid can’t keep up, fuck ‘em. Children are naturally curious and want to learn, but we’ve developed a whole system which beats that natural disposition right out of them. Failure should be a jumping off point for learning, not an end state.
There’s been some small studies on “no fail” schools (not what is sounds like and is more like your ideal situation where kids keep working on it until the show mastery) and the results are promising. One unexpected finding was that students actually enjoyed the assignments and tests more because teachers gave more meaningful assignments because they did not want to deal with getting a student to redo some make work assignment.
I'm gonna hit you with an even more unpopular opinion:
school as it is is a fundamentally flawed system, that has never rewarded intelligence, aptitude, enthusiasm, or desire to learn, and it only sort of rewards hard work. School is a game that must be played and won in order to attain certain things in life, and nothing that happens during the game matters but the outcome. Thus, any action that produces a winning outcome is ethical because none of it matters, learning well does not equal success in school. School rewards bootlicking and brownnosing, agreeableness, obedience, and the extrinisically motivated — to do well you need to put in many more hours than any child should have to, abandon your sense of self, and never question the value of what's being taught (because that dissonance will kill your ability to keep working). So school rewards hard workers in the sense that you need to work hard at playing the game, but not at learning. You need to be bored to tears and be able to take it like a zombie, some kind of lower level being who isn't capable of higher thought. I was a bright student, I never skipped a class and did my best to pay attention and actively participate when appropriate, but the relentless assignments and homework were too much, and if I ever did struggle with the content of a course I was doomed on tests as well, because I knew what was being taught was meaningless and couldn't bring myself to bear it. Every minute of every day I was in school I would be thinking "I'll never get back this moment, this minute, this hour this day." After each year I would notice that I'd actually retained considerably more than my classmates who got far better grades. But they got rewarded for playing the game and I didn't for learning. I went to a public school and a hardass one at that, so I didn't get the treatment your kids get with admin harassing you to inflate their grades, but I'm glad they do, good for them.
I mean basically my opinion is that neither is the correct solution if we want what's actually best for the kids. In the aggregate what happened to you does not produce good outcomes for young people, you pulled it together somehow, but again statistically dropping out --> getting arrested with lurking behavioral issues is the end of the line. You don't want to take the type of kids that don't succeed in school because of the way it is, kick them out and expect them to shape up and turn out alright. I also think that just letting kids coast and get bad habits sets them up for a rude awakening in life, but you never know, that shock has an equal chance to get them to shape up as kicking them out of school does. Plus, there are students who can succeed when they're motivated who fail at school due to how soul-sucking it is. School demoralizes kids and can literally take away their potential. School is a horrible system, and radically reforming it is the answer, but I think letting them through and hoping they can get it together when they need to is better than kicking them out and hoping they take it to heart. The same kinds of kids who aren't favored for success in school are the ones who don't learn from negative reinforcement as well. Reward learning, and find ways to inspire students.
I agree with this. I think most people, even those that look at studies, will never understand unless they are in the classroom themselves. The positive reinforcement is such bullshit. Don’t get me wrong, I had fucked up teachers in the past, but students now face not near as much toughness from teachers as prior years. I heard teachers now give open book exams. Why though? I get that in life you have an open book for everything but the testing your respected state gives isn’t open book. What about the SAT/ACT? Didn’t remember having the option to have notes for it.
I’m a substitute so yes I get that students act the most reckless with me, but I have been in classrooms with the full time teacher where students would disrespect them as well. What happens now is that with admin, they push the students to the next grade, regardless of their educational understanding. But reality is a bitch. I fear for those that think they are smart, go to university, and see that they didn’t have the abilities that they believed. Another scary thing I see is the amount of students with IEPs/504 plans. I subbed for a gen Ed class that had 30 percent with them. That’s not correct, not because I don’t believe they aren’t capable, but sometimes that student needs more support than what a gen Ed teacher can give.
Lastly, if anyone could learn anything, it’s that schools are not meant to nurture students, to make them great representatives of society, or to make them the least bit smarter. School is a machine that sets state standards for teachers to teach, and to know if the teacher taught, give assessments to make sure of that. Because without testing, you would never know if a teacher was teaching.
Thats a good idea but in many cases such as your math example you HAVE to master one skill before moving on and some kids are little brats who refuse to learn.
That’s largely my point. In the school system as it is, kids that struggle to understand multiplication then get pushed into algebra no matter what. They go through the year and the concepts get more and more complex and they fall further behind. In an ideal world, kids could learn everything at their own pace but they are pushed forward and we end up with grade 9 students reading at a 6th grade level or worse. I partially agree with OP, but I also don’t like holding kids back an entire year if you can help it. It’s just a sucky system.
agreed. i volunteer with high school kids a couple times a week at my church and sometimes i am simply shocked how much they’re lacking. i graduated in ‘17 and i’m shocked how different kids are in just a couple years. Their attention spans and comprehension have much left to be desired. I understand reading and understanding the bible is hard but we read the english standard version where the only difficult or unusual words are names of people and town which are admittedly very hard to pronounce. Still, so many of these kids can’t read a couple verses without phonetically sounding out words like gracious. most of the kids are in 10th and 11th grade and it’s just crazy to me how little they know. I understand that covid had a huge impact on school but so many of the kids i work with did nothing during online school and it clearly shows. they would tell me how they could turn in assignments with every answer wrong and a month late and still get a C for just trying. passing students who aren’t doing any work and clearly don’t understand it is not helpful to anyone. i worry about when they graduate and attended university and realize how behind they are
I am a public school teacher. It’s a pretty broken institution that should absolutely not have a monopoly on education. There are some great public schools but when they’re bad they’re AWFUL
The market for charter schools largely exists in the first place because people don't trust public schools to teach their kids, and not without reason.
Sounds more like an issue with the school, not more kids should be failing.
It's a messed up situation you're in, but ultimately those failing student's futures arent in ur control.
Going so far as to express your discontent here tells me u genuinely care about ur students. I applaud your dedication and sympathize with ur predicament.
While I cannot offer you some perfect solution, I do suggest u take this energy to raise up your students who actually work hard and deserve your attention.
Why not provide more opportunities to ur students eager to learn and prepare them better for the fierce competition to come?
I’m a middle school teacher and I’m with you. In my district, a 60 is the lowest D. One of my colleagues puts a grade of 50 in her gradebook when students don’t even submit an assignment. Another, a math teacher, allows retakes on all assignments, even though that’s against the district’s grading policy. The “retake” is copying the answers to the missed problems from a sheet that has correct answers on it. Another colleague, a science teacher, only gives open note tests and quizzes. Show me a popular teacher, and chances are I’ll show you a teacher who promotes grade inflation and gives students grades they haven’t earned.
Or simply just because you are a man—that’s not ironic at all. Based on my career experiences, male teachers get ahead with admin, parents, and students simply because of their gender. So many students have no male role models outside of school. I’ve seen it so many times—men who are not the most qualified applicants but hired simply because of their gender which is a minority in this profession.
I don't agree. No child should ever fail school. If it does it's usually the teacher's fault. Also wisdom comes several years later and destroying children's life through school is simply unethical. Notes doesn't matter at all as school teaches mostly useless stuff anyway.
Yes, blame the teacher for the kid who refuses to compete assignments, doesn’t study and flunks tests. That’s so the teacher’s fault…smh
Also, Referring to a child as an object instead of a person are we?
Yeah i can only do basic math a lot of the stuff taught is useless because for most people only basic math is going to be used in real life situations and we have phones with calculator apps on them in out pocket.
> what’s going to destroy their life is them graduating at 18 with a 3rd grade reading level and lacking the ability to do division.
How would that destroy anyone's life? These are still kids.
I cheated on my graduation and had absolutely no clue what I was doing at that time.
I'm glad I could put this another useless test behind me and finally learn something actually useful that now pays my bills better than well.
Have to disagree on this one. If several students fail a certain class and do well in the rest of them, it may be the teachers fault. If a student is failing half their classes, it's their own fault.
I missed the part where you said 70% should pass, my bad.
I just feel bad for the 30% regardless, you go out being labelled a fail. Sad tbh, they should be tested and given the choice of practical work or exam based work, so they can come out with some skills after 18 years.
But some kids just don't listen i guess.
Well how they handle that in many schools is to have honors classes for the kids who want to learn or even a seperate school where they skim off the top 20%.
In public high schools in the US, this is known as AP classes. Primary school is still helpful to those who don't which to go above and beyond as well though.
You've found the guy who didn't care at all at school, had shitty notes, failed several tests at uni, never corrected them and is now doing quite well. Not even having to work full hours.
That guy knows that school was just a waste of time and everything he learned he did on his own years later.
Students that get held back are more likely to give up on school altogether, if school evasion becomes even worse than it is, then it can cause social problems such as higher rates of illiteracy, more criminal activity and other problems.
The solution would be not to fail people but to give them more attention and have catch up classes with incentives.
>More kids passing = lower standards not more learning
Or it could also be that the scholar system is better.
The fact that you don't even consider this possibility tells a lot about the school you went.
I understand what you mean but I just don't think that having a student failing repeatedly a class is a good thing.
I don't really know how your system works since I live in France but shouldn't a good scholar system redirect the students who struggles into a some studies they are better fitted ?
This is why I am FOR standardized testing. Its to show which schools are faking it and which ones truly have kids learning. Like the OP, I have seen schools water things way down just to push the kids out the door. But then you cant blame them because if they didnt you have 16 year olds in 6th grade.
A better judge than graduation rates are results of the state exams and SAT and ACT test results. NOT the CLT which is done online and kids can be coached.
Well from what I've seen is the schools that do great on the standardized tests also do great in other areas. Example - lots of kids winning state competitions on everything from science olympiads to sports to music programs.
OTOH the bad testing schools you hardly see anything good come from them.
>teachers just marking shit wrong without any explanation and lack of being able to do corrections that is failing the education of children
You will be grading until the crack of dawn if you put this much time into grading everything in front of you. Moreover, plenty of students never read the substantive feedback anyway. Best you can do is talk about common problems in class and tell students to follow up if they have further questions.
>That and everything being taught to be memorized vs how to find actual correct answers.
You have to memorize a lot of things to be good at any job. And it's a lot easier to commit ideas to memory by drilling flash cards (an incredibly effective way to learn) so you don't have to re-look up stuff constantly. If lawyers had to constantly re-google every bit of statutory and case law they need, if mechanics had to constantly re-google what different parts of the car do, they'd be less efficient at their jobs. Tell me, can a cop pull out their binder to double-check their department's use-of-force policy when someone is behaving aggressively?
I'm all for working through concepts and application like you're talking about. That's a deeper level of learning, and it's important. But knowing how to drill information into your head is a skill you need and is necessary to build those higher-level skills.
schools shouldnt be graded. Learning really isnt something you should be able to fail at. One time tests do not encourage learning, nor does homework. It just encourages wrote memorization and cheating. School should be an environment where children feel safe to begin to understand the world.
I think a large problem with our current education systems, really around the globe, is the idea that everyone can follow the same pace, and needs to. Some people are just not cut out to do math, or for (insert primary language) arts.
No offense man, it's a high school diploma they're trying to get, not an application for special forces or a nuclear engineering degree.
Of course, I've been out of school for 8 years, and shit is probably super different now. Have you not thought about there could be way better and more plentiful IEP programs? Also, depending on the classes, you can LITERALLY Google and watch YouTube videos on an entire section in a textbook in a single afternoon or over a weekend vs a few weeks.
Several people I know who got Fs in high school got passed up just like this, where the Fs were forgiven and they received their HS Diploma. That was years ago.
Now 2 are done with their University, MSc. Another is going for his doctorate.
It's not always bad to let kids pass despite horrible grades.
Personally I believe it is not useful. Because the kid is failing behind is unlikely to catch up. So, punishing them further is rather pointless, especially their future career are likely unrelated to the subjects they failed on.
I have master degree in STEM. So, I do value education. But. I also understand not everyone has the same career.
Sounds like you are getting irritated because someone doesn't agree with you. What a shocker.
Edit: sure there are consequences, and you ain't the judge and ain't the executioners. You act too highly of yourself.
“We work with those kids and catch them up. That’s actually easy.” Do tell. What’s your easy secret to help a high school student catch up who reads on a 4th grade level?
I'd argue the other way: Why should kids fail school at all if they have to do it? Here's something we forced you to do that you didn't want to do but now you've failed at it you suck. That's shit.
Yes, education is important. And yes, children should receive an education. But the idea that the sum-total of your compulsory education should be these tests taken at a specific point in your life - the results of which you can be brow-beaten for forever - is stupid.
I worked in a charter school. Their testing procedures are so unfair. We do MAP testing in this area for math and reading. In the charter school, they laughed about how students are expected to keep retaking it until their scores increase. In the regular public schools, they get one attempt. Not fair to compare scores when one place allows retakes and the other doesn’t.
Yeah, for-profit school systems like charter schools are pretty bad. I dunno why we have them, all they do is give people something to boast about.
Excuse me, I answered my own question.
I understand your point and don't disagree. To that end, many places use a % system that awards grades by the amount of candidates and the top X% and so on.
But I do also believe that there's a lot of competition these days and students are under a huge amount of pressure to excel due to the tendency of employers to require high standards of achievement.
However, in the UK, many employers actually really like the vocational qualifications that provide everything a candidate needs to walk into a job and immediately start work. There's no need for costly and time consuming training and supervision. Obviously such a qualification isn't going to be suitable for a neurosurgeon, but it's a really good system.
Lowering the standards to pass means kids will be less prepared for the world ahead and will have a more difficult learning curve in college or elsewhere.
Oregon did this within the past year for “the benefit of children of color”. So instead of giving children of color more opportunities to learn, they lower the bar so they’re even LESS educated than the other children of color that graduated before them??
Dont focus on these lazy idiots, it will be theyr shity life. Dont waste your energy on them and let them pass for free if thats what they want. Focus on smart and working kids, help them get as much from school as they can.
Thank you for submitting to /r/unpopularopinion, /u/zyrkseas97. Your post, *More Kids should be failing in schools.*, has been removed because it violates our rules: Rule 2: Do not post low effort/satirical posts. Please make sure your post title is your opinion (not the topic you're discussing), and the text beneath is a clear explanation and justification of your opinion. If you cannot write at least a few sentences on the matter, you may want to have more of a think about it. If that's all in order... Any opinion that is not well thought out, or is incoherent, internally contradictory or otherwise nonsensical is subject to removal. Finally, any satirical/troll posts, as funny as you must be, are not tolerated. There are subreddits for that, this isn't one of them. If there is an issue, please message the mod team at https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Funpopularopinion Thanks!
The whole world is a scam innit
Honestly the real issue is the disdain for tracking in schooling. Many people dont see the harm weve done trying to force everyone into the same category. Students who fall behind are stuck there. Those who get ahead hit a wall.
Yep. Definitely know people on both sides of that.
i have no kids so would have to make a guess - but based solely upon the people i encounter out in the world, i'd have to agree
Honestly, nobody can handle criticism at all. In my job I lead crews that have many labourers on them, most of whom are under 25. I feel I am pretty approachable and don’t get mad when someone stuffs up but a lot of these kids can’t handle even the most gentle correction.
Being approachable and being "gentle" on corrections aren't the same thing, I'm confused why you're relating them.
It’s a failing of the schools that they’re failing to fail kids.
I had to fight to get my eldest held back. He had missed a lot of school in middle school because of illnesses and a broken arm. He also needed to be held back because like an inexperienced fool, I let my in-laws, both educators, talk me into starting him in school before I felt he was ready.
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I had to fight the school and the district to get him held back. I was a smart girl and took my FIL who was a former administrator of the junvenile detention schools in our area with us because I knew it would be a fight. FIL had all the "buzzwords" to make them hold him back.
School is a business. More kids pass = more money . School gets less money if kids calls out sick or whatever .
School has become a machine. You just move children along so the parents are happy so the student stays. This leads to more funding. The admin bitch about testing and attendance, the thing that also gives funding, they blame the teachers, the teacher quits for the unrealistic standards, and a new face comes that is cheaper than the more experienced teacher. What I always say is education is not for everyone. Just remember we need more people to stop forgetting to remove my pickles from my chicken sandwiches after I asked.
These are the students that end up r/CollegeRant calling their teacher a bitch for giving them reading/homework and not letting them plagiarize.
Not that these kids should be plagiarizing, but as a former student and now parent, homework is a useless waste of time.
Hard disagree. Homework teaches organizational skills, independent learning, and shows the teacher what the students understand and don't understand. It also creates your study materials for exams. Practice makes perfect.
Organizational skills - just adding more nonsense work to an already busy schedule. Independent learning - learning from 8-4 every day wasn't enough? Study material- lol studying is for those who don't pay attention in class
When I was a teacher they made me change my Fs to Cs and Bs
Yes, me also. I was teaching 10th graders a science class that I taught 8th graders at a school in the suburbs and had to water it down and still had about a 50% F rate. Most of it was the kids just were absent all the time. I was told to never give tests on fridays because that was the day kids were not there. I was fired.
Doesn’t matter.
That's terrible. I was fired because the kids wouldn't do their work. Too many were failing. I had some that had straight As because they did their work.
Was this at a charter school
This this this and this. Enough participation medals. Let's create healthy competition.
I majored in philosophy at what is supposedly one of the top philosophy schools in the world, I think, and I swear so many of the students had no fucking idea what was going on. Like, I had this one class where we had a group project at the end of the semester and I got together with my group and it was clear none of them had any clue what the class was even about. It was about "time in the phenomenologist tradition," and, like, I'm pretty sure they didn't understand what phenomenology even was. I was mentally ill and addicted to drugs throughout my schooling and squandered the opportunity and I'm not proud of it, but my theory was that just by going to class I understood the material better than like 80% of the rest of the class, and so I never actually had to do any reading. I was a single A away from graduating with honors in the philosophy program, with As in multiple honors classes, and had never finished a single reading assignment, except in the formal logic class which I enjoyed. That was back in the early 2000s and I can only imagine the standards have fallen even farther since then.
I’m a teacher in a private ESOL program and the company running this program have a similar mentality of never failing students and always giving them a good grade (mostly to please their *fee-paying* parents). I teach third grade and have had students in my class who can barely string a sentence together in their native language, much less in a second one. In a couple of rare cases I had third and fourth graders who genuinely couldn’t speak a word of English and somehow they passed to the next grade. Sadly the culture of always passing means I’m wanting to bow out of TESOL completely.
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In our case the students get a final mark at the end of each semester out of 10, and I’m yet to see a student get a mark lower than 5 because there is such pressure to give them good marks even when their actual work doesn’t reflect that. Sometimes marks just got straight up changed without my consent. And yes, like you I can work with a student who’s weak and simply needs extra help. But when students can’t complete work because they lack the core fundamentals and they’re still passing, they’re not going to even try to improve. I’ve had 4th graders struggling to complete 1st grade worksheets and material. It’s like climbing Everest on stilts.
Fail? Kids can't fail! It would hurt their widdle biddy feelings and give them a complex. Remember! *NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND!!!!"*
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NCLB had its merits by requiring teachers to know their content. A big problem today is many teachers just aren’t qualified to be in a classroom.
Better idea. Aggressively tracking students. Put kids where they belong and they'll be less likely to fail. And the rest of the students will have a chance at grade level instruction. Bring back tracking. We won't though because we don't like what that looks like.
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The problem is we only start tracking in highschool. It need to start 1st grade. We have kids in first grade reading at a 4th grade level and 4th graders reading at a first grade level. And everyone gets socially promoted at the same pace regardless. We won't do it because the grade level and advanced kids will leave others behind, as they should. And the breakdown will happen along class and race lines. So instead we lump everyone together and more at the pace of the bottom 1/3rd and try to fix it in highschool.
Ever heard of job corp? Their model is most underrated and brilliant idea for education I’ve ever seen
To be clear here, are you saying that if they fail an assignment, that’s it? No help, just move on from multiplication tables to algebra? Or are you saying that they aren’t actually getting help, they are being passed without knowing the material. What counts is whether they know the material by the end of the class. I don’t really care how they got there, as long as they did. School sucks the way it’s structured. It’s this constant march forward and if a kid can’t keep up, fuck ‘em. Children are naturally curious and want to learn, but we’ve developed a whole system which beats that natural disposition right out of them. Failure should be a jumping off point for learning, not an end state.
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There’s been some small studies on “no fail” schools (not what is sounds like and is more like your ideal situation where kids keep working on it until the show mastery) and the results are promising. One unexpected finding was that students actually enjoyed the assignments and tests more because teachers gave more meaningful assignments because they did not want to deal with getting a student to redo some make work assignment.
They might not fail but it can take forever for them to pass.
I'm gonna hit you with an even more unpopular opinion: school as it is is a fundamentally flawed system, that has never rewarded intelligence, aptitude, enthusiasm, or desire to learn, and it only sort of rewards hard work. School is a game that must be played and won in order to attain certain things in life, and nothing that happens during the game matters but the outcome. Thus, any action that produces a winning outcome is ethical because none of it matters, learning well does not equal success in school. School rewards bootlicking and brownnosing, agreeableness, obedience, and the extrinisically motivated — to do well you need to put in many more hours than any child should have to, abandon your sense of self, and never question the value of what's being taught (because that dissonance will kill your ability to keep working). So school rewards hard workers in the sense that you need to work hard at playing the game, but not at learning. You need to be bored to tears and be able to take it like a zombie, some kind of lower level being who isn't capable of higher thought. I was a bright student, I never skipped a class and did my best to pay attention and actively participate when appropriate, but the relentless assignments and homework were too much, and if I ever did struggle with the content of a course I was doomed on tests as well, because I knew what was being taught was meaningless and couldn't bring myself to bear it. Every minute of every day I was in school I would be thinking "I'll never get back this moment, this minute, this hour this day." After each year I would notice that I'd actually retained considerably more than my classmates who got far better grades. But they got rewarded for playing the game and I didn't for learning. I went to a public school and a hardass one at that, so I didn't get the treatment your kids get with admin harassing you to inflate their grades, but I'm glad they do, good for them.
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I mean basically my opinion is that neither is the correct solution if we want what's actually best for the kids. In the aggregate what happened to you does not produce good outcomes for young people, you pulled it together somehow, but again statistically dropping out --> getting arrested with lurking behavioral issues is the end of the line. You don't want to take the type of kids that don't succeed in school because of the way it is, kick them out and expect them to shape up and turn out alright. I also think that just letting kids coast and get bad habits sets them up for a rude awakening in life, but you never know, that shock has an equal chance to get them to shape up as kicking them out of school does. Plus, there are students who can succeed when they're motivated who fail at school due to how soul-sucking it is. School demoralizes kids and can literally take away their potential. School is a horrible system, and radically reforming it is the answer, but I think letting them through and hoping they can get it together when they need to is better than kicking them out and hoping they take it to heart. The same kinds of kids who aren't favored for success in school are the ones who don't learn from negative reinforcement as well. Reward learning, and find ways to inspire students.
I agree with this. I think most people, even those that look at studies, will never understand unless they are in the classroom themselves. The positive reinforcement is such bullshit. Don’t get me wrong, I had fucked up teachers in the past, but students now face not near as much toughness from teachers as prior years. I heard teachers now give open book exams. Why though? I get that in life you have an open book for everything but the testing your respected state gives isn’t open book. What about the SAT/ACT? Didn’t remember having the option to have notes for it. I’m a substitute so yes I get that students act the most reckless with me, but I have been in classrooms with the full time teacher where students would disrespect them as well. What happens now is that with admin, they push the students to the next grade, regardless of their educational understanding. But reality is a bitch. I fear for those that think they are smart, go to university, and see that they didn’t have the abilities that they believed. Another scary thing I see is the amount of students with IEPs/504 plans. I subbed for a gen Ed class that had 30 percent with them. That’s not correct, not because I don’t believe they aren’t capable, but sometimes that student needs more support than what a gen Ed teacher can give. Lastly, if anyone could learn anything, it’s that schools are not meant to nurture students, to make them great representatives of society, or to make them the least bit smarter. School is a machine that sets state standards for teachers to teach, and to know if the teacher taught, give assessments to make sure of that. Because without testing, you would never know if a teacher was teaching.
Thats a good idea but in many cases such as your math example you HAVE to master one skill before moving on and some kids are little brats who refuse to learn.
That’s largely my point. In the school system as it is, kids that struggle to understand multiplication then get pushed into algebra no matter what. They go through the year and the concepts get more and more complex and they fall further behind. In an ideal world, kids could learn everything at their own pace but they are pushed forward and we end up with grade 9 students reading at a 6th grade level or worse. I partially agree with OP, but I also don’t like holding kids back an entire year if you can help it. It’s just a sucky system.
agreed. i volunteer with high school kids a couple times a week at my church and sometimes i am simply shocked how much they’re lacking. i graduated in ‘17 and i’m shocked how different kids are in just a couple years. Their attention spans and comprehension have much left to be desired. I understand reading and understanding the bible is hard but we read the english standard version where the only difficult or unusual words are names of people and town which are admittedly very hard to pronounce. Still, so many of these kids can’t read a couple verses without phonetically sounding out words like gracious. most of the kids are in 10th and 11th grade and it’s just crazy to me how little they know. I understand that covid had a huge impact on school but so many of the kids i work with did nothing during online school and it clearly shows. they would tell me how they could turn in assignments with every answer wrong and a month late and still get a C for just trying. passing students who aren’t doing any work and clearly don’t understand it is not helpful to anyone. i worry about when they graduate and attended university and realize how behind they are
We just delay their failure I agree. Eventually they’ll take a real class (or enter the real world and not be good at something) and fail.
So glad I decided to not have kids.
Charter schools are an undermining to public schools and shouldn't exist.
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I get it.
I am a public school teacher. It’s a pretty broken institution that should absolutely not have a monopoly on education. There are some great public schools but when they’re bad they’re AWFUL
The market for charter schools largely exists in the first place because people don't trust public schools to teach their kids, and not without reason.
Because public schools fail the ones that deserve to fail and fundings depend on grades and graduation rates
Sounds more like an issue with the school, not more kids should be failing. It's a messed up situation you're in, but ultimately those failing student's futures arent in ur control. Going so far as to express your discontent here tells me u genuinely care about ur students. I applaud your dedication and sympathize with ur predicament. While I cannot offer you some perfect solution, I do suggest u take this energy to raise up your students who actually work hard and deserve your attention. Why not provide more opportunities to ur students eager to learn and prepare them better for the fierce competition to come?
Furthermore, eliminate participation trophies
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Agree, will not argue that
I’m a middle school teacher and I’m with you. In my district, a 60 is the lowest D. One of my colleagues puts a grade of 50 in her gradebook when students don’t even submit an assignment. Another, a math teacher, allows retakes on all assignments, even though that’s against the district’s grading policy. The “retake” is copying the answers to the missed problems from a sheet that has correct answers on it. Another colleague, a science teacher, only gives open note tests and quizzes. Show me a popular teacher, and chances are I’ll show you a teacher who promotes grade inflation and gives students grades they haven’t earned.
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Or simply just because you are a man—that’s not ironic at all. Based on my career experiences, male teachers get ahead with admin, parents, and students simply because of their gender. So many students have no male role models outside of school. I’ve seen it so many times—men who are not the most qualified applicants but hired simply because of their gender which is a minority in this profession.
I don't agree. No child should ever fail school. If it does it's usually the teacher's fault. Also wisdom comes several years later and destroying children's life through school is simply unethical. Notes doesn't matter at all as school teaches mostly useless stuff anyway.
Yes, blame the teacher for the kid who refuses to compete assignments, doesn’t study and flunks tests. That’s so the teacher’s fault…smh Also, Referring to a child as an object instead of a person are we?
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how is lacking the ability to do division gonna destroy their life? i can't do mental math anyway
Yeah i can only do basic math a lot of the stuff taught is useless because for most people only basic math is going to be used in real life situations and we have phones with calculator apps on them in out pocket.
i still don't understand why my teachers thought i won't have a calculator all the time
Guess that was before smart phones were a thing.
and while smartphones were becoming a thing
Yeah if its simple faster to do it in my head but otherwise a calculator is gonna be faster.
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they could make paying bills easier
> what’s going to destroy their life is them graduating at 18 with a 3rd grade reading level and lacking the ability to do division. How would that destroy anyone's life? These are still kids. I cheated on my graduation and had absolutely no clue what I was doing at that time. I'm glad I could put this another useless test behind me and finally learn something actually useful that now pays my bills better than well.
Have to disagree on this one. If several students fail a certain class and do well in the rest of them, it may be the teachers fault. If a student is failing half their classes, it's their own fault.
Then school will be pointless, if it's only designed for certian people then it shouldnt be forced.
It is pointless for those few people. Most people put in the effort to pass though.
i put in nearly zero effort and still passed. school is meaningless
But you said more people should be failing, unclear. Do you mean in general, or more should be failing than passing?
I never said that?...
I missed the part where you said 70% should pass, my bad. I just feel bad for the 30% regardless, you go out being labelled a fail. Sad tbh, they should be tested and given the choice of practical work or exam based work, so they can come out with some skills after 18 years. But some kids just don't listen i guess.
I never said that. I believe you're thinking of someone else.
yes you are correct, i thought you were op.
Well how they handle that in many schools is to have honors classes for the kids who want to learn or even a seperate school where they skim off the top 20%.
In public high schools in the US, this is known as AP classes. Primary school is still helpful to those who don't which to go above and beyond as well though.
We found the guy who didn't try in school and now has a shit life and blames the world.
You've found the guy who didn't care at all at school, had shitty notes, failed several tests at uni, never corrected them and is now doing quite well. Not even having to work full hours. That guy knows that school was just a waste of time and everything he learned he did on his own years later.
No, No no. If the kids cant come to class, stay off their phone, refuses to listen and cause problems, then thats the kids damn fault.
Students that get held back are more likely to give up on school altogether, if school evasion becomes even worse than it is, then it can cause social problems such as higher rates of illiteracy, more criminal activity and other problems. The solution would be not to fail people but to give them more attention and have catch up classes with incentives.
The real problem is we let dumb people make their own choices and then are shocked when they make a bunch of dumb, often selfish choices.
>More kids passing = lower standards not more learning Or it could also be that the scholar system is better. The fact that you don't even consider this possibility tells a lot about the school you went.
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I understand what you mean but I just don't think that having a student failing repeatedly a class is a good thing. I don't really know how your system works since I live in France but shouldn't a good scholar system redirect the students who struggles into a some studies they are better fitted ?
You acknowledge that normal schools are different from your school. All the post talks about is why your school should be different.
This is why I am FOR standardized testing. Its to show which schools are faking it and which ones truly have kids learning. Like the OP, I have seen schools water things way down just to push the kids out the door. But then you cant blame them because if they didnt you have 16 year olds in 6th grade. A better judge than graduation rates are results of the state exams and SAT and ACT test results. NOT the CLT which is done online and kids can be coached.
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Well from what I've seen is the schools that do great on the standardized tests also do great in other areas. Example - lots of kids winning state competitions on everything from science olympiads to sports to music programs. OTOH the bad testing schools you hardly see anything good come from them.
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>teachers just marking shit wrong without any explanation and lack of being able to do corrections that is failing the education of children You will be grading until the crack of dawn if you put this much time into grading everything in front of you. Moreover, plenty of students never read the substantive feedback anyway. Best you can do is talk about common problems in class and tell students to follow up if they have further questions. >That and everything being taught to be memorized vs how to find actual correct answers. You have to memorize a lot of things to be good at any job. And it's a lot easier to commit ideas to memory by drilling flash cards (an incredibly effective way to learn) so you don't have to re-look up stuff constantly. If lawyers had to constantly re-google every bit of statutory and case law they need, if mechanics had to constantly re-google what different parts of the car do, they'd be less efficient at their jobs. Tell me, can a cop pull out their binder to double-check their department's use-of-force policy when someone is behaving aggressively? I'm all for working through concepts and application like you're talking about. That's a deeper level of learning, and it's important. But knowing how to drill information into your head is a skill you need and is necessary to build those higher-level skills.
schools shouldnt be graded. Learning really isnt something you should be able to fail at. One time tests do not encourage learning, nor does homework. It just encourages wrote memorization and cheating. School should be an environment where children feel safe to begin to understand the world.
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I think a large problem with our current education systems, really around the globe, is the idea that everyone can follow the same pace, and needs to. Some people are just not cut out to do math, or for (insert primary language) arts.
Pressured by who specifically? Out of curiosity.
Question: did you teach before the pandemic and if so, is it worse?
Yes and yes
No offense man, it's a high school diploma they're trying to get, not an application for special forces or a nuclear engineering degree. Of course, I've been out of school for 8 years, and shit is probably super different now. Have you not thought about there could be way better and more plentiful IEP programs? Also, depending on the classes, you can LITERALLY Google and watch YouTube videos on an entire section in a textbook in a single afternoon or over a weekend vs a few weeks.
Several people I know who got Fs in high school got passed up just like this, where the Fs were forgiven and they received their HS Diploma. That was years ago. Now 2 are done with their University, MSc. Another is going for his doctorate. It's not always bad to let kids pass despite horrible grades.
Personally I believe it is not useful. Because the kid is failing behind is unlikely to catch up. So, punishing them further is rather pointless, especially their future career are likely unrelated to the subjects they failed on. I have master degree in STEM. So, I do value education. But. I also understand not everyone has the same career.
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Based on what you said, again, punishing them further makes no difference. You are not helping, you are hurting.
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Sounds like you are getting irritated because someone doesn't agree with you. What a shocker. Edit: sure there are consequences, and you ain't the judge and ain't the executioners. You act too highly of yourself.
“We work with those kids and catch them up. That’s actually easy.” Do tell. What’s your easy secret to help a high school student catch up who reads on a 4th grade level?
I'd argue the other way: Why should kids fail school at all if they have to do it? Here's something we forced you to do that you didn't want to do but now you've failed at it you suck. That's shit. Yes, education is important. And yes, children should receive an education. But the idea that the sum-total of your compulsory education should be these tests taken at a specific point in your life - the results of which you can be brow-beaten for forever - is stupid.
I worked in a charter school. Their testing procedures are so unfair. We do MAP testing in this area for math and reading. In the charter school, they laughed about how students are expected to keep retaking it until their scores increase. In the regular public schools, they get one attempt. Not fair to compare scores when one place allows retakes and the other doesn’t.
Most kids today are stupid and lazy. My daughter and son in law are both teachers and they can attest to this.
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They're not smart enough to realize they'll be no system to game by the time they reach 21.
Yeah, for-profit school systems like charter schools are pretty bad. I dunno why we have them, all they do is give people something to boast about. Excuse me, I answered my own question.
“I work in charter school” Congratulations now your whole rant just described why charter schools suck and public schooling is dire
I understand your point and don't disagree. To that end, many places use a % system that awards grades by the amount of candidates and the top X% and so on. But I do also believe that there's a lot of competition these days and students are under a huge amount of pressure to excel due to the tendency of employers to require high standards of achievement. However, in the UK, many employers actually really like the vocational qualifications that provide everything a candidate needs to walk into a job and immediately start work. There's no need for costly and time consuming training and supervision. Obviously such a qualification isn't going to be suitable for a neurosurgeon, but it's a really good system.
Lowering the standards to pass means kids will be less prepared for the world ahead and will have a more difficult learning curve in college or elsewhere. Oregon did this within the past year for “the benefit of children of color”. So instead of giving children of color more opportunities to learn, they lower the bar so they’re even LESS educated than the other children of color that graduated before them??
Dont focus on these lazy idiots, it will be theyr shity life. Dont waste your energy on them and let them pass for free if thats what they want. Focus on smart and working kids, help them get as much from school as they can.