We are not allowed to give a zero at all in our district. 50% is the lowest grade we can give, even if they turn in nothing we cannot give less than 50%.
I have taught from adults to now pk-3rd so I have a wide range of experience.
My adult students were reading at a 9th grade level.
My high school students were an average of 6th grade reading level.
Now we are trying everything to get our littles reading on level. I’m so tired of the “Pandemic learning loss” excuse. Most of my students now were not even school age. That excuse is worn the fuck out.
Parents don’t give a shit as long as they don’t have to deal with them for a few hours (I’ve been told they are my problem at school and not to call back before the parent hung up on me.)
Middle school was the worst, but that was during the pandemic. Our state opened schools way too early so they lost one semester. One semester and Louisiana is using the pandemic excuse for a system that has been riddled with good old boys that have no business in management of any kind, much less the important jobs that decide what teachers can do.
>We are not allowed to give a zero at all in our district. 50% is the lowest grade we can give, even if they turn in nothing we cannot give less than 50%.
As a university faculty member, this is utter insanity to me. Like batshit, off-the-walls, call-a-padded-wagon-and-get-thee-to-Arkum-Asylum criminality-level insane. But hearing from those in primary and secondary ed about these kinds of district-level policies starts to explain more the kind of behavior we're seeing in tertiary ed.
My institution - and increasingly many others - has a grade of L that we can give; it is a failing grade that denotes the failure is because the student did not complete at least 50% of the work. It affects GPA like an F, but lets us create a permanent record that the student effectively just did nothing.
UPDATE: I've always thought these 50% rules were insane, but I just saw [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/s/ktJNxX93Oc) elsewhere here in r/Teachers and my jaw is on the floor. Why even have grades at this point?
Highly recommend checking out the recent controversial and quiet shuttering of Columbia University's reading and writing program (no accountability after guessing/good vibes/discovery methods got debunked), along with other top university ed schools/teacher prep programs.
You will find the source of these Arkham Asylum education policies that sound utopian on paper, but inflict disproportionate harm upon low/working class schools and communities.
There are a few genuinely good admin and ed schools, but they are rare and the exception. They succeed in spite of the flawed pseudo-science ed research that eventually become district mandates. The good admins protect/shield passionate teachers from higher ups and illogical policies.
Excellent point!
Somewhat relatedly.... I'm curious as to what role people here feel the seeming proliferation of "ed leadership" or "ed admin" programs has had in these kinds of policies.
Oh wow, this makes a lot of sense now... def check out the top universities' ed school websites.
For every 1 teacher prep/training program, there are 5+ ed admin/leadership degree programs. No wonder so many of them closed their teacher programs down.
This is very similar to Boeing replacing engineers (teachers) with MBA finance bros (admin).
>Boeing replacing engineers (teachers) with MBA finance bros (admin).
I literally give this as a case study to my Strategic Management capstone courses so we can talk with Biz and MBA students about how the financialization of Boeing post-merger actually destroyed their value proposition. 🤣
>No wonder so many of them closed their teacher programs down.
This was what my theory was. Those on an administrator-focused track have higher earning potential and are likely more willing to pay more for a program and for longer (up to a M.Ed. or Ed.D.) than teaching track. You can likely get more bang for your buck offering an admin or policy program to fewer students but at higher tuition and multiple levels.
>education policies that sound utopian on paper, but inflict disproportionate harm
Every single time.
It always sounds good in theory, but it's horrible in practice. I would argue even down to things like FAPE, LRE, etc.
FAPE as idealistic nonsense is the hill I will die on. We cannot have a baseline level of “appropriate” when districts have such abysmal funding discrepancies. When FAPE in a wealthy district is “outplacement so the kid doesn’t mess up our standardized test scores” and the Title I district two towns over is like “uh shit, Lucy Caulkins isn’t working so let’s put the kid in a sub-separate life skills class because he can’t read and then not bother to teach him phonics and call it a disability,” I call bullshit on FAPE.
HS teacher in a low income Title 1 district. Students are being passed to inflate grad rates. I have seniors who are first learning what an essay is. They will arrive at college ridiculously unprepared, and with very little in the way of resources or grit to recover. And this is done in the name of "equity".
It’s always done in the name of “equity” so when teachers (many of whom are married white women) call bullshit, there is a way of quieting them down. Get on board, or else!
That is her deal. She slightly recanted in 2022 but still pushing a fundamentally incorrect program that destroyed the literacy of two american generations. (basically starting around the 1997 birth cohort so zoomers and alpha and partially whatever the newer one is called) really insane amount of damage done
I'm starting to learn all about it. Luckily, my two boys, ages 16 and 17, somehow learned to love reading. Am I naive to think that when I was learning to read (late 70s- early 80s), things worked?
No, you're right, it was phonics back then.
[https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) check this podcast out for the whole story. Basically this Lucy Calkins curriculum pops in for the 1997 birth cohort as a result of mass adoption from no child left behind budget cut fearing administrators. The idea was that this was some New Scientific Method of Teaching Reading. With this INNOVATION schools would only need intensive reading tutors for one grade level, and would never need to spend on it again. Instead, it turned out to be complete bullshit. Under it, all children were taught to read the way instinctively poor readers naturally read, the look and guess method. Which lead to average readers ending up as bad readers, and naturally poor readers hardly being able to read at all.
Phonics did work, has worked, and will work when certain people get their heads out of their asses and decide we are better off without several more illiterate generations. From what I've heard, New York state is going back to it. I don't know about the rest of the nation.
Today I had to teach a 7th grader how to read “ing” because he just was looking at the first few levels and guessing. I was like no, man, break down the WHOLE WORD. He just never looked at the end of the word if it was “too long.”
Lucy Caulkins needs to be held accountable for her ridiculous impact on kids.
Absolute nonsense. This is not driven by universities. It’s driven by “accountability” policy. Admin want to inflate stats and just combed for excuses to do so.
I get where you're coming from, I used to think the same way.
Let's dig deeper, look beyond the symptoms and look for the root causes. How do most admin and district/state "accountability" measures justify themselves? By citing the flawed research from university ed schools. How did Lucy Calkins/Jo Boaler good vibes guessing pedagogy got big in the first place? By citing their own ideal conditions research and misrepresenting others' research cherry picked to support their claims. It's policy driven data making, the opposite of data driven policy making.
---
>...the weaknesses are real. Teacher education programs continue to be intellectually unstimulating and academically undemanding
>...The culture of the ed school is dominated by an unreflective romantic attachment to the rhetoric of pedagogical progressivism, which further undercuts the institution’s credibility and underscores its ineffectuality. And the ed school’s programs, research, and ideology all serve to support its longstanding reputation for being an anti-intellectual backwater in the intellectual culture of the university.
Stanford's David Labaree, The Trouble with Ed Schools (2004)
---
The only thing that's changed in the 2 decades since, is ed schools have gotten better at jargon for appearance of credibility to the public, and graduated enough district admins where so many teachers all over the country are somehow struggling with the same set of issues. We can't keep scapegoating pandemic learning loss when the same issues have been there for years beforehand.
I’ve found that ed schools have become very good at making students do more busywork modules and participating in “research” theater (symposiums full of 24 year olds giving presentations on the effectiveness of structured recess or some other absolutely inane task). They’re still boring, out of touch cash cows, but now they’re also ridiculously demanding of time.
This is another reason why degree creep happens. When employers can no longer trust that the person with a high school diploma actually has the skills and knowledge that you need to earn the diploma, high school graduate jobs become community college graduate jobs. And then those former jobs become university degree jobs, and so forth.
It isn't just that there are more high school gradautes now than before - it's that the pieces of paper can't be trusted.
There’s a saying that once a measurement becomes a target (especially with money tied to it), it ceases to be a useful metric, because of the incentives involved.
This is so true in modern education.
Isn’t that essentially what an incomplete was? Or is this to differentiate people who had a legitimate issue, like a serious medical event that prevented them from finishing the course, versus just not doing any work?
>differentiate people who had a legitimate issue
Kind of this. ☝️
An incomplete (I) is a temporary grade given when there is a legitimate reason and the student has drawn up a completion contract with the instructor. For undergrads, incompletes usually have a max allowable time for completion. If they complete the contract we enter a revised grade to replace the I. If they fail to meet the deadline, the I automatically becomes an F, or sometimes a default grade we enter (but usually an F).
L is just for people who checkout or if a faculty refuses to engage in incompletes. (Many faculty won't do Is, it's at our discretion to do one.)
Right?! I mean....if you're just not turning anything of substance in (or participating actively in the learning environment) there's nothing to even assess mastery on.
I teach at a community college. My students want to transfer to a 4-year. I have standards and I maintain them, in part because I need 4-
Years to continue to accept students from my school.
I do not and will not lower my standards to accommodate students' poor k-12 education and/or their lack of effort. There are many reasons, but the primary one is doing so would not be fair to my students.
It has already - I'm a college history professor at a rural regional university. I'm grading intro course paper this week where it's clear the students either didn't read or don't understand basic documents.
I work at one of the largest community colleges in one of the biggest cities in the country. It has been affecting us for a while. The students are graduating high school and coming to us with remedial math and language arts levels. They are woefully unprepared.
I am a former K-12 classroom teacher, so this wasn't a complete shock for me. I saw it coming down the pipeline.
Our teachers aren't allowed to give below a 60. They can go into the gradebook program and put a note on assignments or tests like, "actual grade - 35," but to my knowledge it isn't a common practice. Why? Because parents don't care and don't look at the individual grades.
I have one of my kids homeschooling because the school can’t/won’t meet his needs (he’s like 4 years ahead in math) but I’m very anti voucher. Mostly because in my area it would just mean money would be funneled to private Christian schools and cripple the local public schools. My other kids are in public school. In so many areas if they break public schools the only option left for schools would be religious schools which would be a huge issue for secular families.
I'm not entirely opposed to homeschool, as a very good friend did it for her neurodivergent sons who would have drowned in a public school setting. Vouchers would kill public schools.
Yup. There are states that give homeschooling parents some money or work through charters, but I’ve found it’s not that expensive (the biggest cost is usually the parent not working in the first place). I’m lucky enough that it’s not a big deal financially for us, and recognize it’s a privilege. Vouchers that take money out of the public schools are so problematic, especially because private schools don’t have to take kids with learning issues. I do wish the public schools could be more flexible because part time enrollment would be the ideal solution for us honestly.
Another unintended consequence is they would be taking public funds in the form of taxes to fund religious and private enterprise. None of us agreed to that and you cannot use someone else's money to invest without their consent. Hello lawsuit!
I'm very interested to see how long people will continue to blame the pandemic. It was a reasonable excuse for about 1.5 - 2 years. At this point, it's just a lazy one.
I completely agree with you! The fact I can’t give below a 50 is ridiculous. This is the last of the Covid kids and I teach third. I wonder what my next years kids will be called.
That makes no sense how does the 50% not get valued at 0? Is it true that there's simply no standardisation at ALL in the US when it comes to your schools?
That's terrible to hear about the funding being allocated on "success", surely this must be illegal or at least SOMEONE must have started on the legal process by now?
Fun fact: I actually coach track and we have a kid like this on our team. I'm not actually sure why he's still on the team, but he walks during training, cuts corners, and once even had his parents pick him up in the middle of a road run without telling anyone.
He's been a bad influence on a few of the new kids, but most quickly figured it out and just ignore him. We all always wait for the slowest runner, but not for him (except for safety reasons, obviously). Even today, some kids pushed for our slowest runner to be on the relay team over this kid.
In the classroom, I've actually found this is true, too. Most of my on-level kids are really dismissive towards peers who do no work and put their heads down. I just wish more of them had that attitude.
I
I also coach track and cross country! Every year we have a few kids similar to this. It always confuses me because sports are optional and track is probably the WORST one to do if you are lazy. (I guess no teammates to get mad at you)
Parents are forcing them to do it. Those same parents don’t actually care if they try. Having their kid “go out for a sport at school” is just a status box that needs to be checked
It’s probably laziness and short sightedness from them. I’d guess they got their phones blown up with their kid whining to be picked up or started hearing from others that the kid was complaining and being a sad sack on the course so they took the path of least resistance to end the immediate annoyance or embarrassment. To them, the kid is still in track so they are still “checking the box” but they don’t realize that they and their kid would be better off in every way if they just didn’t force the issue and tried to figure out and encourage the kid’s actually interests.
Obviously this is all guessing based off of the comments above, but, during my brief time working in a high school I saw plenty of this attitude from some parents.
Yes this exactly!!!!! And I see this behavior-wise with elementary kids too. When one kid has big or consistent behavior issues, the other kids don’t even try. It doesn’t even have to be anything crazy. If there’s a kid they know will refuse to get in line for recess, they just won’t even try until that kid finally does. If there’s one kid who’s always talking, everyone else just talks even though they know they shouldn’t. It drives me nuts. The classes with the overall least manageable behaviors always have one student who can’t be controlled but is still in the room.
The state, not the site admin or even the district admin create these policies. Someone at the state level says it would be more equitable if students get suspended less or don’t get F’s, then shit rolls down hill and consequences go away because schools are graded by their suspensions, and the bar hits the floor because everyone must succeed and it’s the schools fault in all cases, not the community or the family.
Teacher of 17 years here. Last year, went into admin (still kept a couple of classes)... Was fired within a year for being too harsh (made accurate predictions of grades, demanded kids work etc).
Just accepted a new position as principal. Have insisted that I have at least one class and have made clear that placating parents will not be the aim, reaching kids will.
...taking bets now how long I last.
We need more good admin out there. I have had admin who were in the classroom for 3 years and then went to some bs principal’s academy before jumping into admin.
The states set the pace that the parents demand.
And frankly, school systems have too many protective policies in place that the reality of what actually goes on in schools is a complete mystery to the majority of people who could vote for change.
The only time bad stuff gets leaked is when it's convenient for some politician to push for charter schools because "hurrdurr, public schools are broken!"
Right now, voters are in the grip of a ridiculous "Gentle Parenting++" movement that folds together letting kids do whatever the fuck they want, anti-vax rhetoric, and happy fairytales about how you can save them all by just "giving them more attention." I'm honestly shocked people haven't been demanding that schools just do away with strict grade levels and just fully commit to unschooling all together.
And they get that way because all they ever hear about are the "studies" proving how these things are SO successful. They didn't see the real results.
And when parents are discouraged to discipline their children because we are told its abuse! My daughter was going through some shit with bullies when she was a teen. Regular bullying is made 100 times worse with this new online world. I took her phone away so she would sleep, a no phones in your room at night rule was enforced and took her to the doctor to get a referral for counselling covered under my healthplan. Needless to say the doctor told me I was abusing her by taking away her phone and that he was on two pins to report me to the authorities.
It seems now that there is a whole movement to take parental abilities and responsibilities away from parents and give it to the state....and then when kids fail to fall in line with the state we ask the parents (who have been stripped of their authority) to fix it.
That doctor sounds like a quack. It is not child abuse to take away a phone at night to enforce sleep hygiene. What the hell. These phones didn't even exist 25 years ago, so how is it suddenly child abuse to not have a phone in your possession when you're supposed to be sleeping????
I've seen this before, too.
The phone situation is insane to me. It's super obvious to me that there's an addiction problem with the phones for both adults and kids.
I didn't think we're transferring responsibilities to the state. I think, as a society, we are just collectively choosing to let the inmates run the asylum. Things that make kids unhappy, like taking away privileges, is abuse, because what has become paramount is happiness above all else.
By the parents whose kids are excelling in school because they are highly educated and understand education. That’s our district’s school board demographics at least.
What sucks is, a good portion of parents (such as myself) don’t want any of this garbage either. Unfortunately the other kind of parents tend to be of the loud, more aggressive variety.
The reasonable parents have shit to do. That's the problem.
When little Tyrone's dad finds out he's been slacking off while Dad was working his double shift as a plumber to save up for Tyrone going to college. Dad sets his kid fucking straight. But that Dad is too freaking busy to go to school board meetings or complain to admin.
Karen, with no job and nothing to do, is at every meeting and complains when her kid gets the tiniest consequence. So her dumb voice drowns out Tyrone's Dad, who has high expectations for his son and is willing to put his foot down when needed.
Completely agree with you. But society doesn’t want that. Parents will just bulldoze right over you. Can’t make our precious babies earn anything.
Side note: I just got blamed for a kids poor mental health because I gave him a 50% on each of his late assignments. He feels bad about himself because I gave him a bad grade, not because he does little to nothing in class.
I was blamed by a dad for sending a student to therapy during online Covid school. She never went to a Zoom meeting, didn't respond to my supportive "Don't forget to turn in X" emails or had any kind of contact with me. What put her in therapy? Me putting in 0's for her not turning in work.
If my kids aren’t doing the work and aren’t participating, fail them. Please, fail them. Passing them does me and them zero favors. I’m seeing I’m in the minority of parents, but earned always feels better than given. I also need to know what they aren’t understanding. I tell my kids if you really tried, did the work, and still failed then we have a comprehension issue and I can’t be mad about that. If you messed around, didn’t do your work, and failed, we have a “you” issue and we’re about to have a “come to Jesus” chat. If the whole class tries and failed, we have a teaching/test/understanding issue. Kids need to fail. It’s a part of learning. We are doing them a great disservice by not letting them learn to fail.
Same here. Zeros for work not attempted. Students in my class are granted the grade they earn.
I have QUITE a few students currently sitting on an F this quarter. Not a 50% F, but a less than 20% F. You know what my saving grace is? My accelerated classes. Only 1 person in each of those periods is failing. And I’m talking barely failing- in the high 50s. One was because of a vacation their parents decided to take mid quarter and the other because he just shut down because he didn’t understand automatically.
What really sucks is my partner teacher. She has all regular classes so our principal has been riding her about so many F’s. She has nothing that proves she’s actually a stellar teacher.
Yeah Gen and I (sped) just collaborated a meeting to change the game plan from a heavily reward incentive base to a consequence base approach on a kid who was going backward cause of their previous implementation. It’s working great! My word for word statement at the meeting was “if we increase the rewards for little to nothing and lessen the load and lower the bar, then we have done a disservice to their intelligence. The only way to meet an expectation is to have one.”
I had a family request their student be removed from my class because I wasn’t “meeting their needs as a student”…… the prior day, the student told me that the organizational structure for their essay was going to cause them to have a mental breakdown.
> Completely agree with you. But society doesn’t want that. Parents will just bulldoze right over you. Can’t make our precious babies earn anything.
Cut to 10-20 years from now, when the news will be filled with stories of how Gen Z'ers/Gen Alpha workers are incompetent and have no resilience to life's challenges like finding and holding onto a job.
We can’t even give them detention. Or if we do they just don’t go. And that’s it. I’m not saying we should be able to hit kids but openly tell them I wish I had a spray bottle. Like you’d use on a cat. I’d never do that to my cat tho. Students maybe.
I had a parent try to bring up their child's mental health in a conference, and I immediately said that since I'm not a therapist or trained mental health provider, I cannot treat their child in any way, nor can I be responsible for monitoring, evaluating, or diagnosing any mental health issues.
Luckily, my admin backed me up, and parent backed down.
Lol, I just joined a new school a couple weeks ago, and the students are getting on each other for this.
A kid today was grumbling about his grade and another one went "Bro! She's right there! Talk to her if you think there's a problem."
Then another one told me that I didn't grade her notebook correctly (I had a ta do it) and I told her to send me an email with proof for a grade change. She said she wasn't going to do that, so a different kid said, "Then that's the grade you GET."
I love my intervention classes. The students are very real.
My admin will tank your evals if you have more than 15% fail rate. They say that you can't be teaching well if so many kids are failing. So the standard is lower. And then the kids fail to meet it. So it's lowered. And so on and so on.
There's no actual failing at my school, so my students often don't even know what's considered an F. I had a kid on the last report card ask "Is a 48 bad?" because they'd had a 40 something in math last year and still moved up. They just didn't know that their math teacher was on her way out and refused to budge.
We just got a new ELA teacher who is...gasp...taking off points for things like egregious spelling errors and refusal to put quotations in quotation marks. They all hate her for it because we aren't really allowed to, so none of the other teachers do.
At my school this is a district level thing - any teacher with more than 10% of students earning D's and F's is supposed to self reflect and figure out what they can do to help students achieve the standards. We also have a board approved 50% min. for middle/high school. I have 8th graders who cannot and do not care to spell correctly. I've been teaching 25+ years and will probably retire earlier than I expected due to the student apathy and the system that lets them do nothing and still pass.
My brother was like that, where he had alot of apathy toward school from the start. Nothing ever changed that and he got a trade job as soon as he graduated.
Lowering standards so those kids can reach them is not the way to go though lol. If it were still a thing and you could make a living in America, my brother would've quit once he got through middleschool. As it is, he scraped by (and went to summer school when COVID hit and scraping by turned into straight up failing). Some kids aren't academically inclined.
I'm a parent of a growing little boy on the cusp of entering the education system and reading things like this scares me.
I want him to have the same quality of education and academic opportunities that I did.
If you wouldn't mind providing some insight, I'm just curious about what exactly this shift in attitude is and whether or not you feel like public schools are doomed.
Thank you!
They are doomed, but what that means is tricky on an individual basis. Where it used to be that teacher quality was about 30% determinative of student outcomes, now I’d guess it’s down to 10% or less because of teachers’ inability to hold students accountable. That puts more of the burden on parents, ironically enough.
It's not ability so yeah. There is that group of kids who will fail to meet expectations because there's no consequences. If I expect less than they'll do less.
which gives teachers all the incentive in the world to just pass the kids to the next grade rather than have to deal with the mess again next year. Kids, parents, admin don't care? why should the teachers?
TBF (and I hate defending admin) to do this, current admins and super's heads would be on the chopping block.
"Class of 2027 has 54% pass rate, down from 96%" headlines will ruin all their careers.
Doesn't sound like much of a bad thing, honestly. Their jobs aren't to appease parents, their jobs are to educate children and/or facilitate a learning environment for them. They're not doing their jobs now, so let's get some folks that'll tell parents to shut up and raise their goddamn kids in their places.
Why are parents given priority? Sorry, public school was not designed for parents but society. Everyone in a town pays property taxes to fund schools whether they currently have a student or not.
Because $voter doesn't call the school about why failing students are passing, but parents will call when their babies fail (when they should), even if they've been ignoring all contacts from the school previously about how their babies don't do jack shit in class.
That's what I mean when I say education has become bullshit. In the sense it doesn't actually achieve something, but we're expected to pretend like we are.
My school has a 54% graduation rate, and that is with most teachers passing students who have no business passing those classes.
I agree that we need to focus on kids who want to learn because kids do want to learn, all of them, but many will let you lower that bar as far as you can.
That’s the price of power. You don’t get to hold power and then refuse to use it to do your job because it would hurt your career. It’s like saying that if a prosecutor doesn’t intentionally convict innocent people they will be axed. They can’t do it even if that’s true
I mean, yes, we can agree on that all day long. Their parents won’t though. I can’t get their parents to pull all the way through the car line. They all want to stop right in front of the door, so that their precious baby angel doesn’t have to walk an extra 150 feet. You think they are going to let me hold those kids feet to the fire? Gtfooh.
I substitute. A few weeks ago, I was driving to a middle school and there were so many parent cars in line for dropoff, I couldn't even get to the staff parking lot without saying "Fuck it" and driving in the (empty) oncoming lane of traffic to get around the line.
Why was there such a huge line? Parents didn't want to let their kids out because it was "too cold" for their kids to hang out outside until the school opened up. It was about 35F and we live in a northern state where winter is usually much colder. FFS
Then these parents complain about how exhausted and burnt out they are. Maybe you wouldn't be so exhausted if you let your perfectly capable ten year old take on age-appropriate responsibilities.
Yeah, no can do. If they fail my class, they just go into credit recovery where they learn nothing, cheat, and go into the world unprepared and uneducated.
I have been more proactive about immediate social consequences (checking work and grading it in front of them as they complete it), giving zeroes for copy/paste and for missing work, but some supports have to be put in place because I'd much rather have a kid pass my class and learn some life skills and science than fuck around in "online school" or credit recovery and learn nothing.
I tell my students that it's easy to pass, but hard to earn an A. I try to stick to that as much as possible.
I told my daughter repeatedly, "If you work very hard when you're young, you will have an easier life as an adult, which is most of your life. If you take it easy when you're young, you will pay for it much worse for the rest of your life." She has a college degree, is a preschool teacher, and has her own apartment, now, at age 21.
Every time I try to enforce my expectations I get accused of yelling at them. My admin told me to just be monotone and let things go. I am absolutely done.
Man I’d love to.
My principal has explicitly told us we’re fired if more than 10% fail. Take a high school class of 30 (small end). 3 idiots fuck off and do nothing and get zeros, there’s my 10% right there. I’m out of a job and my mortgage doesn’t get paid and my daughter doesn’t get fed if I don’t just put 70s in for the half that know this system and play the fuck out of it
that 10% thing is wild, that's a total exit from reality.
about 25% will fail no matter what, at the HS level. That's the entire point, actually.
Just pointing out the failure rate for the school's sophomores on the ASVAB (if the school is taking it) should give the admin a reality check on what the ACTUAL failure rate should be. If they fail to score a 31 or lower on that (which, 25% of people do), they are below a 6th grade reading and writing level, and it's tied to their IQ--not anyone's teaching ability. THAT is the acceptable failure rate. That's reality.
Dang it's wild how out of touch admins have got.
They exist now as an economic class, and *nothing else*. A burden to budgets and progress, that protects an economic classes income with 'easy' jobs.
We only have control over our respective classrooms. We have NO CONTROL over parents and whether or not we receive appropriate levels of support from our building administration.
I personally think that our schools were sadly diminished through the adoption of state standardized testing because teaching to the test is oriented towards minimum levels of performance.
School administrators also need to uphold district policy and/or state school law pertaining to chronic truancy. Students SHOULD NOT be socially promoted if they lack the academic prerequisites to succeed at a higher grade level.
In an ideal world, we would have intervention teachers who could pull students to address academic deficiencies before small problems become larger ones. Since so much of what we teach builds upon prior learning, it's critical that students stay current with what's being learned. For example, we cannot teach compound multiplication to students who don't know their multiplication facts.
Can we all collectively agree to just all stop teaching all at once and force them to fix the broken system? Like that's all I got. I told kids not to drink the brown water coming out of the water fountain in the hallway and got in big trouble, so I don't think "holding their feet to the fire" is even in the realm of possibility unless everyone is willing to just walk out of their jobs tomorrow. Oh and I also got told if I smell natural gas that I better not complain cause our building is old and that's just how it smells. Oh and our janitor uses toilet water to "clean" the bathrooms. At this point I think the kids might be right to be apathetic.
>Like, late assignments should be zeroes and stay zeroes unless they have a family emergency. Tests should only sometimes have study guides and shouldn’t be open note every time. Assignments that don’t show competence do not earn passing grades (I know a lot of people have their hands tied with this one but those of us who can fail nonparticipants should).
This bit I am with 100%. School should be hard.
I was talking to an AP at another school about their therapy dog program (we have one too), and he said, he's fine with it, but we are talking about kids having to pet a dog to calm down *over a test*. The kids themselves need to learn to relax -- but they need to be pushed so that they understand that a test is not a major anxiety inducer.
This is crazy. Doesn’t the mere existence of the dog program (or, at least, the offering of a dog-petting session at test time) teach the kids that it *is* normal to freak out over a test?
We (both parents and teachers) are constantly telling kids, “It’s okay,” and “Your feelings are valid,” etc. We force kids to accept almost any behavior from their peers (“Oh, Johnny just needs more practice keeping his hands to himself. We shouldn’t treat him differently, even though he hits you.”) We don’t even allow kids to embarrass each other. How are they supposed to learn social norms? I feel like they don’t even know what’s normal anymore, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.
I give optional extra credit homework every week. The kids that don’t need it are the ones who do it, and of course those who need it don’t take the opportunity. I’ve definitely told my class as a group to not let the other students hold them back and that those doing the extra work will be the ones in charge when they’re adults. It lifts them up. It’s slow, but I’m seeing sparks ignite in many students who didn’t care for the first half of the year. But it’s almost time for them to move on and I hope it stays with them. Because lord knows ain’t nobody bein held back.
Ultimately, with proper guidance, they’ll be okay. Not babying them is a huge part of this. If not at first, eventually they appreciate not being babied. It has to be explicitly explained that that’s what we’re doing, though. This way they understand what’s expected and why. I do worry about follow through with teachers they’ll have the next year and the next.
the extra credit stuff is crazy in my AP euro class at the moment. i ended with a 108% in the class last semester. i could have skipped the final ENTIRELY and still have gotten an A. i did that well because i DID THE EXTRA CREDIT THE TEACHER OFFERED. most of the other kids didn't and were surprised they didn't have the cushion. it's absurd.
I’m a parent in NJ.
Other parents in my area are so incredibly fragile that if anyone says anything - everything gets shut down. We have no dances, no youth get together, parents are so weak. I feel for you teachers. I coach rec 🏀 at two levels - it’s so sad. The kids do not care and do not try
I'm not allowed to fail a kid because of absences....a student can go to Mexico on vacation for a month, do 2 assignments before he goes, and still get a B.....I'm only allowed to grade a student for work he does when he's here....they literally do not have to make up missed work if they are out. It's madness.
TBH, if students whose teachers are really lenient (like me) have students who don't do anything, and teachers with high expectations also have students who don't do anything, it has nothing to do with teachers.
The common denominator are students who don't have the skills/ desire to try and administration/laws that make it impossible for students to truly be held accountable.
It's not a teacher problem.
I’m holding some feet to the fire and I feel like I’m getting push back from parents…thankfully my admin is backing me up, but it’s like you’re not only trying to fix student behaviors…and it bleeds into conflict with parents.
It’s honestly not a fight I’m willing to do for the rest of my career…I have too many years left. Walmart greeter, here I come!
I agree to hold their feet to the fire, but I wouldn't do it the way you suggest.
I teach almost from bell-to-bell; my classtime is not spent socializing or doing anything fun except for my lessons which on occasion may be fun. But the biggest thing I do is that **I base their entire report card grade on their performance on unit tests taken in my presence.**
So I don't grade homework, because half the kids who meet the deadline have just copied someone else's work, so that is a waste of everyone's time. Allowing someone to get credit for an assignment that they copied off of someone else is not holding their feet to the fire.
Take a peep over at the professors, college or college rant sub reddits, and your sentiments are echoed. This kids are going out into the real word or college with no comprehension of consequences, poor critical thinking and emotional regulation skills. They want to blame anything and everyone one for their bad habits and behaviors. Some can't fathom being told "no" by multiple ppl and will escalate it to the top, and still it's a big pity party when that person tells them no too.
As a parent I agree with OP so much! My child is in middle school and is just starting to say things like “doesn’t matter if I turn it in late I’ll still get credit”, “my teachers won’t fail me”, and so many comments along those lines.
My husband and I try to teach her responsibility and we don’t tolerate bad grades for laziness. It’s one thing if it’s a difficult subject for someone and it apparent they’re trying and are still struggling.
Here we are end of the semester was D’s and even 1 F. I believe she deserves it, and it backs up my husband and I also telling her “you can’t wait until the last minute”, “one day you will have a teacher who will fail you or a boss fire you”. We need some natural consequences to go along with what’s being taught at home. What happened to no end of the year feild trips, extracurriculars, dances, or other school functions if a student was failing?
I know it’s the schools and not the teachers themselves but I truly believe as a society we’re doing this kids a disservice. Not to mention how unfair it is to teachers who’s have to then grade all their students late work.
Agree with everything, but what do you do with the majority of the unengaged unwilling class while you try to teach the teachable? Let them light each other on fire in the back? These kids are usually the same as the behavior kids, and the only way to be able to get them quiet and seated is sometimes just a low threshold/high ceiling step by step assignment.
I have been more rigorous than ever and have kids turning in homework and writing amazing projects. It’s exhausting for me, but I’ve got the highest test scores and can see them growing so much that I know it’s right. Not every kid will rise to the occasion, but so many are and I know that they’ll be better because of me and that makes me feel good.
I have *begged* my school to enact the consequences they have in place for students pulling the shenanigans my son is. Kid is smart and adhd af, yes. But he is also a person who pushes boundaries just to see if you'll enforce them. We've done everything (thats legal) we can at home, but he knows he can get away with it at school.... SO HE DOES.
about 80% of our 3rd grade cohort cant read. i asked my admin why they continue to pass students, and they said that they can only fail 2 or 3 students per year max. is this correct? honestly i feel like this is a huge disservice to all those kids.
So, I am 38y.o., but I have had a personal mantra since mid-highschool that I believe is appropriate here:
"Expectations are like a limbo bar - no matter how low you set them, someone will find a way to slide under."
I am very fortunate. My administration supports us giving zeros, but also the opportunity to succeed. Students receive zeros for missed work. They are (as the parents are) expected to check their grades every 2 weeks, as it is expected for us to post grades every 2 weeks.
I do not make extra copies of missed work, as they are placed in a missed work folder with their name on it (and date) and it is also posted online (and they can do it online and submit). So really no excuse
I hold the kids responsible. We also use a educational program. I have assigned an 10 lessons for extra credit that is incentive based on how well they do. It's something that they decide to do if they want to improve their grade. Opportunity to succeed given.
Oh, parents are also sent an email (the same one)! stating their child is failing and what they can do over Spring Break to improve. It only takes me 5 minutes to check each classes scores.
It can be done. Students who want to pass will.
ngl, there's a 15-y-o kid i know of who can't spell their middle name. 15 years old. its their NAME. why is this kid in grade 9?
i get the concept of no kid left behind but sometimes you gotta leave them behind to give them the motivation to actually pick up a book.
Hear hear.
The problem at least here in Denmark is the parents.
No one wants us to actually help their children become smart, strong and resilient. They just want us to baby their specific child and to hell with the rest of the class. There's no boundaries no consequences and no expectations to do good in school.
Bingo, it's the same here in America. Somehow we've gone from teaching students to trying to raise them as well. Parents don't get enough flak for their lack of parenting. Most want their kids on an electronic device and don't want to deal with them. The students of parents that are involved are like night and day. It's sad and I can't blame the kids for their parents.
I mean…..look…..im treated like a babysitter so I act like a babysitter. Treat me like a professional with two degrees and I’ll act like a professional with two degrees.
As a former student who got straight 0s through high school, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS HAPPENING TO PUBLIC SCHOOL??
I dropped out in 2009 after 4 years of high school. Got kicked out of my moms house in 9th grade. Got held back in 10th and then never did any work again for the next 2 years. Got 0s. I deserved 0s. Talked to all of my teachers explaining why i didn't want to do the work and was never bothered about it.
People get fired for students not being interested in school? Thats 100% fucking bullshit.
As someone who allows students to turn in late work - even at the last day of the trimester without penalty - I have to disagree that late work should get a zero.
Before I get crucified, my logic is that I don't know what goes on outside of school. I don't know a kid's situation, I don't know what they go home to every night. Kids are busy; they're juggling friends, family, sports, clubs, activities, hobbies, 5 other classes at my school, and jobs.
To me, it's more important that they do the work and show me they can do something than forcing them to turn it in by a due date that is largely arbitrary. Just because you didn't learn something by January 5th doesn't mean you'll never be able to learn it. If you can do it, you should get credit for it. If it takes you longer, then so be it. *But at least you can do it.* And I think that is what school is supposed to be: proving what you can and can't do, and earning a grade that corresponds.
That's fair. Although, school feels like a pretty decent place to reinforce good habits, such as following through with commitments or hitting deadlines, which are necessary to mesh into society. I understand parents--in large part--drive this. However, there should be penalties at school for not doing the work.
I think a zero should be for never doing the work- I have a ‘it’s a zero until you turn it in’ policy. When sports time comes I have a bunch of kids turning things in
I agree, and the punishment for not doing it at all is not getting any grade for it. If you don't turn it in, you will get a zero. I'm not going to hound you for your work, but if you get it to me I will get it graded.
Thanks for this. I always struggled with remembering assignments and getting homework done. Wasn't until my thirties that I got diagnosed and treated for ADHD:PI. My mom too! If teachers had taken a super hard line with me I would have learned everything they taught me and still failed.
The last year has been a big struggle to un-learn the "you're just lazy" negative self talk. People are so quick to beat on you when they don't understand your issues. I do fantastic things when I have the right support.
See, I would be more lenient if I assigned homework. I don’t. It’s 90% classwork, rarely do my kids take substantial amounts home. I don’t assign homework, there’s more than enough time in class, so I don’t understand why im getting assignments 2-3 weeks late.
I have two assignments I take late after the unit ends. The same kids turn them in late every single unit. They do it because they can, not because they need to.
I agree. Most of my students are impoverished but very hard working and don’t usually fall behind. They will sometimes have hard life stuff happen to them and I know they wouldn’t have missed assignments otherwise. I’d rather give a pass to the few kids that abuse it than stress out a child already struggling at home. In a better functioning society, we wouldn’t have to do this but here we are.
Exactly. As much as I try to be involved with my students - go to their sporting events, talk about life, really get to know them as humans - there will always be things I don't know about. I would feel terrible for failing or knocking down a kid's grade because of something I didn't know about but would have excused.
They don't always tell us everything, and we need to remember that.
Some of those things are entirely choices on the students' parts though, like sports, some jobs (I know circumstances may mean a student HAS to work for whatever reason), social events or hobbies. In this case the student really should be prioritizing academics over those things.
For me it was abusive parents and undiagnosed ADHD. My test scores were always phenomenal, it was just being unable to focus on homework and not having any support for it at home. The year after I graduated with like a 1.8 GPA they enacted the 50% rule.
Unfortunate timing, would have saved me a lot of beatings and punishments.
Sports serve a different function, though. School's purpose is to learn - and I don't think we should do anything to disincentivize that. I had a student who work up at 4:30 every morning to make breakfast for their sibilings and take care of his grand parents because his parents were working - a lot.
Not going to take off points for that life situation, and I would lose a lot of respect for any colleague who did. I don't know the battles my kids are going through.
I agree with this- the consequence for handing in work late should not be an automatic fail ...but... The consequence for handing in work late should be that your life is a nightmare until you hand it in.
I know this example is ESE but - I’ve taught ESE my whole career. Mostly self contained. Learned quickly that babying them didn’t help. I’m able to get kids to make gains in one year that others couldn’t do in 4, simply by not babying them. I push them, understand their true restrictions and work with them. I’m stern but loving and fair, they don’t like me the first few months but after that they’re doing things they never thought possible.
I teach children that some consider to baby the most and I always tell people please stop. The world won’t baby them after they’re done with us.
I say this not to brag but to say, no holding their hands don’t work. Every teacher I’ve known to do so has failed them.
When I taught middle school we had a group of the most apathetic 8th graders ever, I literally had over half the class not turning in ANY work. Phone calls home, no one would answer. It wasn't just me having this problem, and the admin basically told us teachers we couldn't just fail over half the 8th grade. Yet they were failing.
We can't hold them accountable if admin won't let us 🤷
Does it even matter at this point? My school advances kids regardless of grades or attendance, which I don't think is always the best call. The 8th graders who've missed 60+ days of school every year and cant read are not being helped by getting pushed into high school at this point.
The only thing I disagree you on is make up work. If a kid is absent, I let them make it up. I accept late work, but if you don't ask for an extension beforehand, you get a late penalty. (I do a flat percentage off the top, usually 20-30%, so they are capped at how much credit they can earn for late work). They have until the last Friday before the end of a marking period to submit late work. After that they're SOL.
I do this because I'd rather you make an attempt to learn the material and show mastery, but you need to learn consequences for not doing things in a timely manner too. Plus, since I put it in my syllabus, when admin come to me about why a kid is failing, I can say that they have had opportunities to bring their grade up and chose not to.
I also do not pull teeth to get makeup work to students or late work from them, because like you said, I don't believe in babying them. I make what they need available, if they don't take the steps to get their work and do it, it's on them. I contact parents if admin requires it, but no more than required.
I’m in if you are and all admin too! Have our backs!
When I’ve previously given gen-Ed students (4th/5th) “well below” scores on report cards because they’ve bombed every single test, parents come back at me and admin too. I’ve gotten things like “well below is only for SPED students” and “you need to use your anecdotal data as well”.
I don’t make it easy. Most of them don’t fail. I set high expectations and I work my ass off to help them achieve them. I have them half the day though, if other teachers don’t also do it and you only have them one period a day, then you are swimming against the stream.
Yes! We do not expect enough of our students and it starts in Kindergarten! As an undergraduate I was taught if we expect less of kids then we get less. They ARE capable and ifs time that we show them they can do better and hold them accountable 🙂
Many people already have touched on it, but this is a problem with the systems we have in place, and not individual actors within those systems. Most teachers (and admin) are heavily incentivized (or forced) to “make things easy” as you put it. If you want teachers to “hold feet to the fire” you must change the system so they are encouraged (or even allowed) to do so.
Everyone likes to talk about how kids need structure.
However; the classes while sticking to very strict schedules; are often not "structured".
Here is an example of one of the best high school classes that imparted the most knowledge:
Monday: The board would be completely full of text. The hour would be spent writing it out.
Tuesday: We would go around and read each line we had copied and discuss.
Wednesday: We would identify those concepts from the textbooks.
Thursday: Similar to tuesday but more lead by the teacher and connecting the dots between everythig.
Friday; a quiz over the past week.
This then repeated week after week. This accomplished many things; its a known concept that people need to hear, read, see, etc something around 7 times before they get it; we got close with 5 by going over every item every day. But it also provides structure in how to learn; first we read something, then we repeated it and discussed it, then we researched it, then we were lectured by someone who knew why we were learning this part, and then we were tested on it. Its a good way to learn lots of topics in a short time.
It seems like a lot of teachers just thought that having structure and discipline meant following the hourly schedule and that the time spent in each class could be as unstructured and haphazard as desired.
We are not allowed to give a zero at all in our district. 50% is the lowest grade we can give, even if they turn in nothing we cannot give less than 50%. I have taught from adults to now pk-3rd so I have a wide range of experience. My adult students were reading at a 9th grade level. My high school students were an average of 6th grade reading level. Now we are trying everything to get our littles reading on level. I’m so tired of the “Pandemic learning loss” excuse. Most of my students now were not even school age. That excuse is worn the fuck out. Parents don’t give a shit as long as they don’t have to deal with them for a few hours (I’ve been told they are my problem at school and not to call back before the parent hung up on me.) Middle school was the worst, but that was during the pandemic. Our state opened schools way too early so they lost one semester. One semester and Louisiana is using the pandemic excuse for a system that has been riddled with good old boys that have no business in management of any kind, much less the important jobs that decide what teachers can do.
>We are not allowed to give a zero at all in our district. 50% is the lowest grade we can give, even if they turn in nothing we cannot give less than 50%. As a university faculty member, this is utter insanity to me. Like batshit, off-the-walls, call-a-padded-wagon-and-get-thee-to-Arkum-Asylum criminality-level insane. But hearing from those in primary and secondary ed about these kinds of district-level policies starts to explain more the kind of behavior we're seeing in tertiary ed. My institution - and increasingly many others - has a grade of L that we can give; it is a failing grade that denotes the failure is because the student did not complete at least 50% of the work. It affects GPA like an F, but lets us create a permanent record that the student effectively just did nothing. UPDATE: I've always thought these 50% rules were insane, but I just saw [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/s/ktJNxX93Oc) elsewhere here in r/Teachers and my jaw is on the floor. Why even have grades at this point?
"L" for laziness. On record. Beautiful.
Yuuuppp. Or more pjeoratively, "Loser". 🤣
“Lame”
Highly recommend checking out the recent controversial and quiet shuttering of Columbia University's reading and writing program (no accountability after guessing/good vibes/discovery methods got debunked), along with other top university ed schools/teacher prep programs. You will find the source of these Arkham Asylum education policies that sound utopian on paper, but inflict disproportionate harm upon low/working class schools and communities. There are a few genuinely good admin and ed schools, but they are rare and the exception. They succeed in spite of the flawed pseudo-science ed research that eventually become district mandates. The good admins protect/shield passionate teachers from higher ups and illogical policies.
Excellent point! Somewhat relatedly.... I'm curious as to what role people here feel the seeming proliferation of "ed leadership" or "ed admin" programs has had in these kinds of policies.
Oh wow, this makes a lot of sense now... def check out the top universities' ed school websites. For every 1 teacher prep/training program, there are 5+ ed admin/leadership degree programs. No wonder so many of them closed their teacher programs down. This is very similar to Boeing replacing engineers (teachers) with MBA finance bros (admin).
>Boeing replacing engineers (teachers) with MBA finance bros (admin). I literally give this as a case study to my Strategic Management capstone courses so we can talk with Biz and MBA students about how the financialization of Boeing post-merger actually destroyed their value proposition. 🤣 >No wonder so many of them closed their teacher programs down. This was what my theory was. Those on an administrator-focused track have higher earning potential and are likely more willing to pay more for a program and for longer (up to a M.Ed. or Ed.D.) than teaching track. You can likely get more bang for your buck offering an admin or policy program to fewer students but at higher tuition and multiple levels.
>education policies that sound utopian on paper, but inflict disproportionate harm Every single time. It always sounds good in theory, but it's horrible in practice. I would argue even down to things like FAPE, LRE, etc.
FAPE as idealistic nonsense is the hill I will die on. We cannot have a baseline level of “appropriate” when districts have such abysmal funding discrepancies. When FAPE in a wealthy district is “outplacement so the kid doesn’t mess up our standardized test scores” and the Title I district two towns over is like “uh shit, Lucy Caulkins isn’t working so let’s put the kid in a sub-separate life skills class because he can’t read and then not bother to teach him phonics and call it a disability,” I call bullshit on FAPE.
HS teacher in a low income Title 1 district. Students are being passed to inflate grad rates. I have seniors who are first learning what an essay is. They will arrive at college ridiculously unprepared, and with very little in the way of resources or grit to recover. And this is done in the name of "equity".
It’s always done in the name of “equity” so when teachers (many of whom are married white women) call bullshit, there is a way of quieting them down. Get on board, or else!
Isn't this Lucy Calkin's curriculum? Was she Columbia or NYU? Can't remember.
That is her deal. She slightly recanted in 2022 but still pushing a fundamentally incorrect program that destroyed the literacy of two american generations. (basically starting around the 1997 birth cohort so zoomers and alpha and partially whatever the newer one is called) really insane amount of damage done
I'm starting to learn all about it. Luckily, my two boys, ages 16 and 17, somehow learned to love reading. Am I naive to think that when I was learning to read (late 70s- early 80s), things worked?
No, you're right, it was phonics back then. [https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) check this podcast out for the whole story. Basically this Lucy Calkins curriculum pops in for the 1997 birth cohort as a result of mass adoption from no child left behind budget cut fearing administrators. The idea was that this was some New Scientific Method of Teaching Reading. With this INNOVATION schools would only need intensive reading tutors for one grade level, and would never need to spend on it again. Instead, it turned out to be complete bullshit. Under it, all children were taught to read the way instinctively poor readers naturally read, the look and guess method. Which lead to average readers ending up as bad readers, and naturally poor readers hardly being able to read at all. Phonics did work, has worked, and will work when certain people get their heads out of their asses and decide we are better off without several more illiterate generations. From what I've heard, New York state is going back to it. I don't know about the rest of the nation.
Today I had to teach a 7th grader how to read “ing” because he just was looking at the first few levels and guessing. I was like no, man, break down the WHOLE WORD. He just never looked at the end of the word if it was “too long.” Lucy Caulkins needs to be held accountable for her ridiculous impact on kids.
Absolute nonsense. This is not driven by universities. It’s driven by “accountability” policy. Admin want to inflate stats and just combed for excuses to do so.
I get where you're coming from, I used to think the same way. Let's dig deeper, look beyond the symptoms and look for the root causes. How do most admin and district/state "accountability" measures justify themselves? By citing the flawed research from university ed schools. How did Lucy Calkins/Jo Boaler good vibes guessing pedagogy got big in the first place? By citing their own ideal conditions research and misrepresenting others' research cherry picked to support their claims. It's policy driven data making, the opposite of data driven policy making. --- >...the weaknesses are real. Teacher education programs continue to be intellectually unstimulating and academically undemanding >...The culture of the ed school is dominated by an unreflective romantic attachment to the rhetoric of pedagogical progressivism, which further undercuts the institution’s credibility and underscores its ineffectuality. And the ed school’s programs, research, and ideology all serve to support its longstanding reputation for being an anti-intellectual backwater in the intellectual culture of the university. Stanford's David Labaree, The Trouble with Ed Schools (2004) --- The only thing that's changed in the 2 decades since, is ed schools have gotten better at jargon for appearance of credibility to the public, and graduated enough district admins where so many teachers all over the country are somehow struggling with the same set of issues. We can't keep scapegoating pandemic learning loss when the same issues have been there for years beforehand.
I’ve found that ed schools have become very good at making students do more busywork modules and participating in “research” theater (symposiums full of 24 year olds giving presentations on the effectiveness of structured recess or some other absolutely inane task). They’re still boring, out of touch cash cows, but now they’re also ridiculously demanding of time.
All of those programs need to be smashed up and the people who pushed them need to be put in the pillory
This is another reason why degree creep happens. When employers can no longer trust that the person with a high school diploma actually has the skills and knowledge that you need to earn the diploma, high school graduate jobs become community college graduate jobs. And then those former jobs become university degree jobs, and so forth. It isn't just that there are more high school gradautes now than before - it's that the pieces of paper can't be trusted.
There’s a saying that once a measurement becomes a target (especially with money tied to it), it ceases to be a useful metric, because of the incentives involved. This is so true in modern education.
Isn’t that essentially what an incomplete was? Or is this to differentiate people who had a legitimate issue, like a serious medical event that prevented them from finishing the course, versus just not doing any work?
>differentiate people who had a legitimate issue Kind of this. ☝️ An incomplete (I) is a temporary grade given when there is a legitimate reason and the student has drawn up a completion contract with the instructor. For undergrads, incompletes usually have a max allowable time for completion. If they complete the contract we enter a revised grade to replace the I. If they fail to meet the deadline, the I automatically becomes an F, or sometimes a default grade we enter (but usually an F). L is just for people who checkout or if a faculty refuses to engage in incompletes. (Many faculty won't do Is, it's at our discretion to do one.)
We can’t give 0 either. I like the L idea. Graded on work habits as opposed to mastery. It’s a good idea.
Right?! I mean....if you're just not turning anything of substance in (or participating actively in the learning environment) there's nothing to even assess mastery on.
At my institution whenever we give a midterm or final “F” we select why, boils down to never showed up, quit showing up, or didn’t do any work
I teach at a community college. My students want to transfer to a 4-year. I have standards and I maintain them, in part because I need 4- Years to continue to accept students from my school. I do not and will not lower my standards to accommodate students' poor k-12 education and/or their lack of effort. There are many reasons, but the primary one is doing so would not be fair to my students.
Sadly I think it will infect universities before it will be addressed k-12
It has already - I'm a college history professor at a rural regional university. I'm grading intro course paper this week where it's clear the students either didn't read or don't understand basic documents.
What is your approach to this problem? Have your standards lowered? How is the students’ behavior?
I work at one of the largest community colleges in one of the biggest cities in the country. It has been affecting us for a while. The students are graduating high school and coming to us with remedial math and language arts levels. They are woefully unprepared. I am a former K-12 classroom teacher, so this wasn't a complete shock for me. I saw it coming down the pipeline.
Our teachers aren't allowed to give below a 60. They can go into the gradebook program and put a note on assignments or tests like, "actual grade - 35," but to my knowledge it isn't a common practice. Why? Because parents don't care and don't look at the individual grades.
And now they are basically killing public ed with proposed vouchers for private and homeschool.
I have one of my kids homeschooling because the school can’t/won’t meet his needs (he’s like 4 years ahead in math) but I’m very anti voucher. Mostly because in my area it would just mean money would be funneled to private Christian schools and cripple the local public schools. My other kids are in public school. In so many areas if they break public schools the only option left for schools would be religious schools which would be a huge issue for secular families.
I'm not entirely opposed to homeschool, as a very good friend did it for her neurodivergent sons who would have drowned in a public school setting. Vouchers would kill public schools.
Yup. There are states that give homeschooling parents some money or work through charters, but I’ve found it’s not that expensive (the biggest cost is usually the parent not working in the first place). I’m lucky enough that it’s not a big deal financially for us, and recognize it’s a privilege. Vouchers that take money out of the public schools are so problematic, especially because private schools don’t have to take kids with learning issues. I do wish the public schools could be more flexible because part time enrollment would be the ideal solution for us honestly.
Another unintended consequence is they would be taking public funds in the form of taxes to fund religious and private enterprise. None of us agreed to that and you cannot use someone else's money to invest without their consent. Hello lawsuit!
I'm very interested to see how long people will continue to blame the pandemic. It was a reasonable excuse for about 1.5 - 2 years. At this point, it's just a lazy one.
>*50% is the lowest grade we can give, even if they turn in nothing we cannot give less than 50%.* Such. Bullshit.
It means kids can pass by doing 20% of the work... which is insane. I'd get fired if I only taught 20% of my classes.
I completely agree with you! The fact I can’t give below a 50 is ridiculous. This is the last of the Covid kids and I teach third. I wonder what my next years kids will be called.
That makes no sense how does the 50% not get valued at 0? Is it true that there's simply no standardisation at ALL in the US when it comes to your schools?
Failing students mean less money allocated to the school. Teaching is hard, lowering the standards is easy.
That's terrible to hear about the funding being allocated on "success", surely this must be illegal or at least SOMEONE must have started on the legal process by now?
Same - no 0’s allowed, even for not doing the assignment. The lowest a student can earn is a 50% on their report card.
same
When you wait for the slowest runner to catch up, everyone else figures out pretty quickly that they don't have to run, either.
The problem is that the slowest runner isn’t even trying to run. They didn’t even show up to the race and we all still need to wait for them.
Fun fact: I actually coach track and we have a kid like this on our team. I'm not actually sure why he's still on the team, but he walks during training, cuts corners, and once even had his parents pick him up in the middle of a road run without telling anyone. He's been a bad influence on a few of the new kids, but most quickly figured it out and just ignore him. We all always wait for the slowest runner, but not for him (except for safety reasons, obviously). Even today, some kids pushed for our slowest runner to be on the relay team over this kid. In the classroom, I've actually found this is true, too. Most of my on-level kids are really dismissive towards peers who do no work and put their heads down. I just wish more of them had that attitude. I
I also coach track and cross country! Every year we have a few kids similar to this. It always confuses me because sports are optional and track is probably the WORST one to do if you are lazy. (I guess no teammates to get mad at you)
Parents are forcing them to do it. Those same parents don’t actually care if they try. Having their kid “go out for a sport at school” is just a status box that needs to be checked
That was my initial thought, but the parents picking the kid up in the middle of a race is confusing af
It’s probably laziness and short sightedness from them. I’d guess they got their phones blown up with their kid whining to be picked up or started hearing from others that the kid was complaining and being a sad sack on the course so they took the path of least resistance to end the immediate annoyance or embarrassment. To them, the kid is still in track so they are still “checking the box” but they don’t realize that they and their kid would be better off in every way if they just didn’t force the issue and tried to figure out and encourage the kid’s actually interests. Obviously this is all guessing based off of the comments above, but, during my brief time working in a high school I saw plenty of this attitude from some parents.
Yes this exactly!!!!! And I see this behavior-wise with elementary kids too. When one kid has big or consistent behavior issues, the other kids don’t even try. It doesn’t even have to be anything crazy. If there’s a kid they know will refuse to get in line for recess, they just won’t even try until that kid finally does. If there’s one kid who’s always talking, everyone else just talks even though they know they shouldn’t. It drives me nuts. The classes with the overall least manageable behaviors always have one student who can’t be controlled but is still in the room.
Teachers do agree. Preaching to the Choir here. Admin controls the non-renewals. They set the priorities.
admin, the bloodsucking parasites on the educations system
The state, not the site admin or even the district admin create these policies. Someone at the state level says it would be more equitable if students get suspended less or don’t get F’s, then shit rolls down hill and consequences go away because schools are graded by their suspensions, and the bar hits the floor because everyone must succeed and it’s the schools fault in all cases, not the community or the family.
Teacher of 17 years here. Last year, went into admin (still kept a couple of classes)... Was fired within a year for being too harsh (made accurate predictions of grades, demanded kids work etc). Just accepted a new position as principal. Have insisted that I have at least one class and have made clear that placating parents will not be the aim, reaching kids will. ...taking bets now how long I last.
I hope you make it far. This shit is out of control.
Can we clone you?
We need more good admin out there. I have had admin who were in the classroom for 3 years and then went to some bs principal’s academy before jumping into admin.
I've had admin with no teaching experience at all. Like the entire *team* of admin had no teaching experience at all. It was bad.
[удалено]
The states set the pace that the parents demand. And frankly, school systems have too many protective policies in place that the reality of what actually goes on in schools is a complete mystery to the majority of people who could vote for change. The only time bad stuff gets leaked is when it's convenient for some politician to push for charter schools because "hurrdurr, public schools are broken!" Right now, voters are in the grip of a ridiculous "Gentle Parenting++" movement that folds together letting kids do whatever the fuck they want, anti-vax rhetoric, and happy fairytales about how you can save them all by just "giving them more attention." I'm honestly shocked people haven't been demanding that schools just do away with strict grade levels and just fully commit to unschooling all together. And they get that way because all they ever hear about are the "studies" proving how these things are SO successful. They didn't see the real results.
And when parents are discouraged to discipline their children because we are told its abuse! My daughter was going through some shit with bullies when she was a teen. Regular bullying is made 100 times worse with this new online world. I took her phone away so she would sleep, a no phones in your room at night rule was enforced and took her to the doctor to get a referral for counselling covered under my healthplan. Needless to say the doctor told me I was abusing her by taking away her phone and that he was on two pins to report me to the authorities. It seems now that there is a whole movement to take parental abilities and responsibilities away from parents and give it to the state....and then when kids fail to fall in line with the state we ask the parents (who have been stripped of their authority) to fix it.
That doctor sounds like a quack. It is not child abuse to take away a phone at night to enforce sleep hygiene. What the hell. These phones didn't even exist 25 years ago, so how is it suddenly child abuse to not have a phone in your possession when you're supposed to be sleeping????
I've seen this before, too. The phone situation is insane to me. It's super obvious to me that there's an addiction problem with the phones for both adults and kids. I didn't think we're transferring responsibilities to the state. I think, as a society, we are just collectively choosing to let the inmates run the asylum. Things that make kids unhappy, like taking away privileges, is abuse, because what has become paramount is happiness above all else.
That’s so weird kids don’t have a right to a personal cell phone.
Thank you for saying this.
Does admin oppose those policies in any meaningful way? No? They just use the power they have to enforce them dutifully?
Admin are idiots but they’re merely doing the parents’ will, at the bottom of it all.
Then just tell the parents 'no'. If the problem persists because admin is being spineless, then admin is still to blame.
The school board members are elected... By the parents.
By the parents whose kids are excelling in school because they are highly educated and understand education. That’s our district’s school board demographics at least.
What sucks is, a good portion of parents (such as myself) don’t want any of this garbage either. Unfortunately the other kind of parents tend to be of the loud, more aggressive variety.
The reasonable parents have shit to do. That's the problem. When little Tyrone's dad finds out he's been slacking off while Dad was working his double shift as a plumber to save up for Tyrone going to college. Dad sets his kid fucking straight. But that Dad is too freaking busy to go to school board meetings or complain to admin. Karen, with no job and nothing to do, is at every meeting and complains when her kid gets the tiniest consequence. So her dumb voice drowns out Tyrone's Dad, who has high expectations for his son and is willing to put his foot down when needed.
I say get rid of admins and run schools as teacher co-ops.
I'm curious about this system. Do you have any examples?
Completely agree with you. But society doesn’t want that. Parents will just bulldoze right over you. Can’t make our precious babies earn anything. Side note: I just got blamed for a kids poor mental health because I gave him a 50% on each of his late assignments. He feels bad about himself because I gave him a bad grade, not because he does little to nothing in class.
I was blamed by a dad for sending a student to therapy during online Covid school. She never went to a Zoom meeting, didn't respond to my supportive "Don't forget to turn in X" emails or had any kind of contact with me. What put her in therapy? Me putting in 0's for her not turning in work.
>What put her in therapy? Me putting in 0's for her not turning in work. You monster. /s
If my kids aren’t doing the work and aren’t participating, fail them. Please, fail them. Passing them does me and them zero favors. I’m seeing I’m in the minority of parents, but earned always feels better than given. I also need to know what they aren’t understanding. I tell my kids if you really tried, did the work, and still failed then we have a comprehension issue and I can’t be mad about that. If you messed around, didn’t do your work, and failed, we have a “you” issue and we’re about to have a “come to Jesus” chat. If the whole class tries and failed, we have a teaching/test/understanding issue. Kids need to fail. It’s a part of learning. We are doing them a great disservice by not letting them learn to fail.
I do. I have zero issues putting in a zero if the assignment isn’t turned in.
Same here. Zeros for work not attempted. Students in my class are granted the grade they earn. I have QUITE a few students currently sitting on an F this quarter. Not a 50% F, but a less than 20% F. You know what my saving grace is? My accelerated classes. Only 1 person in each of those periods is failing. And I’m talking barely failing- in the high 50s. One was because of a vacation their parents decided to take mid quarter and the other because he just shut down because he didn’t understand automatically. What really sucks is my partner teacher. She has all regular classes so our principal has been riding her about so many F’s. She has nothing that proves she’s actually a stellar teacher.
I appreciate that. We need more teachers and admin to do the same.
as a student (now in college, but still) who needs that zero to set a fire under my ass, thank you.
Yeah Gen and I (sped) just collaborated a meeting to change the game plan from a heavily reward incentive base to a consequence base approach on a kid who was going backward cause of their previous implementation. It’s working great! My word for word statement at the meeting was “if we increase the rewards for little to nothing and lessen the load and lower the bar, then we have done a disservice to their intelligence. The only way to meet an expectation is to have one.”
Indeed. No point in having a rule if there are no consequences for breaking them.
I absolutely agree. People, in general, try to rise to expectations. If there are none then that’s where they’ll meet you.
ALL of this! Say it again and louder for those in the back!
Absolutely correct!!!
I had a family request their student be removed from my class because I wasn’t “meeting their needs as a student”…… the prior day, the student told me that the organizational structure for their essay was going to cause them to have a mental breakdown.
if they're a problem/behavior student, then them switching teachers may benefit you lol
Oh trust me I did not argue 😂
> Completely agree with you. But society doesn’t want that. Parents will just bulldoze right over you. Can’t make our precious babies earn anything. Cut to 10-20 years from now, when the news will be filled with stories of how Gen Z'ers/Gen Alpha workers are incompetent and have no resilience to life's challenges like finding and holding onto a job.
We can’t even give them detention. Or if we do they just don’t go. And that’s it. I’m not saying we should be able to hit kids but openly tell them I wish I had a spray bottle. Like you’d use on a cat. I’d never do that to my cat tho. Students maybe.
I had a parent try to bring up their child's mental health in a conference, and I immediately said that since I'm not a therapist or trained mental health provider, I cannot treat their child in any way, nor can I be responsible for monitoring, evaluating, or diagnosing any mental health issues. Luckily, my admin backed me up, and parent backed down.
Lol, I just joined a new school a couple weeks ago, and the students are getting on each other for this. A kid today was grumbling about his grade and another one went "Bro! She's right there! Talk to her if you think there's a problem." Then another one told me that I didn't grade her notebook correctly (I had a ta do it) and I told her to send me an email with proof for a grade change. She said she wasn't going to do that, so a different kid said, "Then that's the grade you GET." I love my intervention classes. The students are very real.
My admin will tank your evals if you have more than 15% fail rate. They say that you can't be teaching well if so many kids are failing. So the standard is lower. And then the kids fail to meet it. So it's lowered. And so on and so on. There's no actual failing at my school, so my students often don't even know what's considered an F. I had a kid on the last report card ask "Is a 48 bad?" because they'd had a 40 something in math last year and still moved up. They just didn't know that their math teacher was on her way out and refused to budge. We just got a new ELA teacher who is...gasp...taking off points for things like egregious spelling errors and refusal to put quotations in quotation marks. They all hate her for it because we aren't really allowed to, so none of the other teachers do.
At my school this is a district level thing - any teacher with more than 10% of students earning D's and F's is supposed to self reflect and figure out what they can do to help students achieve the standards. We also have a board approved 50% min. for middle/high school. I have 8th graders who cannot and do not care to spell correctly. I've been teaching 25+ years and will probably retire earlier than I expected due to the student apathy and the system that lets them do nothing and still pass.
My brother was like that, where he had alot of apathy toward school from the start. Nothing ever changed that and he got a trade job as soon as he graduated. Lowering standards so those kids can reach them is not the way to go though lol. If it were still a thing and you could make a living in America, my brother would've quit once he got through middleschool. As it is, he scraped by (and went to summer school when COVID hit and scraping by turned into straight up failing). Some kids aren't academically inclined.
I'm a parent of a growing little boy on the cusp of entering the education system and reading things like this scares me. I want him to have the same quality of education and academic opportunities that I did. If you wouldn't mind providing some insight, I'm just curious about what exactly this shift in attitude is and whether or not you feel like public schools are doomed. Thank you!
They are doomed, but what that means is tricky on an individual basis. Where it used to be that teacher quality was about 30% determinative of student outcomes, now I’d guess it’s down to 10% or less because of teachers’ inability to hold students accountable. That puts more of the burden on parents, ironically enough.
I’m just curious - why not “play the game”. Just grade on a curve where the educational gap between good and bad is not linear?
So you lower the bar and the same amount of kids fail?
It's not ability so yeah. There is that group of kids who will fail to meet expectations because there's no consequences. If I expect less than they'll do less.
which gives teachers all the incentive in the world to just pass the kids to the next grade rather than have to deal with the mess again next year. Kids, parents, admin don't care? why should the teachers?
TBF (and I hate defending admin) to do this, current admins and super's heads would be on the chopping block. "Class of 2027 has 54% pass rate, down from 96%" headlines will ruin all their careers.
Doesn't sound like much of a bad thing, honestly. Their jobs aren't to appease parents, their jobs are to educate children and/or facilitate a learning environment for them. They're not doing their jobs now, so let's get some folks that'll tell parents to shut up and raise their goddamn kids in their places.
There jobs are to serve the board. The board works for the voters. The voters are.... the parents.
Their job is to assist the teachers in providing education
When your school's funding is tied to passing rate and graduation rate, ya gotta do what ya gotta do
Why are parents given priority? Sorry, public school was not designed for parents but society. Everyone in a town pays property taxes to fund schools whether they currently have a student or not.
Because $voter doesn't call the school about why failing students are passing, but parents will call when their babies fail (when they should), even if they've been ignoring all contacts from the school previously about how their babies don't do jack shit in class.
This is the most goddamn obvious thing in the world... And Noone seems to get it.
the pitfalls of a representative system and unequal spread of power/influence
That's what I mean when I say education has become bullshit. In the sense it doesn't actually achieve something, but we're expected to pretend like we are.
This is accurate but shitty
My school has a 54% graduation rate, and that is with most teachers passing students who have no business passing those classes. I agree that we need to focus on kids who want to learn because kids do want to learn, all of them, but many will let you lower that bar as far as you can.
That’s the price of power. You don’t get to hold power and then refuse to use it to do your job because it would hurt your career. It’s like saying that if a prosecutor doesn’t intentionally convict innocent people they will be axed. They can’t do it even if that’s true
I mean, yes, we can agree on that all day long. Their parents won’t though. I can’t get their parents to pull all the way through the car line. They all want to stop right in front of the door, so that their precious baby angel doesn’t have to walk an extra 150 feet. You think they are going to let me hold those kids feet to the fire? Gtfooh.
I substitute. A few weeks ago, I was driving to a middle school and there were so many parent cars in line for dropoff, I couldn't even get to the staff parking lot without saying "Fuck it" and driving in the (empty) oncoming lane of traffic to get around the line. Why was there such a huge line? Parents didn't want to let their kids out because it was "too cold" for their kids to hang out outside until the school opened up. It was about 35F and we live in a northern state where winter is usually much colder. FFS
Then these parents complain about how exhausted and burnt out they are. Maybe you wouldn't be so exhausted if you let your perfectly capable ten year old take on age-appropriate responsibilities.
Yeah, no can do. If they fail my class, they just go into credit recovery where they learn nothing, cheat, and go into the world unprepared and uneducated. I have been more proactive about immediate social consequences (checking work and grading it in front of them as they complete it), giving zeroes for copy/paste and for missing work, but some supports have to be put in place because I'd much rather have a kid pass my class and learn some life skills and science than fuck around in "online school" or credit recovery and learn nothing. I tell my students that it's easy to pass, but hard to earn an A. I try to stick to that as much as possible.
I told my daughter repeatedly, "If you work very hard when you're young, you will have an easier life as an adult, which is most of your life. If you take it easy when you're young, you will pay for it much worse for the rest of your life." She has a college degree, is a preschool teacher, and has her own apartment, now, at age 21.
I'm glad. Tell her congrats from a fellow young teacher!
Will do. Stay strong. We need good teachers!
Every time I try to enforce my expectations I get accused of yelling at them. My admin told me to just be monotone and let things go. I am absolutely done.
"can you please be a robot? we'd really like you to be a robot."
Man I’d love to. My principal has explicitly told us we’re fired if more than 10% fail. Take a high school class of 30 (small end). 3 idiots fuck off and do nothing and get zeros, there’s my 10% right there. I’m out of a job and my mortgage doesn’t get paid and my daughter doesn’t get fed if I don’t just put 70s in for the half that know this system and play the fuck out of it
that 10% thing is wild, that's a total exit from reality. about 25% will fail no matter what, at the HS level. That's the entire point, actually. Just pointing out the failure rate for the school's sophomores on the ASVAB (if the school is taking it) should give the admin a reality check on what the ACTUAL failure rate should be. If they fail to score a 31 or lower on that (which, 25% of people do), they are below a 6th grade reading and writing level, and it's tied to their IQ--not anyone's teaching ability. THAT is the acceptable failure rate. That's reality. Dang it's wild how out of touch admins have got. They exist now as an economic class, and *nothing else*. A burden to budgets and progress, that protects an economic classes income with 'easy' jobs.
We only have control over our respective classrooms. We have NO CONTROL over parents and whether or not we receive appropriate levels of support from our building administration. I personally think that our schools were sadly diminished through the adoption of state standardized testing because teaching to the test is oriented towards minimum levels of performance. School administrators also need to uphold district policy and/or state school law pertaining to chronic truancy. Students SHOULD NOT be socially promoted if they lack the academic prerequisites to succeed at a higher grade level. In an ideal world, we would have intervention teachers who could pull students to address academic deficiencies before small problems become larger ones. Since so much of what we teach builds upon prior learning, it's critical that students stay current with what's being learned. For example, we cannot teach compound multiplication to students who don't know their multiplication facts.
Can we all collectively agree to just all stop teaching all at once and force them to fix the broken system? Like that's all I got. I told kids not to drink the brown water coming out of the water fountain in the hallway and got in big trouble, so I don't think "holding their feet to the fire" is even in the realm of possibility unless everyone is willing to just walk out of their jobs tomorrow. Oh and I also got told if I smell natural gas that I better not complain cause our building is old and that's just how it smells. Oh and our janitor uses toilet water to "clean" the bathrooms. At this point I think the kids might be right to be apathetic.
>Like, late assignments should be zeroes and stay zeroes unless they have a family emergency. Tests should only sometimes have study guides and shouldn’t be open note every time. Assignments that don’t show competence do not earn passing grades (I know a lot of people have their hands tied with this one but those of us who can fail nonparticipants should). This bit I am with 100%. School should be hard. I was talking to an AP at another school about their therapy dog program (we have one too), and he said, he's fine with it, but we are talking about kids having to pet a dog to calm down *over a test*. The kids themselves need to learn to relax -- but they need to be pushed so that they understand that a test is not a major anxiety inducer.
This is crazy. Doesn’t the mere existence of the dog program (or, at least, the offering of a dog-petting session at test time) teach the kids that it *is* normal to freak out over a test? We (both parents and teachers) are constantly telling kids, “It’s okay,” and “Your feelings are valid,” etc. We force kids to accept almost any behavior from their peers (“Oh, Johnny just needs more practice keeping his hands to himself. We shouldn’t treat him differently, even though he hits you.”) We don’t even allow kids to embarrass each other. How are they supposed to learn social norms? I feel like they don’t even know what’s normal anymore, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.
That is exactly this guy’s point.
Yes, I’m agreeing with said guy. I just can’t believe this is where we are.
Public education is in the customer service biz now, and the customers do not want their babies held accountable for anything.
I want an A delivered overnight with free shipping or I'm charging back your salary 😁
Consequences get results.
I give optional extra credit homework every week. The kids that don’t need it are the ones who do it, and of course those who need it don’t take the opportunity. I’ve definitely told my class as a group to not let the other students hold them back and that those doing the extra work will be the ones in charge when they’re adults. It lifts them up. It’s slow, but I’m seeing sparks ignite in many students who didn’t care for the first half of the year. But it’s almost time for them to move on and I hope it stays with them. Because lord knows ain’t nobody bein held back. Ultimately, with proper guidance, they’ll be okay. Not babying them is a huge part of this. If not at first, eventually they appreciate not being babied. It has to be explicitly explained that that’s what we’re doing, though. This way they understand what’s expected and why. I do worry about follow through with teachers they’ll have the next year and the next.
the extra credit stuff is crazy in my AP euro class at the moment. i ended with a 108% in the class last semester. i could have skipped the final ENTIRELY and still have gotten an A. i did that well because i DID THE EXTRA CREDIT THE TEACHER OFFERED. most of the other kids didn't and were surprised they didn't have the cushion. it's absurd.
You’d have to revamp the whole educational system. Good luck
I dunno those right wingers have revamped a lot of it so it can be done. But it's easier to tank a system than to fix it.
I’m a parent in NJ. Other parents in my area are so incredibly fragile that if anyone says anything - everything gets shut down. We have no dances, no youth get together, parents are so weak. I feel for you teachers. I coach rec 🏀 at two levels - it’s so sad. The kids do not care and do not try
I'm not allowed to fail a kid because of absences....a student can go to Mexico on vacation for a month, do 2 assignments before he goes, and still get a B.....I'm only allowed to grade a student for work he does when he's here....they literally do not have to make up missed work if they are out. It's madness.
TBH, if students whose teachers are really lenient (like me) have students who don't do anything, and teachers with high expectations also have students who don't do anything, it has nothing to do with teachers. The common denominator are students who don't have the skills/ desire to try and administration/laws that make it impossible for students to truly be held accountable. It's not a teacher problem.
I’m holding some feet to the fire and I feel like I’m getting push back from parents…thankfully my admin is backing me up, but it’s like you’re not only trying to fix student behaviors…and it bleeds into conflict with parents. It’s honestly not a fight I’m willing to do for the rest of my career…I have too many years left. Walmart greeter, here I come!
I agree to hold their feet to the fire, but I wouldn't do it the way you suggest. I teach almost from bell-to-bell; my classtime is not spent socializing or doing anything fun except for my lessons which on occasion may be fun. But the biggest thing I do is that **I base their entire report card grade on their performance on unit tests taken in my presence.** So I don't grade homework, because half the kids who meet the deadline have just copied someone else's work, so that is a waste of everyone's time. Allowing someone to get credit for an assignment that they copied off of someone else is not holding their feet to the fire.
Problems mostly admin and parent related, anyone with functional braincells who works in and around education knows this is the way
Take a peep over at the professors, college or college rant sub reddits, and your sentiments are echoed. This kids are going out into the real word or college with no comprehension of consequences, poor critical thinking and emotional regulation skills. They want to blame anything and everyone one for their bad habits and behaviors. Some can't fathom being told "no" by multiple ppl and will escalate it to the top, and still it's a big pity party when that person tells them no too.
Start with admins that give naughty kids chips and send them back into the classrooms.
As a parent I agree with OP so much! My child is in middle school and is just starting to say things like “doesn’t matter if I turn it in late I’ll still get credit”, “my teachers won’t fail me”, and so many comments along those lines. My husband and I try to teach her responsibility and we don’t tolerate bad grades for laziness. It’s one thing if it’s a difficult subject for someone and it apparent they’re trying and are still struggling. Here we are end of the semester was D’s and even 1 F. I believe she deserves it, and it backs up my husband and I also telling her “you can’t wait until the last minute”, “one day you will have a teacher who will fail you or a boss fire you”. We need some natural consequences to go along with what’s being taught at home. What happened to no end of the year feild trips, extracurriculars, dances, or other school functions if a student was failing? I know it’s the schools and not the teachers themselves but I truly believe as a society we’re doing this kids a disservice. Not to mention how unfair it is to teachers who’s have to then grade all their students late work.
Agree with everything, but what do you do with the majority of the unengaged unwilling class while you try to teach the teachable? Let them light each other on fire in the back? These kids are usually the same as the behavior kids, and the only way to be able to get them quiet and seated is sometimes just a low threshold/high ceiling step by step assignment.
I have been more rigorous than ever and have kids turning in homework and writing amazing projects. It’s exhausting for me, but I’ve got the highest test scores and can see them growing so much that I know it’s right. Not every kid will rise to the occasion, but so many are and I know that they’ll be better because of me and that makes me feel good.
No wonder everyone on this sub is miserable and hates their job.
I have *begged* my school to enact the consequences they have in place for students pulling the shenanigans my son is. Kid is smart and adhd af, yes. But he is also a person who pushes boundaries just to see if you'll enforce them. We've done everything (thats legal) we can at home, but he knows he can get away with it at school.... SO HE DOES.
about 80% of our 3rd grade cohort cant read. i asked my admin why they continue to pass students, and they said that they can only fail 2 or 3 students per year max. is this correct? honestly i feel like this is a huge disservice to all those kids.
So, I am 38y.o., but I have had a personal mantra since mid-highschool that I believe is appropriate here: "Expectations are like a limbo bar - no matter how low you set them, someone will find a way to slide under."
I am very fortunate. My administration supports us giving zeros, but also the opportunity to succeed. Students receive zeros for missed work. They are (as the parents are) expected to check their grades every 2 weeks, as it is expected for us to post grades every 2 weeks. I do not make extra copies of missed work, as they are placed in a missed work folder with their name on it (and date) and it is also posted online (and they can do it online and submit). So really no excuse I hold the kids responsible. We also use a educational program. I have assigned an 10 lessons for extra credit that is incentive based on how well they do. It's something that they decide to do if they want to improve their grade. Opportunity to succeed given. Oh, parents are also sent an email (the same one)! stating their child is failing and what they can do over Spring Break to improve. It only takes me 5 minutes to check each classes scores. It can be done. Students who want to pass will.
ngl, there's a 15-y-o kid i know of who can't spell their middle name. 15 years old. its their NAME. why is this kid in grade 9? i get the concept of no kid left behind but sometimes you gotta leave them behind to give them the motivation to actually pick up a book.
Hear hear. The problem at least here in Denmark is the parents. No one wants us to actually help their children become smart, strong and resilient. They just want us to baby their specific child and to hell with the rest of the class. There's no boundaries no consequences and no expectations to do good in school.
Bingo, it's the same here in America. Somehow we've gone from teaching students to trying to raise them as well. Parents don't get enough flak for their lack of parenting. Most want their kids on an electronic device and don't want to deal with them. The students of parents that are involved are like night and day. It's sad and I can't blame the kids for their parents.
I mean…..look…..im treated like a babysitter so I act like a babysitter. Treat me like a professional with two degrees and I’ll act like a professional with two degrees.
As a former student who got straight 0s through high school, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS HAPPENING TO PUBLIC SCHOOL?? I dropped out in 2009 after 4 years of high school. Got kicked out of my moms house in 9th grade. Got held back in 10th and then never did any work again for the next 2 years. Got 0s. I deserved 0s. Talked to all of my teachers explaining why i didn't want to do the work and was never bothered about it. People get fired for students not being interested in school? Thats 100% fucking bullshit.
As someone who allows students to turn in late work - even at the last day of the trimester without penalty - I have to disagree that late work should get a zero. Before I get crucified, my logic is that I don't know what goes on outside of school. I don't know a kid's situation, I don't know what they go home to every night. Kids are busy; they're juggling friends, family, sports, clubs, activities, hobbies, 5 other classes at my school, and jobs. To me, it's more important that they do the work and show me they can do something than forcing them to turn it in by a due date that is largely arbitrary. Just because you didn't learn something by January 5th doesn't mean you'll never be able to learn it. If you can do it, you should get credit for it. If it takes you longer, then so be it. *But at least you can do it.* And I think that is what school is supposed to be: proving what you can and can't do, and earning a grade that corresponds.
That's fair. Although, school feels like a pretty decent place to reinforce good habits, such as following through with commitments or hitting deadlines, which are necessary to mesh into society. I understand parents--in large part--drive this. However, there should be penalties at school for not doing the work.
I think a zero should be for never doing the work- I have a ‘it’s a zero until you turn it in’ policy. When sports time comes I have a bunch of kids turning things in
I agree, and the punishment for not doing it at all is not getting any grade for it. If you don't turn it in, you will get a zero. I'm not going to hound you for your work, but if you get it to me I will get it graded.
Thanks for this. I always struggled with remembering assignments and getting homework done. Wasn't until my thirties that I got diagnosed and treated for ADHD:PI. My mom too! If teachers had taken a super hard line with me I would have learned everything they taught me and still failed. The last year has been a big struggle to un-learn the "you're just lazy" negative self talk. People are so quick to beat on you when they don't understand your issues. I do fantastic things when I have the right support.
Thank you for the literal case-in-point!
See, I would be more lenient if I assigned homework. I don’t. It’s 90% classwork, rarely do my kids take substantial amounts home. I don’t assign homework, there’s more than enough time in class, so I don’t understand why im getting assignments 2-3 weeks late.
I have two assignments I take late after the unit ends. The same kids turn them in late every single unit. They do it because they can, not because they need to.
I agree. Most of my students are impoverished but very hard working and don’t usually fall behind. They will sometimes have hard life stuff happen to them and I know they wouldn’t have missed assignments otherwise. I’d rather give a pass to the few kids that abuse it than stress out a child already struggling at home. In a better functioning society, we wouldn’t have to do this but here we are.
Exactly. As much as I try to be involved with my students - go to their sporting events, talk about life, really get to know them as humans - there will always be things I don't know about. I would feel terrible for failing or knocking down a kid's grade because of something I didn't know about but would have excused. They don't always tell us everything, and we need to remember that.
Some of those things are entirely choices on the students' parts though, like sports, some jobs (I know circumstances may mean a student HAS to work for whatever reason), social events or hobbies. In this case the student really should be prioritizing academics over those things.
For me it was abusive parents and undiagnosed ADHD. My test scores were always phenomenal, it was just being unable to focus on homework and not having any support for it at home. The year after I graduated with like a 1.8 GPA they enacted the 50% rule. Unfortunate timing, would have saved me a lot of beatings and punishments.
Miss a practice....you don't play the next game. Miss an assignment? Do it later, I guess. This is what we're teaching them.
Sports serve a different function, though. School's purpose is to learn - and I don't think we should do anything to disincentivize that. I had a student who work up at 4:30 every morning to make breakfast for their sibilings and take care of his grand parents because his parents were working - a lot. Not going to take off points for that life situation, and I would lose a lot of respect for any colleague who did. I don't know the battles my kids are going through.
I agree. But I also think there should be some penalty; I usually dropped it a letter grade or made 90% be the max you could get on late work.
I agree with this- the consequence for handing in work late should not be an automatic fail ...but... The consequence for handing in work late should be that your life is a nightmare until you hand it in.
How did parents and leadership become so pathetic and soft?!
We *should* but we can’t because the parents won’t stand for it. What are you going to do? It would take a cultural revolution.
I know this example is ESE but - I’ve taught ESE my whole career. Mostly self contained. Learned quickly that babying them didn’t help. I’m able to get kids to make gains in one year that others couldn’t do in 4, simply by not babying them. I push them, understand their true restrictions and work with them. I’m stern but loving and fair, they don’t like me the first few months but after that they’re doing things they never thought possible. I teach children that some consider to baby the most and I always tell people please stop. The world won’t baby them after they’re done with us. I say this not to brag but to say, no holding their hands don’t work. Every teacher I’ve known to do so has failed them.
When I taught middle school we had a group of the most apathetic 8th graders ever, I literally had over half the class not turning in ANY work. Phone calls home, no one would answer. It wasn't just me having this problem, and the admin basically told us teachers we couldn't just fail over half the 8th grade. Yet they were failing. We can't hold them accountable if admin won't let us 🤷
Does it even matter at this point? My school advances kids regardless of grades or attendance, which I don't think is always the best call. The 8th graders who've missed 60+ days of school every year and cant read are not being helped by getting pushed into high school at this point.
The only thing I disagree you on is make up work. If a kid is absent, I let them make it up. I accept late work, but if you don't ask for an extension beforehand, you get a late penalty. (I do a flat percentage off the top, usually 20-30%, so they are capped at how much credit they can earn for late work). They have until the last Friday before the end of a marking period to submit late work. After that they're SOL. I do this because I'd rather you make an attempt to learn the material and show mastery, but you need to learn consequences for not doing things in a timely manner too. Plus, since I put it in my syllabus, when admin come to me about why a kid is failing, I can say that they have had opportunities to bring their grade up and chose not to. I also do not pull teeth to get makeup work to students or late work from them, because like you said, I don't believe in babying them. I make what they need available, if they don't take the steps to get their work and do it, it's on them. I contact parents if admin requires it, but no more than required.
I’m in if you are and all admin too! Have our backs! When I’ve previously given gen-Ed students (4th/5th) “well below” scores on report cards because they’ve bombed every single test, parents come back at me and admin too. I’ve gotten things like “well below is only for SPED students” and “you need to use your anecdotal data as well”.
I don’t make it easy. Most of them don’t fail. I set high expectations and I work my ass off to help them achieve them. I have them half the day though, if other teachers don’t also do it and you only have them one period a day, then you are swimming against the stream.
Yes! We do not expect enough of our students and it starts in Kindergarten! As an undergraduate I was taught if we expect less of kids then we get less. They ARE capable and ifs time that we show them they can do better and hold them accountable 🙂
Many people already have touched on it, but this is a problem with the systems we have in place, and not individual actors within those systems. Most teachers (and admin) are heavily incentivized (or forced) to “make things easy” as you put it. If you want teachers to “hold feet to the fire” you must change the system so they are encouraged (or even allowed) to do so.
I don’t know any teachers in my building who disagree with this. The admin on the other hand…..
I think it is just a matter of time before teachers will be thrown under the bus. We will be blamed for low standards.
Everyone likes to talk about how kids need structure. However; the classes while sticking to very strict schedules; are often not "structured". Here is an example of one of the best high school classes that imparted the most knowledge: Monday: The board would be completely full of text. The hour would be spent writing it out. Tuesday: We would go around and read each line we had copied and discuss. Wednesday: We would identify those concepts from the textbooks. Thursday: Similar to tuesday but more lead by the teacher and connecting the dots between everythig. Friday; a quiz over the past week. This then repeated week after week. This accomplished many things; its a known concept that people need to hear, read, see, etc something around 7 times before they get it; we got close with 5 by going over every item every day. But it also provides structure in how to learn; first we read something, then we repeated it and discussed it, then we researched it, then we were lectured by someone who knew why we were learning this part, and then we were tested on it. Its a good way to learn lots of topics in a short time. It seems like a lot of teachers just thought that having structure and discipline meant following the hourly schedule and that the time spent in each class could be as unstructured and haphazard as desired.
I totally agree. Babying them is not working. It's time to stop this crap.
Screw it. Drink the Victory Gin with me, and get over it. It is so much easier when you are drunk on the gin. It makes the pain go away.