In reality, public education exists to prop up the housing market, I.e. “I need to get into this neighborhood for my kids,” and as we saw during COVID, it’s fundamentally a place of day care for two-income families (or one-income families), with an element of providing meals. At this point, I am not sure it is much more than that. I have a limited understanding of public education, as I don’t have kids of my own, but I was a Teach for America (read: potential white savior) teacher for a few years about 18 years ago.
I also realize that we ideologized all the socially-relevant jobs of late, including teachers.
Now look at this Jessica Grose column.
There’s a lot of crazy sh*t in there about education, but let me give you a few:
Failure is a bad word — and the kids know it. It takes way more work to hold a student accountable than to simply pass him/her. Even if a kid does nothing all year, we are encouraged to find a way to pass him/her. And then, of course, when a student does not perform, parents often want to know what we are going to do about it — not what their child can do.
OK. That one seems to speak to bad parenting.
Part of the issue is grade inflation. As Chalkbeat reported last year, “Even as students have taken higher-level courses, their G.P.A.s have steadily risen — from an average of 2.68 in 1990 to 2.94 in 2000, 3.0 in 2009 and 3.11 in 2019.” At the same time, test scores on national exams have dropped or remained unchanged, which suggests that students aren’t actually better prepared in math, English or science than they were 20 years ago. The lack of basic skills has been evident for a while: Many two- and four-year colleges devote significant resources to remedial education.
OK. That’s cooked books.
Several teachers whom I spoke with or who responded to my questionnaire mentioned policies stating that students cannot get lower than a 50 percent on any assignment, even if the work was never done, in some cases. A teacher from Chapel Hill, N.C., who filled in the questionnaire’s “name” field with “No, no, no,” said the 50 percent floor and “NO attendance enforcement” leads to a scenario where “we get students who skip over 100 days, have a 50 percent, complete a couple of assignments to tip over into 59.5 percent and then pass.”
OK. So no focus on true student achievement — just move them along. An Amazon warehouse job must be waiting somewhere, right?
Warren also told me that in her relatively affluent Massachusetts district, parents were hyper-focused on grades and frequently pushed back when they weren’t happy, which led to many teachers playing it safe because they didn’t want the agita, including possible escalation to the principal. “Tests could be retaken and assignments perfected. No failing grades. If teachers are conscientious, this creates an enormous amount of work. If teachers are not conscientious, kids are just sliding by,” she wrote in the questionnaire. “Teachers know it and kids know it.”
This is from a Stanford education professor:
I am struck by the seeming contradiction between multiple measures of academic engagement and learning (e.g., sharply increased absenteeism, declining achievement) and the increases in high-school graduation we are seeing in some places. For example, the four-year high-school graduation rate in California increased from 84.5 percent in 2018–19 to 87.0 percent in 2021–22. That’s a large increase, and a surprising one given that the state’s chronic-absenteeism rate more than doubled over the same period. On a more granular level, I also note that Los Angeles Unified recently celebrated its “record-setting” graduation rate. Over the same period, its chronic absenteeism rate increased.
So everyone is absent, but everyone is … graduating?
It feels like public education is at a point where we need to blow it up and consider a new model. Obviously that’s very hard.
What say you?