Make no mistake, this is a rant.

Last year I wrote Being “special” can ruin your children’s lives; yesterday at Small Business Boomers Jean ranted about Millennials’ atrocious writing skills, a subject I’ve bemoaned here multiple times—and not just Millennials!.

Today, at Leadership Turn, CandidProf, a regular on Thursday, talks about education now and what he foresees as a result of additional schools adopting rules similar to those enacted by the Dallas School System.

Previous complaining about the results of today’s education pales to insignificant when considering the long-term results of what Dallas has done.

Consider,

• “…the new rules require teachers to accept late work and prevent them from penalizing students for missed deadlines. Homework grades that would drag down a student’s overall average will be thrown out.
• District records state that the changes are part of a switch to “effort-based” grading and are designed to give students multiple opportunities to demonstrate that they’ve mastered class material.
• Requiring teachers to contact parents instead of awarding zeros is designed to increase home-school communications…
• Retests and deadline extensions are meant to motivate students to do better after initial failure.”

In other words there are no penalties for not doing the work and the tests don’t count since students can take the exact same test over and over until they get a good grade and their previous efforts are deleted from their records.

As to the over-worked/under-paid teachers, do you think that many will take the time to call every parent whose child’s homework isn’t turned in on time. 20+ kids in the class times an average 15 minute call talking to a parent who is more likely to heap abuse on the teacher while defending their perfect child.

It’s not worth it, so the kids will pass.

Pass on to college not only unable, but also unwilling to learn—forcing colleges to dumb down their classes, too.

According to Denise Collier, the district’s chief academic officer “The purpose behind it is to ensure fair and credible evaluation of learning – from grade to grade and school to school.”

Fair to whom?

The students who work hard or the ones who consider teachers lucky that their classroom is graced with their presence.

Fair to the teachers who get those students the following year, and the year after and the year after that…

Even previous graduates think it’s stupid, “Babying the rules so that [students] have almost unlimited chances to pass, that’s unreal,” said Joshua Perry, a 2007 graduate of Skyline High School. “In the real world, you don’t get a whole lot of chances or other ways to make something up.”

But it’s after college that you, my dear readers, come into play.

Because these are the same kids you will be forced to hire and rely on to move your company forward.

And if that doesn’t scare the hell out of you let me know what drugs you’re on and I’ll get some, because it sure scares it out of me.

Image credit: adienache CC license

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 4:30 am and is filed under Business info, Communication, How Stupid Can You Get, Leadership's Future, Personal Growth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: Dallas Public Schools, education, Millennials, parents, school
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.