Student passes 3 classes in 4 years, ranks near top half of class with 0.13 GPA
foxbaltimore.com
foxbaltimore.com
I feel really bad for the kids going to schools like this. One-third of the kids ruin it for everyone else. They show up, don't do anything and make sure to pull everyone else down by being as disruptive as possible. They threaten the teachers and the other students. They destroy school property. They treat school as a place to hang out with others that simply prey on the physically weaker kids. This all happens right under the disinterested teachers noses. The most violent, the most criminal elements end up controlling the environment of the school.
As a child, I didn't realize that this was unusual. I just believed that this Lord of the Flies style environment was what everyone was going through in school. My parents had grown up on farms and didn't understand what an urban school was like and so were of no help.
I learned very little in these schools. What I did learn though was not to be on the streets after school let out. It was a rough neighborhood, and it was simply not safe walking home after school. Fortunately, there was a large, safe, well supplied public library very close to the school. I would hang out there reading after school until dinner time, and then when the gangs had thinned out I would make my way home.
One thing saved me from this hell, books. At the library, seeking refuge from the thugs out on the street, I started reading and developed a love of learning on my own. I read every science and math book I could and decades of science periodicals, I asked my father to buy me paper so I could work on my diagrams and drawings of my ideas and "inventions" at home. Ultimately, I escaped Detroit, I went to MIT, and now I live a great life.
For whatever reason, not everyone has an aptitude for learning math and science on their own, but these kids could be helped if the schools worked. I don't know the solution, but many of the schools in these urban school districts don't work, the schools should be torn down, and everyone that works at these schools should be fired. It is an American tragedy and something needs to be done.
There are usually about 180 days in a school year meaning this student was absent more than than 50% of the time. At what point is it no longer the school's fault?
What the school is hoping for is that he'll voluntarily drop out and - maybe - get his GED. That's usually the only out they're given.
Because schools don't fail kids or hold them back as a matter of policy, and honestly, that doesn't matter. That's not excuse for the mother not knowing what's going on.
>hey passed him without even notifying her that he was absent so often
Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but she should take an interest. She's raising him. And it isn't like he failed one test. It's years of failed classes and truancy. Are you telling me a parent wouldn't see the signs that would make them at least go and talk to his teachers to see what's going on?
If you don't have enough time to raise your children properly, that's 100% on you. Having children is a choice, and the costs of that choice should not be imposed on society at large.
Why not? Why do you accept that as truth? What's the alternative? There's no point in arguing what she should have done because we can't change the past, she's here with three kids, so what do we do now? Just let them rot or help them out? I mean I suppose we could just murder all poor people and be done with it, but that's not really a society I want to be a part of.
When you see someone trip and fall, do you get down and tell them they should have watched where they were walking then kick them in the ribs before you walk off?
There is, so we can prevent the next person from making the same mistake.
You can't save a sinking ship with a bucket alone. You have to plug the leak.
So you’re opposed to parents who take whatever work they can get in order to support their families. By your previous statement, you’re probably also against welfare, as that also externalises the costs. It sounds like you’re against the idea that people should be allowed to procreate unless they’re rich?
That's of course not to say that there aren't genuinely awful people and parents out there, but often they're not spending every waking hour working to support their kids, with little to nothing remaining after bills are paid.
Are you saying that's the most likely case here?
Better to figure out how we can support these people so that their lives aren't filled with such abject suffering than to say "they (retroactively) shouldn't have kids."
Yes, by supplying them with adequate family planning education and free access to contraceptives so they understand the risk and burden of parenthood before inflicting it upon themselves.
Let's also help those that have been left behind though. We have the ability to help everyone.
1. "No child left behind".
2. Common core. Which is inherently very racist and damaging to high performing kids.
Often the war on white privilege manifests itself as preventing white success rather than helping PoC. Families that help their children with math homework have been irritated that students often get no credit on math homework if they use the older arithmetic methods. Rather than allowing students to use any valid mathematical principles to learn, children are forced to use a new system that (in my opinion) generates extra work to achieve the correct result.
I dated a teacher many years ago, long before the political climate shift, and she constantly ranted about how common core was slowing her students down. At the time I didn’t understand much (and didn’t ask her to elaborate much), but it’s been interesting seeing her rants validated the last couple of years.
Common core makes sense when a student struggles with the traditional methods. But forcing all students to use it, and it’s historical background of being driven by racial issues, is a damning sign that it’s intentionally holding high performers (often White or Asian) back.
I have enough time to get the nuance of common core and help my child but plenty of others don't have that luxury of time.
Khan Academy, for example, conforms to the Common Core perfectly.
In the Age of Google, it shouldn't be hard to summon the relevant passages which are problematic so that everyone can discuss them. But the vagueness of critique is a tell that someone doesn't care to lead with detail.
For instance on the math side, a focus on numeracy rather than rote memory gives students without access to extra out of school resources another set of tools to approach later math classes on their own.
On top of that, a focus numeracy also helps out privileged students as well and IMO actually teaches math rather than just arthimetic. It'll actually be useful in an age where everyone has multi ghz calculator in their pocket.
Everyone wins.
This whole discussion reminds me of the push back against New Math, where the changes in education were described by some as a soviet plot. No, we just keep making improvements to how we teach each generation, using the data we got from the previous gens.
How does "everyone win" when students who understand math are failing tests because they're not using an absurd roundabout method of multiplying numbers?
You did, by implying that an emphasis on less privileged students harms more privileged students, and that this was in fact the goal of common core. You continue down this assumption further in your post.
> What I did mention was that students who were able to comprehend mathematics using the traditional arithmetic techniques were not getting credit for their work, because the education system was forcing a new thought model for learning elementary math.
The whole point is to demphasize lucking into or remembering the right answer, but demonstrating true mathematical understanding via different forms of symbol manipulation. Memorizing times tables doesn't help students when they have a computer measured in 10s to 100s of GLOPS in their pocket, but a deeper understanding of numerical relationships does.
They don't get credit for their assignment, because they didn't do the assignment, or fulfill the assignment's goals.
> The fact that this new model, Common Core, was specifically designed to reduce privelege[sic]
Giving less privileged children more tools to understand higher math takes nothing away from more privileged children.
> How does "everyone win" when students who understand math are failing tests because they're not using an absurd roundabout method of multiplying numbers?
Because the point of the assignment isn't teaching them multiplication, it's to teach them numeracy. Just because parents (and a lot of K-5 teachers) were failed in that regard doesn't mean we should lower the bar or continue teaching in ways that don't prepare students for the modern world.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with common core, but it starts actually at addition and subtraction, before students even get to memorizing multiplication tables. The traditional method of "borrowing a 1" from the next digit is no longer a valid method of showing work for multi-digit subtraction. This is the method most of us learned on just fine. It works, it doesn't abstract away any numerical concepts. Again, if students struggle, I'm all for alternative methods. But forcing students with solid comprehension into "finding a zero" can do more damage than good.
>Giving less privileged children more tools to understand higher math takes nothing away from more privileged children.
I just explained how students who grasp the math are forced to learn a new method, one that often adds unnecessary confusion. You would be correct if students were allowed to use the methods they understood (assuming the methods are mathmatically sound)
You're clearly arguing in bad faith, I wish you all the best with your trolling career
These students aren't successful by definition. They're students that are failing the assignments. The goal isn't arithmetic, it's numeracy. Greater numeracy helps "successful" students as well.
> I'm not sure how familiar you are with common core, but it starts actually at addition and subtraction..
The whole point of common core is that there's next to no emphasis on teaching arithmetic but instead numerical relationships. Yes, the borrow a one method is still taught _in addition_ to other numerical relationships. The point of these assignments isn't to get to 3 + 9 = 12 (because everyone is surrounded by equipment that'll make that determination before your brain has processed what your retina sees). If you have children who can't demonstrate these different forms of numerical relationships, but only have a memorized algorithm, then sort of by definition they don't have solid comprehension of the concepts being taught, and unsurprisingly fail the assignment.
> I just explained how students who grasp the math...
And I explained how your view of the goal is wrong. We're not teaching arithmetic, we're teaching numeracy. It's like how in higher math if you just state an answer without your proof chain, you fail. The point isn't seeing if you can crank away at the calculations, it's if you understand the different, specific logical relationships between numbers.
These students failing aren't "grasping the math", they're not demonstrating the mathematical concepts being taught and falling back to another (most likely rote) method.
Math isn't arithmetic.
> You're clearly arguing in bad faith, I wish you all the best with your trolling career
I'd prefer if you kept HN conversations civil even if you disagree with the person you're communicating with.
Same, which is why I will continue to walk away from straw man arguments.
> Often the war on white privilege manifests itself as preventing white success rather than helping PoC.
other than you intrinsically view common core as a zero sum strategy, that's taking from privileged students to as a strategy to relatively help less privileged students?
Addressing your point head on isn't making a strawman argument, and doesn't make me a troll.
Would you care to address my point, that your understanding of student success is wrong here, and that's the core of your misunderstanding, and they are in fact helping students across the privilege spectrum? Or will you just continue to call people who disagree with you trolls?
* I didn't say education was a zero sum game, I said that forcing this pedagogical style was harming successful students.
* I don't even know how to address your arguments because you're inserting claims I did not make. Again you're saying I intrinsically view common core as a zero sum strategy? When I just want students to be able to learn in the method they understand, whether that is Common Core, or not.
These are straw man arguments, you are the one who is not addressing my points. So yes, you are trolling, currently. And I call it out when I see it.
That person _is_ a teacher in addition to creating common core. Common core was designed by teachers overall.
The title of the video is literally "Teacher admits he helped write Common Core to end white privilege"
> I didn't say education was a zero sum game, I said that forcing this pedagogical style was harming successful students
..to help non "successful" students. When someone says "we did this to help this subset" and you use that as proof that they're intending to harm another subset, that's the definition of a zero sum argument.
You're also continuing to not address the root of my argument, falling back on name calling.
The Common Core specifications for any grade are very sparse, and simply lists learning goals for the year. It takes 5-10 minutes to read over an entire grade.
> Find whole-number quotients and remainders with up to four-digit dividends and one-digit divisors, using strategies based on place value, the properties of operations, and/or the relationship between multiplication and division. Illustrate and explain the calculation by using equations, rectangular arrays, and/or area models.
This is the level of specification that the Common Core will offer. Where do you find the story that borrowing is not to receive credit, or is not to be taught?
To anyone who has been paying attention, the Common Core advances the CA math curriculum by about 0.5 years, and that's really about it. Students are absolutely learning the same math. Khan Academy is an example of a curriculum which conforms Perfectly to the Common Core.
There's nothing racial about it, and it's quite a reasonable curriculum for math in the sum of all things.
That's the idea, but there's no evidence of actual improvement in, say, student math skills.
For instance:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/a-progress-report-on-the-...
"The 2012 Brown Center Report predicted, based on empirical analysis of the effects of state standards, that the CCSS will have little to no impact on student achievement. Supporters of the Common Core argue that strong, effective implementation of the standards will sweep away such skepticism by producing lasting, significant gains in student learning. So far, at least—and it is admittedly the early innings of a long ballgame—there are no signs of such an impressive accomplishment."
That's the context of your cherry picked sentence, that even a foundation expecting no benefits found them, and is left with trying to downplay those findings.
And that's to be expected, a long tail of continued improvements as the students get older and the benefits of increased numeracy in higher math pay off, and as we get better at communicating to K-5 teachers (who, frankly probably didn't have the best math background either) start grasping the meta point of what's being taught.
> States that more aggressively implemented the CCSS registered larger gains from 2009-2013. That’s an optimistic finding for CCSS.
Even they find that clear data that states implementing CCSS have better outcomes, only a few years after implementation, that correlates with how aggressively CCSS was rolled out in the state.
I provided this source because they're ideologically opposed to CCSS, but even they admit that there's a positive effect early in the roll out. The rest is them bending over backwards trying to explain why their own data doesn't actually matter. In short I cited them because it's one of the best cases for the antithesis of my argument and it still proves what I'm saying.
> and was late or absent 272 days
And the mother's statement:
> He didn't fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job. They failed. They failed, that's the problem here. They failed. They failed. He didn't deserve that.
There's got to be far more than just the school failing here.
It's almost ridiclous.
If students don't show up, don't care, have absolutely no interest in paying attention, are more concerned with social structure etc. then a top prep-school would have the same outcomes.
The blame and externalizations is part of the problem.
The teachers are basically heroes.
The families, students, communities are completely broken, that's the problem.
What? Why are the teachers basically heroes for letting a student to the next grade while he's failing that much? And also not informing the parent about it? Huh?
This line of thinking is really insulting to teachers.
Do you think for a moment the teachers have a right one way or the other to fail those students?
What would happen when the teacher decides to fail 80% of a class? Do you think that's allowed? Not for a second.
And 'informing the parent about attendance'?
You think the parents generally care one bit?
You think the parents don't know their kids are never in class?
What kind of parent 'discovers' their kid has not been in school for 2 years?!?
That it's the teachers responsibility to spend 4 hours on the phone every day as 70% of her class doesn't show up?
It is the expectation that students:
1) Show up. 2) Paid attention. 3) Don't join gangs. 4) Try to finish the work.
If they do those things, they will get an education.
Beyond that, it's really hard for schools - a school can handle a 'small handful' of special cases, but not much more.
The fact that this parent didn't know so many things for so long means that they are absentee. But they are holding 3 jobs, and for them to not know also indicates the failure of the school to keep the parent informed.
Sure, but it's also typical for school admin to lie about the same thing happening when it did not.
parents are normal people too, they sometimes suck too, just move on.
Promotion policy is probably administrators, not teachers. (There are other reasons, like the lack of apparent attempted active contact from teachers despite the number of failed classes, absences, etc., why the teachers here are not heros, but promotion policy probably isn't something they control.)
They basically just showed up to work and rubber-stamped everyone on to the next grade. Tell me what about this makes them heroes.
Most of them could quit and just go elsewhere - often they do the work because they view it as a social responsibility.
Everything they do beyond 'showing up and teaching' is beyond their duty, and most of them do.
This whole bit about 'rubber stamping to the next grade' is a misunderstanding of the situation -> they don't have the power to fail students en masse.
I suggest >80% of teachers would be happy to 'fail' students if that were allowable. They'd probably love to have classes of 8-10 students which is probably the necessary level of attention required.
If teachers acted rationally they would quit and leave - frankly I think they should, let the communities deep problems be exposed for what they are.
It’s quite rationale to stay in a position and get paid in order to pay bills, manage life, etc.
In this case it’s not really to the benefit of their students, so they are sacrificing their happiness in vain.
If most people are failing, then it's not a case of bad decisions, it's a systems issue.
It's stupid to try to apply personal responsibility to average behaviour. Groups of people do things for reasons.
If a kid is doing a job or twoand the mom 3 and he's missed several days of class because the family is literally trying to keep its life afloat, can you fault that kid for not knowing how to read?
It's easy to make bold statements and declare the failing of others when you're not the one living it.
Life. can. be. hard. To a degree that nearly everyone on this forum especially cannot begin to comprehend.
Bullshit. I'm exactly who you describe. I went to a top prep highschool. I jerked off for four years, doing no serious work and giving no fucks. I coasted to graduation with a 2.0 grade average, a feat that I repeated in college for my five-and-a-half year bachelor degree.
I now have a career, a house, and various other fixings of middle class life because I was a white kid in a wealthy area code, and was thus afforded enough attention to spare me from my own foolishness.
> “He feels embarrassed, he feels like a failure,” France said of her son. “I'm like, you can't feel like that. And you have to be strong and you got to keep fighting. Life is about fighting. Things happen, but you got to keep fighting. And he's willing, he's trying, but who would he turn to when the people that's supposed to help him is not? Who do he turn to?”
Her son is the victim? Maybe that school is not the best, but the student made the choice to skip classes and not tell anyone. He's not the victim, he's actually a failure because he failed most of his classes, and he needs to learn from that and take school seriously, or stop pretending he's studying.
Losing three years is a fair exchange for the three years of freedom he loaned from his future.
He's a kid. He made bad decisions. He needs support, role models and being gently but firmly held accountable for his decisions in a way that ramps up gradually. I don't see these things in this story.
The school informed his mom of his grades but - at least as reported here - didn't explain the eventual consequences to her. They did not impose the 'natural' consequences of not progressing in classes that she was expecting. There's a communication failure there, a weird policy, and a failure to escalate this case. He was not held accountable for his decisions regularly with gradually increasing stakes. There's also the bad reassuring incentive provided by publishing his peer ranking in a failing peer group.
The mom also apparently did not escalate these very bad grades and attendance into a major issue for her son. She didn't go down there and dig into it. And now she is avoiding any overall responsibility for the bad situation he is in. Perhaps she didn't learn personal accountability at school. Certainly she trusted the school too much.
Shit is messed up.
But we take schooling as a shared responsibility, and that's the only piece of this puzzle we have collective control over, so let's focus on how that can be improved. It's a long game. The kids of educated kids will almost always be educated. Blaming the mom is not productive. Calling the kid a failure is unhelpful.
This is not exclusive to failure. He failed AND he needs help.
I think the issue here is that missing 270 days of school requires some detailed explanation. There’s a reason, but having once been a teenager the most reasonable is that he skipped a lot of school.
Blaming “the system” for this level of just plain missingness is not telling the whole story.
Unless you want to go deeper in that the underlying condition that made it hard for the parent to not check grades in 4 years and the kid to skip that much school without anyone noticing.
Bingo. Not the only thing of course (as you mention some issues with schools government funding structures) but a critical one.
Although I've learned talking about culture is often taboo in academia and polite serious conversation. You have to be extremely careful so many don't breach the subject at all, so it gets ignored like many important obvious things. Like "The Wire" it's easier to show it in it's raw form than to analyze it in discussion or in papers.
But still it's a giant elephant in the room which I experienced heavily as a poor performing student early on in my life. Before I (fortunately out of circumstance with my single mother) moved to a better environment and set of friends.
That's the difference. This kid was failed by the all of the adults who's fucking job it is to care for him.
- That the school will teach what they are required to teach
- That the school will track absences/lates
- That the school will notify the parent if they see that the child is falling behind at either of those
Having seen similar cases myself, I can say almost definitively that one of the other huge parts going on here is that at some point the student fell behind and was ashamed to speak up. If no one is being accountable, students in this position can show up every day and still fail because they simply don‘t have the foundation to understand what’s being taught. It doesn’t take much at that point for them to simply disengage and stop showing up. By not being “disruptive” I would argue that they are more at risk of failing as these issues fly under the radar.
This lady is in a hole and sometimes I feel our society just throws a shovel at her and thinks poorly of her when she doesn't use it.
You (and anyone else) have my full and unrestricted permission to copy/paste it.
The immediate 'bad justification' is that if I didn't attend, I might get labelled as the problem.
The 'more rational' justification is that by attending and listening I get a better understanding, and by meeting #2 and #3 hope I can contribute constructively.
I know I'm definitely not going to be able to help by dodging the discussion.
Now there are exceptions - if I think others are better able and willing to solve an important issue, or I think the issue is ultimately unimportant - but that's high risk. Like saying I don't need school, so I won't go.
All the schools I attended would place an automated call to my parents if I was absent for a class or the day. Mid-Semester progress reports were mailed to my house for my parents to review. If a student fell severely behind, the teacher could request a conference with the parent.
Perhaps... perhaps this school did none of that (hard to believe). But on some level, the parent has to actually give a sh*t about their child and their education. Working 3 jobs or whatever is not an excuse to be an absent parent.
I'm close with several elementary school teachers, and we've had this discussion before. A parent that doesn't care at all, will nearly always yield a child that performs poorly, no matter how much individual attention the teacher applies to the child. Parents must be engaged in a child's upbringing - they are the primary role model for the child and are the only people that can enforce desired behaviors like doing homework instead of playing video games.
Accessing that portal is a technological barrier not every parent can overcome. Judging by the extent of the problem in that particular school, it might be a common issue in the community it serves.
Sure the parents could take computer literacy courses, access internet at the library if they don't have access at home, or navigate the school bureaucracy (not easy and not always friendly, trust me!), and we could still play the blame game. But ultimately if we add enough friction that 50% of our users fail to engage, perhaps a review of the system is warranted.
[0] https://www.air.org/resource/description-u-s-adults-who-are-...
I don’t want to tell someone what their ability is, but I have to believe that at least one of those will be the right choice for any individual parent.
Even my dentist sends both SMS and phone calls for appointments. And they are a 2-bit operation. My doctor has a web portal but they rely on phones for important information like 'you missed an appointment without warning us'.
I'm struggling at the idea some random locked we form was sufficient for this critical information.
> But in those three years, only one teacher requested a parent conference, which France says never happened. No one from the school told France her son was failing and not going to class.
And that's after this child received dozens of failing grades and hundreds of absences the parent also ignored. Instead of disciplining this child, the parent bought him a video game console and a giant wide-screen TV (shown in the article!).
People need to take responsibility for their own inaction at some point.
The teacher requested it: is parent saying that the request never happened?
If the request did happen and it was only sent/seen once, where do the lawmakers draw the line between “The teacher asked once and the parent never took them up on it, therefore it’s the parent’s fault.” and “The school didn’t share what the concerns were and only tried to contact the parent once in 3 years. The school is at fault.”
The school I went to would not let you advance if you failed a subject (with a few exceptions). You failed math? You don't get promoted. No exceptions.
Of course, my school may have had its own set of problems, but this sounds like the opposite extreme.
I'm British and school (at least when I was there)'s purpose was passing a set of exams when you're 16 and then another optionally at 18. There were informal exams throughout, to tack progress.
Occasionally it was suggested a pupil was held back a year (if they were so far behind, they wouldn't benefit from the next year) - but that was pretty extreme.
Normally pupils were just streamed, so they were put in a class of comparable ability the next year. If they did well they might go up, if they didn't they might go down.
If you hit an exam in a low stream, you might get pushed towards an easier exam (with a lower maximum grade available)
Basically you as a pupil, were never in any doubt as to your trajectory.
The tech lead. Sure, the system is broken to have even allowed this situation to occur, but the tech lead failed everybody by approving those patches.
This kid may have been absent and neglecting their studies, but the school kept promoting them to the next grade and didn't even attempt to take corrective actions by contacting the parent. They failed to do THEIR job and allowed for it to get to this point.
The system is broken and in cases like these the school is put in an impossible situation. And remember this isn't just one kid they're trying to deal with: it's more than half of the student body. So the tech lead probably has dozens of junior devs constantly pushing code that he has to deal with.
You're probably right: the tech lead makes a nice scapegoat when a news article gets published that riles everyone up. Firing him won't solve the problem though.
>This kid may have been absent and neglecting their studies, but the school kept promoting them to the next grade and didn't even attempt to take corrective actions by contacting the parent.
Let's say all that is true. It's still the mother's fault. How could you raise your child and not know he is failing every class and skipping half the time FOR YEARS. Come on man, be serious.
>They failed to do THEIR job and allowed for it to get to this point.
What are you talking about? It isn't the school's responsibility to raise children. Schools are part of a huge government bureaucracy staffed by well meaning bureaucrats providing a particular social service. You, as a parent, CANNOT delegate the responsibility for raising YOUR child to them.
One of the insidious things about this is that we've got an underclass that just doesn't understand at all how the basic systems of life work. How school works; how school can improve economic outcomes in the future; how to do basic legal and organizational things. They've also got severe lacks of attentional resources-- being poor, often in single parent homes, working high numbers of hours.
In turn, they produce another generation with largely the same impediments.
It's easy to blame the parent or individual actors within the system, but the system produces bad outcomes with costs that are borne both by the children and by society as a whole.
(the point being that the count of 'late and absent' probably doesn't paint enough of the story)
Specifically: "Under Maryland law, a truant student is one who is “unlawfully absent” from school for more than: 8 days in any quarter, 15 days in any semester, OR 20 days in a school year."
Also, "What happens when a student is found to be truant? The student will be referred to the county board’s system of active intervention. Note that each county must develop a system of active intervention for truant students.
A school system representative will investigate the cause of the truancy. This representative may provide counseling or even notify the Department of Juvenile Services. "
There is whole system designed to handle such cases and it failed miserably
They were very slow and weak about responding, but you're overstating. They did a few things over the three years, up to and including finally bumping the child back to 9th grade.
The mother apparently did exactly nothing. Until the school's actions finally hit home hard enough.
My complaint is with your misuse of language to make a point. "Exactly nothing" means beyond zero is excluded. At worst you need to use "essentially nothing" or some such vague/weasel words rather than stating logical falsehoods.
It seems very logical (however shameful) that the system would optimize for passively allowing students to age out of the system, as letting minority students fail doesn't have anywhere near as much blowback as fining or locking up disadvantaged people for truancy.
Focus on actual outcomes would be a good start. I would replace the whole school administration with someone more capable.
A new administator or new system with the same incentives is likely going to give the same results.
Ideally there is a process of incorporating real-world results and revising one's beliefs, but that process seems to have pretty much shut down in favor of strict political orthodoxy.
The world is full of tangled messes where everybody is acting with respect to their own local incentives and everyone is worse off as a result
Truancy enforcement didn't work too well. Whether laxer truancy approaches end up with better outcomes overall is open to debate, but it's not like there's a clear answer.
Truancy does make teaching effectively much harder. You're forced to either go over the beginning material over and over for the people who missed it, or you just abandon them and teach the handful of people who have attended consistently. No matter what you teach, you're teaching the wrong thing for half or more of the class. Then people get bored, and they skip school...
And imagine being the one new excited, passionate teacher trying to rock the boat and get some effort. You're upsetting parents who wonder why you're all up in their business and don't understand the value. Your gradebook creates issues for your administrators. Other teachers who have given up react defensively and seek to undermine you. And the students are not thankful, and can be extremely disruptive.
I don't know how you fix it. Project-based learning has some evidence that it can work in situations like this, because it can draw out participation and interest by gamifying more of education. But it's not like a little more PBL is going to make the system suddenly work.
I felt like I was pretty successful providing individual instruction. For instance, I found a way to teach basic algebra that worked for guys with 3rd and 4th-grade level test scores. It didn't teach them the principles they would need for greater math education, but none of these guys were ever going to study college-level Calculus. They just needed enough math to pass the GED. Unfortunately, teaching that way involved a lot of moving around the classroom, and I didn't really want predators staring at my ass behind my back. So I didn't stick with it.
It says a hell of a lot that teachers find that kind of environment safer than public school. That suggests to me that discipline & safety have to be comprehensively addressed before any other changes will have a chance to work.
I later took college classes, and that was a different story. One teacher said that his prison students were much better than his free-world students, as they generally weren't partying all weekend etc. and were motivated to be in school.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/10/17/924766186... [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kamala-harris-truancy-arrests...
We have a mild teacher shortage across the board (which may become major with reports of as many as 40% of teachers seriously considering leaving the profession this year). And then in turn, inner city schools are worse workplaces... which attract worse peers... You need a hell of a martyr complex to take this on, and even if you have it you won't last.
And throwing money at comp won't fix this, either: that's not a great motivator to get the people with the passion to fix this.
Inner city school systems are great at grinding up passionate personnel, making them quit or just surrender to do things that look good on paper but don't improve anything.
I don't know the answers, but I do know this -- it's a hell of a lot less than what gets spent in the NY metro area.
According to the US Census[1], out of the largest 100 US Public School systems Baltimore ranked near the very top in spending per child (5th out of 100). Baltimore spent $15,793 per child. Only New York and Boston spent considerably more.
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/school-s...
The parent comment even mentions that they have the option to contact juvenile services but can also provide counseling. That seems like the real answer in probably the vast majority of cases.
This is an incredible assumption. There are probably millions of people (Paul Graham, for one) who would agree with Scott Alexander's "description of experiencing school as tortuous": one such example, "Scott, your description of school-as-hell deeply resonated with me. I can say without exaggeration that my time in the public school system was more miserable to me, and left me with deeper scars and issues, than my time in Iraq."[0]. Most of these complaints about child-prison hell-schools are from people who went to far better schools than the one in the article. I spent ten years in prison, and I have far more hatred for the public school system than I do for the prison system.
I agree that counseling could help in many cases, perhaps most, but it's deeply mistaken to say that the vast majority of kids are willing to go to school. There will always be a significant number of kids who simply don't want to go, or would rather spend their days involved in drugs or gangs. Plenty of people think that going to school is "acting white".
[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-co...
Something less drastic?
How about this..
Look at this thread. You’ll read all kinds of excuses for and blame of the mother.
Yet nobody mentioned the father.
A father — under our system — faces no penalty for neglecting a child. None. In a custody order where the mother has primary, the father has NO OBLIgATION to see the kid.
This is so engrained in our culture that, like I said, the thread doesn’t even mention a father...
In my line of work, I know of men who have upwards of a dozen children from just as many women. There is nothing in the law that deters this activity. Nothing. There used to be. And, when there was, it didn't happen.
Penises and Vaginas, orgasms and lust, haven't changed one iota in the past 10,000 years. I have little patience for those who wring their hands, fretting about how to stop this insanity. We know exactly how to stop it. You can open any legal code older than 100 years and see exactly how it is stopped.
The fact is, this society has made the deliberate and intentional decision to eradicate any responsibility on the part of men, leaving women absolutely fucked (and the daughters of these women even more screwed.) Ironcially, it was all done in the name of feminism.
* The law treated illegitimate children as illegitimate. It was harsh to be born out of wedlock. (https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/inheritance-rights-for-leg...). No child support. No inheritance. Etc.
* Until recently, there was no no-fault divorce. You couldn't up-and-leave a marriage without good cause. If your husband was beating you or your wife committed adultery, that was a valid reason. If you got bored, existential ennui, or married for child support in the first place, you were SOL unless the other party agreed. People were expected to make it work.
* All sorts of fraud laws around sex and sexual behavior. If we had sex because I promised to marry you, I was expected to marry you. Marriage was viewed as a legal agreement.
... and so on.
Most of it had problems, but there were some good ideas in there too. Adapting those to a 21st century framework of equal rights would be challenge, both intellectually and politically. There was a history of perverse, unintended consequences, intertwined changes, etc. and a discussion like this would be a political hot potato.
Divorce is also a massive industry and political lobby. It intertwines itself with social justice and feminism, so it's hard to tease out, but a lot of work is actively done to break up families, since lawyers, guardians ad litem, etc. profit. A lot of that hits low-income families, despite low-income divorce happening without bringing this industry in.
https://www.educationnext.org/international-look-single-pare...
In any case, nobody ever linked ‘adultery laws’ with school.
There are many ways to incentivize nuclear families and discourage illegitimacy.
And, many ways to do the opposite.
In US, for whatever bizarre reason, society had been trained to recoil at the idea of a nuclear family. Indeed, some readers will reflexively gag at my use of the term ‘illegitimate.’
It’s strange.
Occasionally you get these stories where people are ‘shocked’ that a kid in Baltimore didn’t go to school! Yet, the fact that he has no father is just ho-hum. Missing the forest for the trees.
In this case, it's quite possible the father is in prison.
We've created a society, a system far too complex for such simple attributions. You're only fooling yourself if you blame any one of those parties.
A whole system analysis and solution is the only way to make meaningful progress.
Parents have to care for a child to do well (or even mediocre) in school. A child isn't going to choose to do difficult homework in lieu of video games if left up to their own choices.
If we examined the parent's school grades, we'd probably find a similarity, unfortunately. Same with the parent's parents. All this ultimately leads to working 3+ low-skill/low-education jobs just to keep a roof over your head. Every statistic about high school graduation rates firmly says so.
You either are or not. My bet would be that the parent is fully aware, but ashamed and in denial about the situation.
A busy mother is still a mother. Should know when their son is lying. She could be tricked for a month, for one year maybe, but when 4 entire years passed and she claims that didn't suspected anything... either she barely talks in the dinner with the boy about his day or she carefully circumnavigated the theme and don't really wanted to know the details of his education.
And some parents just don't like the school system. I know a case of a divorced mother that deliberately boycotted the education of her daughter repeatedly asking her to be at home so she didn't feel alone. The outraged school wanted to do a point and the truant girl had to repeated several years, with the same outcome and less effort put on it each year. Everybody, was relieved when she eventually reached the legal age, was dumped from the school, show the middle finger to everybody and keep with their former life (Partied hard, socialized a lot, found a partner and married). We could say that she is doing fine, in fact.
This is a lie you tell yourself to be able to continue to look down on people.
In the real world, people are affected by their circumstances, regardless of whether they have the ability to change them.
Not, this is a dichotomy covering all the possible outcomes, thus can't be a lie, by definition.
Some people are good parents, other are terrible at parenthood. Where is the lie in my statement? There are millions of examples.
If your son failed the school for four years, failed in ALL classes, didn't learn anything in your face, and you are clueless about that, don't blame other people. You have a responsibility in this train crash. You must calm down, do damage control and exercise more the communication part in your parenthood. You can be busy and tired, but this is no excuse for not showing the slighest interest for your boy's life, future plans, interests, or education. Not at this level.
Being a good parent is more than being just a food providing machine.
... you even assume that the family has internet at home...
In Florida, my mom taught students whose homes *didn't even have floors*.
BUT that's a very challenging process, and we should still have compassion for people who haven't managed to pull it off yet.
(I have no input on the specifics of this situation though, just trying to provide some context)
- The mom holding an iPhone 12
- Her son playing video games on a large TV then pulling a smartphone out of his pocket.
I think it's reasonable to assume they have internet access, at the very least through their phones.
It's fine to challenge someone's assumptions, but it kind of feels like you're trying to pull a "gotcha" that doesn't apply in this case.
What we're seeing here is the breakdown of extra-legal authority and responsibility. Truancy laws and CPS only work when the vast majority of parents do their job.
That is a dangerous thought. The next thing one might say is why we need truancy laws and CPS if not to harass well-behaved middle class parents.
But they aren't a substitute for "well-behaved" parents. No matter how much money the government spends it will not be able to raise children.
I don't know how to solve this problem but I am sure any solution involves recognizing what's going on here, which you are not doing.
Should we discourage some people having children then?
What the hell happened to personal responsibility? The parents are 1000000% to blame here. The school system isn’t your nanny.
It is more, not less, the school’s fault if they aren't actively reaching out to parents with significant absences.
Progress reports show the number of absences and late days (at least all I've seen). So do semester grade reports. It's extremely unlikely a present and engaged parent doesn't notice report card after report card coming home with C's, D's and F's, and hundreds of absent days piling up.
The article even states the parent claims to have been aware of all the failing grades, but somehow assumed her son was doing fine because he graduated to the next grade? How is that even remotely possible and not a major point of concern?
What we likely have here is an absent parent complaining that someone else didn't raise her child correctly.
Nobody ever claimed being a parent is easy... and working 3 jobs isn't an excuse to check out of your parental responsibilities.
Since the article involves review of records which include contact requests initiate by school staff, and does not cover any regarding attendance/truancy from administration, we can most justifiably assume that, like those concerning class performance from teachers (other than the one teacher request that there is no evidence ever went beyond the school office), there was nothing.
And we can be fairly certain, again, given the absence of remark on this being in the records, that despite absence far above the level that is legally defined a truancy in Maryland, the student either was not referred to the district by the school for truancy (most likely, as even a report without follow up would be reflected), or, if they were referred, the follow-up of either active contact by the district (if the school's own contact records did not show sufficient active effort) or referral to law enforcement (if the school's records showed all reasonable efforts at outreach had been exhausted or the districts own followup was unsuccessful) did not occur.
Even if the parent was actively and willfully wrong here, the authorities at the school and/or district failed their duty that exists for the the benefit of the student and for the benefit of the other students whose education the occasional presence of the intermittently attending student would interfere with.
So, while there is certainly a parental failure (the precise degree of culpability for which cannot be assessed from the information at hand), the parent is also completely correct (almost irrespective of the degree of their own culpability[0]) that school authorities failed her child (and, though she did not make this charge, in doing so they failed the public, as well, and the fact that her son was apparently fairly typical for the school tends to indicate that the failure by the school authorities was massive and systemic, not an isolated individual falling through the cracks.)
[0] absent some bizarre scenario llke a massive, elaborate documentation fraud that provided a plausible legitimate narrative supporting the degree of absenteeism, which not only strains plausibly initially, but is implausible would not have been noted were it documented.
The report card noted the teacher requested a conference. It's flatly on the parent to follow-up and schedule one. How else does that work?
The article writer looked at the report cards and totaled up 200+ absent days for crying out loud. How is it even reasonable to excuse the parent from just ignoring all these warning signs?
Could the school have done more? Sure, they could have jailed the child for delinquence, but putting children in jail really does more harm than good. What else was this school supposed to do? They quite literally gave the child and parent every opportunity to be included on the child's progress, and even (on record!) reached out in an attempt to discuss things with the parent.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on the rest of things. Raising children is a parent's responsibility... and now this part-time parent is aghast her son will have to repeat all the failed classes she was 100% aware of - as-if there's some plausible scenario where her child could just be graduated and go out into the real world on their own.
“50% of days late or absent” can mean anything from being a second late every other day to being not at school half the days.
That’s a range from almost no absences down to 50% of them.
It wasn't just one school, either. My dad being in the Air Force, we moved around a lot. The schools were the same everywhere.
I could imagine he showed up more the 1st year, did not master the material, and then found the 2nd and following years impossible/pointless so stopped going.
But promoting students as they fail all classes is just atrocious education. It’s warehousing.
The American school is striking in its emphasis on externally managed curricula, state-wide tests, etc. It feels like the teachers are competent but nobody trusts them. Other parents seem more demanding and aggressive than at the expensive private school in London.
Any solution to America’s school woes probably isn’t going to include even more top-down control and parental involvement, as the system seems to be already overflowing with those.
However, they have the same root cause. What would actually solve this is a systemic shift in America's education system to a more centralized approach that promotes well researched methodologies and systems to be used across the country. We have phenomenal teachers and phenomenal schools that operate at extremely high efficiency. The problem is that this quality is extremely poorly distributed. This would be very unpopular with the wealthier members of society though, as it would make access to academic silo schools much less of a given for their children. And access to education, and the societal benefits that this access brings, is one of the primary motivators for wealthier Americans. You don't have to look farther than Hacker News. How often do you see titles here like "MIT students launch the Facebook of toilet paper", where MIT student is seen as a meaningful signal. Your child doesn't get the opportunity to be the beneficiary of that headline without first being purchased a top rate education at America's best high schools.
This is about absent parents and a school board that has already given up on students before they even enroll.
This is not a "systemic" national issue...its an issue for inner city schools where the students are poor and brown.
So I come from India where the above model is in place - very few government funded schools are considered top ranking. Parents live closer to good private schools and fund the same when possible. But usually this means hours of transit for the child.
At least from my perspective, the US model seemed better. Here you can choose to live in a nice neighborhood if you can and get a lot more benefits than just good schools. These things seem to go together (safety / general wealth of the neighborhood / public services / good schools / accessibility to job locations and so on). I am curious to see why someone would not want this.
If the overall push is that the whole country should grow only at a uniform rate and we should penalize folks who work hard to get these benefits in lieu of folks who can't (or won't), that doesn't sound very American, at least not the American dream I was sold when I moved :).
To promote higher achieving students we split kids into three different tiers based on their performance in their 4th school year (around age 10/11). Each tier is actually a completely separate school (location, building, curriculula, even different qualifications for teachers). Students that do exceptionally well/bad can still move between tiers every year.
There is a world where the state provides education and thinking about private schools isn't an important consideration for parents. I would expect it's similar in many other EU countries. So it's not one or the other like you fear.
Saying something like "choose to live in a nice neighborhood" is analogous to saying "if you're poor you won't be given access to good schooling" because poor people can't choose to live in a nice neighborhood, no matter how hard they are willing to work. Not to mention poor children. And you're presenting a false dichotomy here. We don't have to choose between rewarding people who work hard and providing good education to everyone. We are absolutely capable of doing both, we just choose not to because the system in place has clear benefits to the people who are creating/perpetuating that system. Much like the caste system in India. I'm absolutely, in very clear terms, not proposing we implement the Indian education system. That should be obvious.
What you're defining as American is very dangerous. You're saying quite literally "to be American is to have the individual right succeed no matter the expense to others". While that's a very Hacker New mentality, and quite obviously how America operates, I wouldn't call it particularly equal or meritocratic. If hard work was rewarded, the hard working lower class Americans who have three jobs would be given access to these neighborhoods and school-systems. But this is transparently not the case.
You seem to be someone who believes you should seek the rewards of your hard work, and I agree with you 100%. However, what you're missing is that the rewards system in the US is not designed to reward those who are putting in the most effort. Nor is it designed to reward the children who are driven and likely to be successful. The rewards and incentives in the US currently favor anyone who already has money, no matter what they are actually providing to society. And it certainly provides no opportunities to promising young children who happen to be from lower-class backgrounds... but at this point I'm just stating facts.
Please don't say things like "US currently favor anyone who already has money", as it completely ignores the achievements of first and second generation immigrants. They had no money, only hard work, and while they are not billionaires, many of them are in the middle class, earning more than a median salary.
Just because I am a success, or an immigrant is a success, doesn't mean we have created an optimal system. I'm not ignoring the achievements of anyone, I'm plainly stating "just because some people manage to survive a poorly constructed system of hierarchies and go on to be successful, doesn't mean we can't do wildly better than we are.". The US favoring anyone who has money is a plain fact, clear as day. Just because someone is successful in spite of that doesn't mean it's not true.
For every person that survived the odds with hard work and some luck, there are 5 brilliant people here who don't get that chance. People who are relegated to the lower class because the system didn't give them the opportunity to succeed, and all our lives are worse for it. These people go on to commit crimes to alleviate their socioeconomic problems, or at best generally less productive than they could be. A society should be measured by the opportunities it provides for people to remove themselves from poverty. The United States does a quantifiably miserable job at this, both through education and social welfare.
It's simple enough to look at the statistics for upward class mobility and to see that the United States is worse than ever in these regards. And we are the wealthiest country in the world. Something is wrong, and a large part of the problem is the financial, educational, and social incentives provided to the wealthy and the cyclical nature of poverty.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/05/23/feds-release-...
So there are obviously other factors besides wealth.
At the end of the day someone, somewhere, had a need and put in the effort (for good or ill) and obtained wealth.
But mostly I'm curious what you would do differently?
> Your child doesn't get the opportunity to be the beneficiary of that headline without first being purchased a top rate education at America's best high schools.
Does this mean I should say, “hey, earthscienceman only has PhD because his parents has purchased him top rate education in the America’s best high school”?
My grit and determination is not a metric that shows that the system functions.
That dream has a name and it is class/social mobility. That's something we can measure and the US does not come out well in that measurement.
There are many countries that are much better for class/social mobility than the US. We may be better than the poor (often exploited third world) country that immigrants come here from, but we are not the best by far.
We're not even in the top 20. The World Economic Forum puts us at 27, between Lithuania and Spain.
http://reports.weforum.org/social-mobility-report-2020/socia...
Where in the world is it easiest to become rich? The Nordic countries, of course! Iceland, Norway and Sweden have the highest proportions of billionares in the world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9UmdY0E8hU
In fact, some of the countries with the best education outcomes outlaw private schools entirely. This forces the wealthy to send their children to public schools, which means they become powerful advocates for improving the education of ALL students.
There are extensive documented procedures for handling under performing or absent students, defined in great detail at the top level. But seems like there is a disconnect between those bureaucratic processes and actual connections between the teachers making sure the students know where they stand.
I wonder why.
Maybe that's the answer then? Abolish school districts, all public schools should be controlled by the state government? Then local taxes won't pay for schools, only state and federal taxes will. That's the system we have here in Australia, and it seems to work okay.
Spending more money on schools will not fix a social problem.
If state governments took over control of schools and local school districts were abolished, that might well not lead to any change in the overall amount of money spent on public education, but it would very likely lead to changes in how and where that money was spent.
Money isn’t going to solve that.
“You never told me!” Umm we had 27 emails on the topic, you responded on half them. We scheduled 10 conferences and you showed up to none of them.
Also, most parents would really rather their kid succeed. It's easier for them that way.
What does it leave? The kids. They resist education because it's hard and involves work; that's only natural. Some more than others, though, and having TV and games competing with school these days makes that number a lot higher than the only other option was rolling a hoop with a stick. Unsuccessful students drag their whole class back with them, because again, the teacher wants them to succeed. So it looks like when you have a critical mass of failing students - 20% maybe? - you descend below the event horizon and the whole school becomes irredeemable.
If your problem statement were true, I'd expect that I'd see a strong correlation at the state level between per student spend at the city/town level and test scores. I won't say there's no correlation but it's a fairly weak one. For example, many urban school districts have both bottom of the barrel results with some of the greatest spend.
Added: You also see disparities between states. Mississippi outspends Utah per student. Which one do you think has better outcomes. And New York dwarfs everyone else in spend even though most NYC public schools are notoriously bad.
And, in that comparison, it's extremely well documented that wealthy neighborhoods have significantly better outcomes than their poorer neighbors.
Sure. But wealthy neighborhood correlates with a bunch of other things than high property values and typically relatively high property taxes which fund schools. It also tends to correlate to successful people, often well-educated, with at least one parent who spends a lot of time involved with their children's schoolwork, other types of support including tutoring if necessary, etc. So it's more complicated than the local public school has more money and spends that money on the right things.
Test scores are meaningful, but they aren’t absolute. To say test scores are meaningless is not true. The reason tests are used, and probably overused, is to have some sort of generalizable metric.
Just because tests have flaws doesn’t mean they are worthless. I think more focus should be spent on better tests, and fewer, not on doing away with them.
There’s some magical thinking that a country of 330M will be able to holistically evaluate kids across the country in a way that is useful for funding allocation.
I agree. Having the student sign an affidavit that they know math is good enough for me.
[0] - https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/governor-lar...
One of the most important things to understand how America works, I think, is to appreciate that blame-avoidance is the #1 priority of basically all actors who matter—which itself isn't that unusual—and also that we also have a bizarre cultural blindness to same, such that we'll give people a pass when they plainly are responsible just because they set something up in advance to shift the blame (to e.g. a system of rules or a committee).
The flip side of this is that we crucify people who can have mistakes pinned on them, or admit to a mistake.
"No-one got fired for buying IBM" is practically a national motto for us.
We'll tolerate a chronically-broken and ineffective system far, far longer than we will an individual making one bad choice for every ten good ones they make.
Keeping this in mind makes a lot of how our institutions and "decision-makers" operate much clearer.
If you compared Finland to only white students in the USA you'll see one result, if you compare to only black students you'll see very different results.
Of course, then there are the systemic/societal reasons you allude to. In America having a child for many people means losing your job and your health care. In Finland they give you a year off and a complete wardrobe for your kid. In Finland they ended homelessness entirely. In America at this very moment they are debating on the senate floor whether repealing eviction moratorium would incentivize single mothers to get a job. There's really no comparing.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/much-teachers-around-world-wh...
We in the US have never even tried that for anyone but our wealthiest, let alone our poorest.
If we took this problem seriously on a federal level, and put all our options on the table, we absolutely could fix it.
I had a middle school English teacher who spent a couple weeks at the beginning of the school year teaching a basic calligraphy style. His general idea was to instill a respect and love for penmanship believing that would extend to the words being written as well. I can honestly say that in my 14 years of English education (including a few mandatory college classes), I both enjoyed and probably learned more in that single English class than any other single English class (which was generally my worst subject).
I happened to run across some of his pictures a few years back, and had a short online conversation where I learned he had been forced out of education after 30 something years teaching because the school refused to allow him any flexibility to extend the curriculum. That particular school where he taught, and I attended was likely the worst school I ever went to (and still today has very poor rankings) yet, it had five teachers who I consider to have some of the largest affect on my education. Including one that encouraged and helped me to enroll in her C programming class at the local JC when I was in middle school.
So, I haven't any idea how those teachers that used to have the largest affects on some kids survive without the flexibility to diverge from the curriculum to make the subject interesting for their students.
I'd find it difficult to say what exactly is the problem with Baltimore schools generally, especially in the face of a lot of people who've seen The Wire, know nothing else about my town, and yet somehow feel themselves qualified to dissect it anyway - that's not a shot at HN particularly, that's just what happens when Baltimore comes up for discussion anywhere that isn't Baltimore. But I can tell you what, and who, the problem isn't - I can, and I just did.
Schooling can only get you so far. Many of these kids need help outside of school with mentorship and staying out of crushing poverty. Otherwise they really don't have a chance even with the very best of schooling. I have no doubt that it is very difficult for these teachers. We try to quantify "failing schools" with standardized testing but that is not taking into account the students going into it. Then for the teachers working there they are demoralized and have a tough job as it is. I am not saying the schools are blameless but this is a more multifaceted and systematic problem than underperforming schools.
Unfortunately, that's completely wrong. The worst-of-the-worst schools, especially in cities (maybe also out in the sticks, I have less visibility into that) get tons of extra money (state, feds, non-profit grants, et c.), such that they're not-uncommonly spending more per student than their "rich" counterparts, paying their teachers more, and so on.
The reason that's so unfortunate is because if funding failing schools equally to "good" schools, or even somewhat better than them, made meaningful progress to solving the problem, that'd be a relatively easy thing to do.
It turns out, instead, that any actually-helpful approach to fixing US schools amounts to "solve poverty". That's a much bigger problem, is much more expensive, is much more complex, and is far harder to sell, politically. One finds oneself immediately in the weeds of trying to fix US labor relations, wealth inequality, and our social safety net. But that's what has to be done to really fix the problems with our schools. Everything short of that is just a show put on so it looks like "we're doing something about it".
[EDIT] instead of down-votes I'd love a pointer to a more tractable solution than "solve poverty", but everything I've seen so far indicates that's the only thing that's gonna work and that the wonderfully simple solution of "fund schools equally" has little or no effect. AFAIK the only thing we've tried that even kinda worked was so-called "bussing", but that was so wildly unpopular (and not just among the people you'd expect to have hated it) that I can't imagine anyone having the guts to propose it again.
I know so many teachers across the country who are so dedicated and hard working, even in some of the worst performing schools. I’ve heard some be described as martyrs and I can’t disagree. I can’t make an absolute statement about every teacher or every school. I’m sure somewhere, some are bad. But at this point I am very sensitive to blaming the teachers. I don’t think they are the problem.
Anecdotally, I’ve found teachers who transition to tech/info security to be amazing as well. Super organized, hard working, and great interpersonal skills. Seriously, if you can give a former teacher a chance at your organization do so.
Take the mother in the profile. Her kid has been failing most of his classes for years and she blames the school for not knowing that?
>> He didn't fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job. They failed. They failed, that's the problem here. They failed. They failed. He didn't deserve that.
No. She failed him. He failed himself too. But she neglected her responsibilities of raising him. You can't delegate raising your child to an education bureaucracy, even if it is staffed by well-meaning individuals.
"We" collectively didn't decide to produce a child with no thought for their future. So I think some of us failed more then others.
Surely there's something between that and not knowing that your kid has been failing (and skipping) most of his classes for years.
I think the mother and the student have definitely failed. That said, the school is producing many such failures. At some point blame needs to transcend individuals and start attaching to the system or context those individuals are in.
We're not anywhere near that point. Half the people here place no responsibility on the parent. At all.
So maybe we should actually try this 'individual responsibility' thing before blaming the system, or aliens, or the Illuminati.
This is even more true, I think, when it is not a single teacher whose class is failing but a school's, and, I expect, a large part of that school system is failing. We should investigate and understand why and a satisfactory answer is not that one particular mother and child were derelict.
The real systemic issue is that nearly ever competent and rational actor is incentivized to run away from the problem. This applies to parents, teachers and administrators. No one's life gets better by taking this problem head on and making things incrementally better, so the only people who are left to deal with the problem are the ones who don't realize how bad things are, don't care or don't have the means to move away.
If society cared, it would intervene well before they needed that, and it wouldn't reach that point.
Since it doesn't, it doesn't intervene at all, and it still never reached that point.
Why? Because, probably, the school is unsafe for students. Never mind blamethrowing who is at fault for truancy. When half the class is late/absent half the time, what can the county do? It's take an army of truancy officers to even begin to address.
I think it’s generally better for one to write what one means rather than using stale or disjointed metaphors.
Wouldn't that depend on the hardness of the material you're hammering into? Even with woods, there are some very dense and hard ones around... ;)
Analogies are a method to quickly transmit wealth of information, cultural biases, and to determine a set of shared assumptions which become to a "common ground" on which the relevant points of the argument can be discussed, rather than fighting back on forth on every property of the scenario under discussion.
> I think it’s generally better for one to write what one means rather than using stale or disjointed metaphors.
If I was offering instruction, then maybe. If I am writing to convince then I use the literary tools which convince the most people; analogy and thematic devices. In this case I am asserting a social argument and bald data convinces very few people.
If all you have are the facts, then all you will receive is an argument over the facts.
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/14-months-la...
State by state data: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab5_1.asp
Texas allows up to age 26...heh.
It's possible at age 22 the state is not required to provide him an education, but chooses to do so anyways
Here's Texas, for example: https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/ED/htm/ED.25.htm
There are many scenarios where stable homes with good incomes fall apart. On the other hand, there are also plenty of examples of homes where kids were had where there was no stability or income necessary from the get go to provide them with the support they'd need to work their way through the educational system and come out successful on the other end. How do you address the elephant in the room of people who decide to have kids without the means and time to properly provide for them (which includes encouraging and cultivating a desire to pursue an education)?
I fail to see an easy solution. Foster homes of well to do families that can put the resources and time into nurturing these kids towards a brighter future? More resources into educating folks to steer clear of parenthood if they're not adequately equipped for the job ahead?
More generous state support for low income families would go a long way. Better to help their existing family than to try and transplant them to a new one I would have thought (in most cases anyway)
The presence/absence of a 2nd parent at home continues to be the overwhelming and undisputable primary factor that correlates to student success.
Failing schools are just another symptom.
Something stinks about this story. We certainly don't have the whole picture here.
Unrelated but when I read the article I assumed the school was a private school. I realize that doesn't really match up with "Single Mother of three working three jobs", but "Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts" does not sound like a public school to me.
There's unfortunately not a deeper conspiracy here than a public school system which advances students whether or not they learn literally anything.
Also: I sympathize with a single working mother, but "notification process" aside, the fact is, this means she didn't look at her kid's report card in 4 years. She might otherwise be a perfectly great parent, but she was 0% engaged with his education.
Their lives are significantly hurt by crappy parenting and a crappy school system.
It's like they never had a chance.
How is someone going to pass Spanish 2 after failing Spanish 1?
Failure is not a barrier to passing evidently.
It all just stinks is what I mean. Basically no one took any kind of responsibility for this kid's education and success.
1. https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2020/02/25/baltimore-city-sch...
The district’s five-year graduation rate increased by .02 percentage points, to 75 percentage points overall. Since 2010, the four-year graduation rate has increased by 8.8 percentage points overall.
“The new graduation requirements raised the bar for all Maryland students
Public education failed? Or these kids' parents' failed? Doesn't seem fair to force schools to pick up the slack of failing parents and families and then chalk it up to school failures when the kids still aren't attending. You could have a gold-plated diamond-studded high school staffed by nobel prize winners, and it wouldn't amount to any value for the kids if they don't go...
Which is a much larger and harder issue than a failure of individual responsibility. But it seems like that's the more foundational issue as far as I can tell.
But how did the mother get into position where a) she's single and b) she needs to work 3 jobs to get by?
One situation is teen pregnancy. Say a girl gets pregnant as a teenager and the father flees (common for single moms). Now she has to raise a kid by herself and drop out of school, limiting her career options.
Is this an individual responsibility fail or a societal fail? I guess you could argue "society failed by not providing her with free contraceptives and/or abortive services and/or social services" but it's just a bad, sad situation no matter how you slice it, and clearly there was some personal agency involved. Even worse, it's a self-perpetuating cycle (i.e. the pregnant teen's offspring is more likely to also be a pregnant teen)
I guess my point is that even if it's clearly an individual-failure, how long should that condemn her to a life of struggle and hardship, let alone her children? If one step off the straight-and-narrow in society means that you need to beat incredible odds to make it back onto the happy-path, we need to work to make that easier to do. Regardless of whether you fell off that path by your own actions today, last week, or decades ago when you were a child.
I'd want to live a society where those struggling get repeated lifelines and assistance to help find some stability. I guess I don't see what the other option is; I don't think we can just give up and let them (and their children, and their children's children...) struggle and fail forever. Even if that means that they need more support/attention than the average citizen for however long it takes.
https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/maryland/maryland-l...
I can't blame a parent who has bought into a system that was doomed to failure from the very beginning.
By shifting schools to local funded, areas with multiple (segregated) school systems used "plain and simple economic reason" to shut down excess schools to save cost, somehow always the black ones. The proof that blacks could not lift themselves out of these situations was used as further proof of their inherent inferiority, not the systemic racism they faced.
To compound this, states that organized "literacy tests"[1] to vote rarely required them for whites. Further removed from the ability to affect their circumstances, many black communities languished for generations.
As a natural extension of this, many school districts in the US are still operating under unequal resources while their constituents' tax revenues go towards the landscaping and infrastructure costs of wealthier areas, while the blame is placed on the victims (eg- "absent parents" who are largely working class victims of exploitation from extreme rent seeking, over-policing harsher monetary and legal penalties, payday loan traps, and other things you don't encounter in wealthy areas).
1. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/school-s...
Given the outcomes, intentionally and severely failing students to game well-meaning initiatives smells like high level corruption a la the Cash for Kids scandal.
Someone's getting that funding, sure, but it's not the students or their families.
Teachers in this situation have an impossible job, as it stands they will never be able to make kids with this kind of background succeed, and they haven't been able to for 40 years. Their culpability begins because they are willing participants in this education theater. Its funny that the teachers union will put their foot down about not participating in school because of Covid, but they are very content to participate in a system that condemns a majority of the kids to a futureless life.
What? How would you extrapolate that? The university system, for all its flaws, is very different from public high schools in a poor city.
edit: I do agree No Child Left Behind creates a perverse incentive, just claiming that it's not what caused the problems at this school
Reminds me of the scene in The Wire where they talk about social promotion
This is a multi-dimensional failure at all levels. It's a failure at the Federal level, where NCLB etc pervert education. It's a failure at the state level to provide and enforce educational standards, and to address systemic poverty. It's a failure at the municipal level where crime, corruption and bureaucracy failed. And it's a failure at the personal level where a mother and son aren't communicating, aren't taking care of themselves.
This failure didn't just happen in the last three years to this young man. His path to failure started in kindergarten, in a dysfunctional society that didn't care about him on any level.
Nearly 50% of students in junior high schools will not be able to enter high schools in China. They will enter vocational high schools, in a way similar to those in Germany. And what do Chinese do? They do this: https://images.app.goo.gl/pKvyBtNtBgMhMK1T9 In the picture Chinese parents send their kids to math tutoring classes, and they stayed in the back of the classroom to study too, so they can help their kids after class.
Yeah, laugh all you want, believing that training 5 hours a day for whatever bullshit sports is superior to doing algebra a couple of hours a day. But this is how some millions of kids fight to get into college and change their life, despite limited resource and all the struggles in their life. And the government? They make sure teachers can be fired. They make sure teacher's work can be measured. They make sure teachers will have a career ladder. They make sure teachers can have decent income especially pension.
And states in the US (K12 education is the responsibility of individual states)? I'm sure they do a better job at K12 education. The US, after all, is a developed country, right?
I can see you are cynical, the culture that appreciates sports will be less competitive than the culture that appreciates family involvement in STEM.
if you change any rules in society, some cultures will be more competitive at it. Germans were a quirky precision obsessed culture long before it became useful in the industrial revolution. Some cultures from Asia are competitive in Western Society, whether it is strenuous manual labor or intellectual pursuits.
The actual solution is related to pooling resources to improve society, as this makes it safer and more productive for all. Making it easier improves the fitness of society, as stressors harm society over multiple generations. So just talking about how one can stress themselves out to "make it out" is not productive. We can certainly appreciate it, but it is not a solution for society.
I would be extremely surprised if China, or Scandinavian countries would have weaker labor protections for teachers than they have for their general populace. P
What they do have is excellent training, paying teachers well, high teacher to student ratios, modern educational systems based on the latest research and/or a culture and familial backgrounds that emphasize and prioritize education.
I agree with all of the above. But I feel like you’re missing a key component, in between the distant federal bureaucracy and the over-burdened single mom. At 61%, this school has a daily attendance rate 10 points lower than Bangladesh did in 2000, when almost 70% of girls were married by age 18 and where, even today, children get pulled out of school because they are needed to work in subsistence agriculture. How does this happen?
My dad told me that he used to walk several miles in his village in Bangladesh to go to school, and people kept an eye on him the whole way. If he had not been in class a couple of days, word would have gotten back to his father. I’m talking here about a real village, where people relied on growing rice and mustard greens and fishing to live. His school house had no walls. A third of children died by age 5. They had nothing, other than a tight-knit community where nearly every single child was being raised by two parents, and were intrusively involved in the raising of all of the community’s children.
You’re correct that a “dysfunctional society” failed this kid. But society that’s missing here is the society of people who are supposed to keep an eye on this kid. Literally, not metaphorically. That social infrastructure has been destroyed—for a variety of reasons, from mass incarceration to social normalization of single parenthood. There is no replacement for this society. A federal bureaucracy with standards and metrics can’t fix this problem, because it doesn’t operate at that level.
Very, very well-said, particularly as your example articulates how one of the most fundamental elements of society -- the immediate community -- should work. This loss of society as community (as opposed to society as formalized bureaucracy), affects everyone in myriad ways that I'm sure we fail to appreciate. Unfortunately, the effects are disproportionately felt by the less privileged: a wealthier parent would simply have sent her son to a better school.
Its a tragedy. Lower income people are much more likely to experience this breakdown in social infrastructure, but the least able to afford to lose it.
I didn't say this was solely a Federal problem, though the Feds have the most money and mechanisms to address some of the problems. The state plays a huge role, as does Baltimore. They simply have less resources, though more accurate street-level information.
Issues like this are so complex in terms of factors, that fixing it will take a huge amount of money, time, and attention. And even then, much as the issue is multi-dimensional, it's multi-generational; not just in Baltimore, but in Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, in the majority of inner-cities. Families have grown up with no hope, with little opportunity for improving their lives, with poor educational systems, with a "justice" system that sends a kid to Rikers for allegedly stealing a backpack.
Then add the racism that is prevalent in our country, both institutionally and individually. It gives me great sorrow to see so many lives squandered, and I doubt it will be resolved in my lifetime.
The poverty rate for children in single mother households is four times higher than for children in married couple households. For millennials who graduate high school, work full time, and then get married before having children, 97% live above the poverty line.
There’s only a handful of census tracts in the US where low income Black men enjoy similar upward income mobility to low income white men. They have certain features you’d expect: higher overall incomes, lower racism among whites. But they are also conspicuous in having high numbers of fathers present: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c... (“And, intriguingly, these pockets — including parts of the Maryland suburbs of Washington, and corners of Queens and the Bronx — were the places where many lower-income black children had fathers at home. Poor black boys did well in such places, whether their own fathers were present or not.”). This result is a no-brainer to my dad, or pretty much everyone in Bangladesh, but is deemed a “pathbreaking finding” by the likes of Harvard sociologists.
So why do people refuse to acknowledge the possibility that the breakdown in marriage and fatherhood is part of what causes the breakdown of the local community? To be clear, there’s lots of factors in play and they are coupled. The kid who gets sent to Rikers for stealing a backpack probably doesn’t become an attentive, involved father. Mass incarceration, loss of middle class jobs, etc. There are lots of things need to be solved.
But at the same time, the blind spot around family structure—refusing to label it a problem that also needs to be solved along with the other things—is actually destroying lives. That’s especially true for lower-income Americans. Upper middle class people still adhere to traditional norms in their own lives: they graduate school, get married, and raise children in wedlock, in that order. It’s lower income Americans, not just in Baltimore but across rural America, where those norms have deteriorated the most. And it’s those communities, especially the women and children, that bear the brunt of these social changes.
An enormous amount of these kids come from broken families. I volunteered at a charter school in Cleveland, and would hear the exasperation in the school director's voice over parents who would pick up their kids while strung up on drugs, or not show up at all. There were also a number of great parents who were engaged with their kids, but this was also selection bias because the charter school was specifically for finding the students with the best chances of escaping the cycle of poverty in that area, and taking them away from the public school system.
This article should be used for awareness, not fingerpointing. This is an extremely challenging problem
Baltimore, like Philadelphia, Chicago, and a number of other large cities, has had the same political machine in power for the past 50+ years. It's a system where corrupt politicians compete and only the most corrupt gets to the top to seize power.
It's no wonder the school children aren't learning anything. Their parents keep electing the same failures who never change anything.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Pugh#Resignation_and...
[1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-prem-mike-madigan...
You can’t educate kids if they don’t show up to class.
Taking kids away from parents? Jailing parents as well?
At some point I'm pretty sure that a sufficiently draconian "cure" is worse than the disease.
If you punish the schools that will lead to closures and overcrowding. If you punish parents, that leads to CPS involvement and increased homelessness.
Of course many parents--maybe even the majority of them--don't believe this but way too many do.
This poor woman obviously has a lot on her plate but if your child is failing all his classes for 3 years, why would you assume everything is fine?
I can't even begin to fathom the absolutely staggering level of entitlement required to say that your son with the 0.13 GPA didn't fail, but the school failed him. Certainly both are true but to accept no responsibility whatsoever is just amazing in the worst possible way.
> As we dig deeper into her son’s records, we can see in his first three years at Augusta Fells, he failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days.
Maryland requires 180 days per year. So he was late or missed 272 out of 540 required days. That's more than half of the required days over a three year period.
It's downright criminal what happened to this kid, and apparently at least half of his classmates, but pretending he or his mother didn't do anything wrong is a stretch.
So they're hit with an utterly unprecedented level of incompetence by the school, and she's a (single?) mother working 3 jobs. In that situation it's perhaps not surprising that the oldest has the least supervision among the three.
I guess I'd just disagree that "staggering level of entitlement" is the correct description. I only see a depressing result and a family that's in a very complicated situation, and is rightfully angry at what just took place.
Sure, teenagers should take some degree of personal responsibility, and parents for their children, but in a situation as complicated as this one, I personally wouldn't try to make that judgement from the outside.
Perhaps the worst aspect is the fraud -- promoting the student to higher classes. Failures are best realized and corrected earlier. For that, the mother has a good point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26359197
The truth of the matter is that this is an example of Democrat policies in action. In Baltimore, as many other major cities, you have Democrats in charge for many years. There are no Republicans in 300 miles. It is Democrats who continually insist how they care about these people and their children. And these Democratic politicians have full backing and foundational and educational support of not only teachers unions, but academic institutions, such as departments of education and other humanities, who suppose to solve these problems. Billions of dollars are spent on developing programs to improve lives of inner city kids and their parents. Imagine an analogy of doctors society responsible for the treatment of some disease, coming up with such results!
What a disgrace, what a failure of our children!
48% graduate from this school.
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/local/fast-facts-augusta-fells...
The piece we're missing is the actual curve of the student's performance, and I'm betting it's not linear, throwing information from simple averages out of the window.
I imagine there's a distinct dropoff between the students who actually show up and get degrees, to the students who don't.
Literally no one is graduating with an 0.15 out of 4.00. By definition, they failed most of their classes.
Just like the subject of he article you're discussing with an 0.13. It's not like he just barely didn't make it; they still consider him to be in the 9th grade.
Well obviously at the school but...
> was late or absent 272 days.
I feel like the story here isn't that the schools are failing parents, it's that parents are going to absolutely aburd lengths to try to blames schooles after the fact for their own failures.
She ignore her childs education for 3 years, and so did her kid, and suddenly at the end of it she's going "whaaat!?" when they tell her that this has consequences.
For me, I don’t think checking a report card once would matter. But never checking in three years is indicative of many other problems.
I would expect a little more involvement from the school if any child is doing so poorly. Also, was the kid just not showing up? Or were they showing up and then slipping out before classes started or just not going to class. Because once you drop a kid off at school, I would expect them to make some effort to keep them there or notify the parent when they are not.
Actually, if I read it correctly, it says that school records indicate that only one teacher requested that a parent-teacher conference be held, and there is no supporting evidence that the school acted on that.
If it's possible to miss that much school in 3 years without repeated, urgent, in-person contact with parents long before reaching that point, the school has horrendously failed the parents.
> She ignore her childs education for 3 years
But did she ignore it, or fail to understand mixed messages and place inappropriate trust in authorities.
On its face, the assumption that promotion means adequate progress to advance to the next level is not unreasonable.
Now, as someone who has a college degree, who has worked in education, whose parents both had college degrees and both worked in education, whose social network is full of people who have college degrees and who have worked in education at various levels, I'm quite aware of the existence of a variety of differences in promotion policy, the potential disconnects between promotion and assessments of progress, and that the fact schools cannot be trusted to provide a clear picture of what is going on, especially to minority parents (because of both classic racism and neglect-as-conflict-avoidance.)
But I'm also aware that other people with different backgrounds are very often very much less aware of those things.
“The job the taxpayers are paying me to do is hard, so i just won't do it and hope that nobody who matters notices” isn't acceptable.
A kind of nonfeasance that is all-too-common in entities serving poor and/or minority communities when they aren't actively malfeasant out of malice toward those they notionally serve, sure, but not acceptable.
That's more than the number of days in a school year. She admitted she knew he was failing. He missed more than a full year of school. And now she's trying to blame the school for it instead of taking responsibility for her own parenting. The clear fuck-up I see on the school's part is the school moving him on to the next year's classes when he's failed the previous year so thoroughly.
Can you 'fail' a year of school? Where I am school years are based on age. You can't fail to get older so you can't fail to get into the next year of school.
You have to be in school until you're 16 (age varies depending on state), so the number of attempts is entirely dependent on your grade. If you fail at 10th grade you can drop out right there.
You can choose to keep applying yourself until you pass. Or, in the case of a student who doesn't apply themself or wish to continue with school they simply leave. Job opportunities will be limited to those which do not require an education, of course.
But other people are talking about truancy laws? You can't simply leave if you're truant and can be arrested for it?
In elementary school, back in the 80's, I remember kids being held back. I never saw that happen in higher grades.
Yes, as shown by the school in question deciding that he was actually still a ninth-grader after three years of social promotion.
More critically, you can and should also not be promoted in a particular subject when you fall the prerequisite, whether or not you are promoted in overall grade, which for some reason didn't happen here, either.
They are the same facilities, programs, course materials and teachers as most other places.
The students, an extension of the community are the differentiating factor.
For a million reasons surely, but don't blame the teachers.
It's completely bizarre all this talk about 'education' when students are not showing up, don't care a single bit about outcomes.
That school could be a top prep school and outcomes would be similar.
The 'first order finger pointing' for failing students is reasonably schools.
But once you understand they are the same systems that are in other places, and often the teachers in these places are heroes and part time social workers - you realize it's the inputs, not the system.
It is not the schools responsibility to get students to show up when 70% of them don't want to show up. It's not the schools responsibility to be full time guidance counsellors, mentors, and provide every need.
It's utterly ridiculous. They'd have to have 1 non-teaching staffers for ever 2 students just to cope.
Not even a top prep school could handle that.
The 'best performing schools' also have the most conscientious and engaged students.
There are deep social problems in those communities, blaming the teachers is quite insulting.
Different system and different country, but at our son's school, every child gets two parent-teacher conferences a year (one at the start of the year and one at the end). There is an online booking system, you go in and book a slot. They only go for ten minutes. The only way you don't get one is if the parents choose not to book one.
And that's nothing new, I remember the same thing when I was a kid. The only thing that is new is online booking.
If our son's school can do this, why can't this one? Incompetence? Underfunding?
Actually we don't book the meeting because they have a different system for students on IEPs. If your child has an IEP, you don't book the normal meeting, the school contacts you to arrange a different one. That's because they bring a lot more staff to IEP student meetings than the regular parent-teacher meetings.
The kids who NEED parent teacher conferences don't show up to parent teacher conferences, and the ones who do show up never really needed them in the first place. This is about 90% of the cases. They are still incredibly useful for those 10% leftover cases where a student is struggling and a parent cares
I suspect those economic forces have a lot more to do with black kids wasting away than rhetoric. Rhetoric isn't what has this kid's mother working three jobs.
Ask yourself: Why do you give money to a homeless person; or not?
Of course the problems compound with underperforming friends, corrupt schools, etc. So improving those may help but won't completely fix it.
I've heard of horrifying schools in middle-of-nowhere towns that will never get his kind of attention.
Hopefully all-star teachers and principals, specialized in improving student performance in rough and poverty-stricken areas can come to this school with plenty of money and help this area succeed.
Improvement is hard, incredibly time consuming and expensive. It will take *years* to bring up thriving students once more.
This news article is a blessing of notoriety to help save this school. I hope we hear positive things in 7 or 8 years.
The fact that practically all rural public schools are bad is what keeps us from living the remote-work dream of moving out to a quaint little town or cheap country house. If you're not rich enough for (good) private schools (bad private schools are more common than one might expect, though), and not daring enough to hope to luck into a good urban charter school, then you're basically stuck living in the 'burbs, even if you'd prefer either the city or the country/small-town to that.
I don’t think that is an unreasonable expectation. That IS what the rule used to be, if you didn’t pass you didn’t move on.
The thing is the rules have changed, so the old reliable “signs of trouble” ex. Your child getting held back don’t happen and so the problem gets missed, or the severity of the problem isn’t caught until too late.
"But who failed him?", they cry! His mother? His school? His city? His society? His economy?
And all of them may have failed him.
And yet he still managed to still fail all of them back times two.
It's a shame that no one told him, and it's a shame they say it isn't his fault. But the real shame is that his is the life that's ruined now.
And so it's a shame that no one ever said: "It doesn't much matter who failed who, when you fail you."
How about you reflect on the awful job you’ve done raising this boy? You didn’t check up on his grades, and allowed him to skip class every other day. Absolutely horrendous parenting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKS0GVvoE9I&ab_channel=russl...
The article reads to me like there were significant failures across all three groups, not just the last.
If my production system breaks and I dont know as bour it because the 3rd party alarm service didn't work. My system is still my responsibility.
Fundamentally, the student failed to attend classes. They will suffer the most throughout life.
Secondarily, the parent failed to apply a minimal standard of supervision of the process. She will suffer the second most (as she watches her son struggle more than is inherent in life because of his relative lack of education and maybe realizes her part in not helping him to avoid that).
Thirdly, the school failed to follow its own basic policies and failed in sending appropriate communications. They will suffer the least, however.
I mention the relative suffering, not to excuse the individuals but rather to clarify that they have the greatest investment in the outcome from schooling. If they waste this opportunity, they should not expect to get as good an outcome as if they capitalized on it. If the mom is upset with the school about him being put back three years and not upset with him about the fact that he has wasted three years of his life, I think it’s misplaced anger. (If she’s steaming mad about both things and only talking to Fox about the latter, that’s perhaps optimal, of course.)
For one, the school is at fault because this isn't an isolated incident, the entire school is (statistically) dumb as the box that holds the bricks that are as dumb as what's generally implied. What alarm was sounded in that particular school and every school that is like it (there's no way that this is the only place that this is happening) before this story broke out. How long has this even been taking place (unqualified students being promoted to the next class and having to essentially start from their freshman year again if they intend to graduate)? How many kids on the streets in Baltimore (young men especially) are victims of this system?
The community is at fault, for blindly getting behind anyone with black skin that waves a blue flag because clearly they have been no help. The trends of social media unfortunately champion these people when the communities themselves have no idea as to what they're motives even are.
The culture of the community should be brought into question, because I can suspect with confidence that a majority of these students at these schools are being brought up in broken homes (either single-parent households, mom/dad is "shacking up" with a girlfriend/boyfriend who contributes nil to the household from a moral standpoint or if the child's parents are married, then the struggle to keep things afloat deters the nurturing of a healthy environment). Most of Hacker News is getting through their one, relatively plush job by the skin of their teeth without having to micro-dose MDMA to prevent themselves from shoving their garden hose in their car exhaust...so sit for a moment...put yourself in this black woman's shoes, with three children (who knows how old the remaining two are), potentially no spouse, three jobs and little social mobility. Much respect to this woman for actually speaking out, because I bet a lot of people in her community share the same sentiment as her son – they're embarrassed. It's an embarrassment on many levels! Most people in these situations lack the willpower to even stay abreast on what's going on their own house, so it's likely even more difficult for the community as a whole to muster up the courage and strength to address these multiple issues head-on and stay steadfast on them without being manipulated by politicians or celebrities once their efforts pick up steam.
It's easy to blame the student(s) and their parent(s) if this was happneing somewhere else or to someone else. But in this particular case it's lazy and the greater effects of the environment as a whole are disregarded. Some of you have enough trouble juggling between sitting your own children in front of a computer screen for the afternoon and brown-nosing a superior who's one "Me Too" tweet away from the whole company having to fold and you being forced to spend 7 months baking sourdough bread and "finding yourself" while you wait for the next "Who Wants to be Hired?" post on Hacker News.
It's unfair and repulsive to sit and read people turn into armchair critical theorist when the line between your ignorance and whichever blameworthy party that you can point a finger at is about as thin as Jeff Bezos' eyebrows. It's unfortunate because some of the top comments actually have compassionate observations, but everything in between (including the replies to these comments) is pathetic.
Thots.
One day I visited a barbershop near me on the West Bank of New Orleans where I lived at the time, in the Algiers section of the city. The staff and patrons told me that in the 1990s and before Katrina (as this was not too far from the old housing projects near the bridge across the Mississippi) if police saw you on the corner next to a minor who was out of school during school hours it meant a trip to jail for both of you and being slapped with an automatic charge of contributing to delinquency of a minor, no ifs and buts or questions asked. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, go straight to Orleans Parish Prison (of which I’ll let you find the video of inmates doing various drugs openly in the cellblocks on YouTube).
The owner of the barbershop was shot to death in front of his place earlier this year. Whatever solution HN tries to come up with to this on an armchair basis please don’t let it be eliding the difference between school and prison in the school-to-prison pipeline or making Kamala Harris’ record look like Harriet Tubman in comparison instead of apprenticeships or something. That’s all I ask.
New Orleans (also Baton Rouge), like Baltimore and other American cities will presumably eat themselves alive before the invisible hand of cloud computing and technocracy shows them any love.
But the system of dumping more and more resources to try and make up for lack of family guidance/upbringing/discipline is clearly not going well. That system demonstrably fails often. How much can you compensate for failed families?
Sometimes the conservative line of "family values" is not just right-wing noise. There is something to middle class sensibilities and passing down (or at least even being able to impart) supervision, parenting, and discipline to your kids.
Otherwise, this is just going to continue and continue across generations of people?
San Francisco should take better notes.
I can offend two coasts, I'm not trying to make any friends here.