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Comment by tohnjitor | Hacker News Reader

This is thanks to "No Child Left Behind". Schools are incentivized to pass students up to the next grade no matter what. My wife was told by her school administrator that she was forbidden from failing students.

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Mis-application of "no child left behind" is so rampant and so narrow-minded. I've heard a school administrator say that if one kid couldn't go on a field trip then none of the rest could. Otherwise that one child would have been "left behind"

It's just like the startup mantra: 'failing forward'. \s

That only explains why he graduated as a senior with such a low GPA. I think without No Child Left Behind he would have repeated 9th grade multiple times until he dropped out -- though I could be wrong. I'd say a part of the problem is that the school doesn't have enough funding in general, that class sizes are too big for a teacher to even manage a class or get to know their students well enough to understand them, and tailor how they teach to what the student knows.

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

Then these people eventually graduate, and some might even get hired as teachers, perpetuating the cycle of decline.

| some might even get hired as teachers

What? How would you extrapolate that? The university system, for all its flaws, is very different from public high schools in a poor city.

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