Baltimore student passes 3 classes in 4 yrs, top half of class with 0.13 GPA | Hacker News Reader

Baltimore student passes 3 classes in 4 yrs, top half of class with 0.13 GPA

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23 pointsstarkd42 comments

I just feel so sad reading this.

I know the article mostly talks about the mom's perspective and the school's perspective, but the tragedy to me here is that the kid is the one that truly suffers from neglect. Nobody seemed to even notice that he missed 272 days of school, they reached out for one parent teacher meeting. What psychological effect does it have on the kid that none of the adults really kind of notice when he's out of sight and out of mind?

And multiply that by who knows how many kids are skipping school just in that school without teachers even noticing, occupying some no-man's-land where they're just sort of on their own with an impression that no grown ups really care.

What's that kid's attitude going to be in life? Does he even know what opportunities may have been robbed from him?

According to the school, they place an automated phone call every time the student is absent so, supposedly, they got 272 phone calls notifying them of absences.

Yeah well that seems like a beautiful cover your ass excuse "our robot contacted them 272 times, so our work was done" – ok well did anyone check to see what's going on with a kid who's missed that many days? did anyone check to see if the mom even picked up the phone? or if the number was valid?

Yeah, this never would have flown at my high school. My school's secretary personally called my parents the first time I ever missed a class with an unexcused absence, and that was a single class, not a full day. At the very least, after the first few unanswered automated phone call, a human follow-up should have been made.

Even at a nice high school you may be getting an automated phone call.

The school might not have had a correct phone number on file.

I skipped a ton of highschool. With a single parent that works all the time it's easy to make sure they never get the message ;)

The really sad thing is that this child was in the top half of the class rankings. You can imagine the bottom half probably never made it to class. This is endemic for city schools.

I don’t see anything here that discusses why he didn’t attend school. Was it transportation? Violence? Did he just not want to go? You must attend class, that’s half the equation. What was preventing him from attending class?

Parents are the primary teachers of their children. 100% parental failure.

Parent failed to check. Parent failed to instill any honesty in the student.

School also failed.

I certainly agree that there was a serious amount of parental and school figure failure here, but a school and a parent can only motivate and encourage. A student has to take responsibility for themselves and do the work, too.

This kid was in the top half of his class. I don’t think the personal responsibility bit holds up when literally half a school’s population has this issue. At that point it’s systemic, not individual.

There are always going to be some parents who are overwhelmed, neglectful, or just disengaged. Blaming them accomplishes nothing. We can't just write those kids off. The public school system needs to step in and at least give them a chance to succeed.

Whoever is to blame, they are failing many of them. Not just this one. He was in top half of the school rankings. Imagine what the bottom half did. They probably never showed up.

This is an example of the bigotry of low expectations.

>in his first three years at Augusta Fells, he failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days

I recently graduated highschool, well I suppose recent is subjective, but I cannot imagine missing 272 days. You're not even remotely trying.

For reference, a school year is 200 days. Imagine skipping almost a year and a half of school.

I don't think anyone denies the kid checked out. At what point does the school not have culpability after letting him go to the next grade?

What really happened is the kid dropped out of school about a year and a half ago but the school administration kept defrauding the tax payer for an extra 1.5 years of funding.

So does this mean any Ivy is out of the question?

Yeah but uc schools are still an option maybe Berkeley

IMHO - no one is really concerned about problems like this. Progressives and conservatives come in with their bias first and foremost and the problem is always that their agenda has never been carried out in a pure enough form.

Everyone acts like they care, but both sides manage to turn a blind eye to inconvenient truths surrounding the issues of poverty, black education, black crime, etc. And when the issues highlighted by the right and left, individually, create a cyclic cause-and-effect? Then forget it. Everyone is always concerned about 1/2 of the problem b/c to admit the other portion is using <insert tribal identification> talking points.

What should society do with somebody who doesn't care at all about showing up for school?

The steps the school system claims their policy is to do sound like a reasonable start.

It seems as though the school administrators are going to keep being "socially promoted" without doing their job the same way this student was.

>"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."

Real bitch move to snatch a clickbait quote like that out of a mom at her point of highest stress. I'm sure she would have a far more level-headed response if you asked her six months from now.

Yeah but come on there is kind of a complete lack of personal responsibility here as well

Should we give up on kids whose parents fail to live up to our ideals?

Is that a choice 'we' have?

It is. We can decide that bad kids are bad and throw them in jail at exorbitant cost to the taxpayer, or we can invest more resources into the kids at most risk upfront, to improve their chance of becoming productive members of society.

We can certainly invest in kids, but there has to be an expectation that they put in the effort as well and the idea that just because they put in the effort does not mean they will be as successful as another doing something similar. We have to instill the idea that they have a general responsibility to themselves, their family, and their community. We used to have a semblance of this but over the last 80+ this really seems to have gone out the window.

What was happening 80 years ago? World War 2? Do you think PTSD might have played a role?

I don't know if we can nail it down to any one factor. I think that there were many small factors that have slowly torn away at the values of personal responsibility, accountability, and others.

The context of the 1940s that I see was a Great Depression following the first World War -- was this "personal responsibility" a result of extreme austerity? I think so. But then, for WWII, we saw men conscripted into the polar opposite of "personal responsibility" -- soldiers followed orders; their sole responsibility was up the chain of command. But when they got home, there were high-paying low-skill jobs available, and blue-collar families could afford to have 5 kids, and a house big enough to keep them, on a single worker's income. Today, it's hard to find that kind of income without extensive skill and experience -- especially when we're factoring in housing costs. Folks in the 1940s didn't need to be nearly so "responsible" as they do today, just to make it with a single kid.

This appears to be a false dichotomy. Why can't we have both the exorbitant criminal justice costs and also the "invest more resources" part?

It's not a false dichotomy; I didn't say that those are the only two options, and I did say "to improve their chance..." and not "to guarantee their success."

Who is “we” and what are you signing us up for?

I think I signed myself up for more conversation by posting that. Don't think I signed anybody else up for anything, though?

And it completely distorts the fact that this was failure on so many levels. This was the student's failure to not apply themselves, the parents failure to not be involved and monitoring the results of their child's education, and the school's failure for not applying and properly maintaining the standards they should be and advancing students improperly.

This was part of a fox Baltimore (S.B.C) investigation. That's why. The bigger question is, how didn't she know. How can your kid go through 4 years of school and you not once check his report card or ask him if he needs help with his homework. Or ask him how school is going?

>“I feel like they never gave my son an opportunity, like if there was an issue with him, not advancing or not progressing, that they should have contacted me first, three years ago,” said France.

The kid didn't show up to school 272 times in 3 years, like come on.

As millzlane said, how could she have not known? So it's not like the reporter asking her about her son is the first time she learned about his lack of attendance. Today, six months from now, six months ago, it wouldn't have made a difference.

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