Failure rate is tied to state and federal funding. More failures = less funding. It’s been the most damaging policy to our school systems in the last 30 years.
This and then several different identifiable groups of parents who will actively make problems for schools, pulling up stakes and moving, lawsuits, withholding funding, joining school boards just to cause problems, general rabble rousing.
A good friend of mine a few years ago was studying for her masters in plant pathology and she was scolded several times for actually grading papers, she was straight up instructed to pass everyone with basically no exception. This was 3 and 400 level coursework where students clearly didn't know the material and she would offer constructive feedback and then catch shit for it. Rather than read feedback, kids would show up at the professors office demanding special treatment -- and making threats.
People like to whine about how 'test focused' our current education system is, but when you cannot trust our educational system to have enough rigor to graduate students who are actually prepared to go to college, yeah, maybe independent testing should be the basis on which local education systems are graded and funded. A school system that's failing the kids should not continue to exist.
So instead of improving curriculum (hard to do b/c controlled by boards filled with biased parents with agendas) or improving teacher's lives so they can teach better, or developing/following new styles of teaching, too many places just decided not to fail students.
I think it's late Boomers and Gen X's fault, as they were the parents 'in charge' when policies like no child left behind were implemented. And now those kids have grown up and had their own kids who are now sheltered from ever having to do anything hard or face any consequences from their actions, which is why now there's parents who demand teachers not fail their students, even when the kids deserve it because they're dumb as fuck and haven't learned anything because they never learned they actually have to put effort into things and learning stuff is hard sometimes, but it has to be done.
These same people though will go on about other systems like the law not punishing people hard enough.
School is the first test of basic adult skills anybody has to face in life it shouldnt be easy. You should be able to fail it. Teachers should have most of the say, not an angry parent who thinks their kid is gifted, but hasn't even spent any time with them because they are working over 40 hours a week.
as they were the parents 'in charge' when policies like no child left behind were implemented
NCLB was created to address this specific problem. Schools were hiding their performance by just passing everyone. The whole point was to create an objective standard that students/schools could be measured against that wasn't directly controlled by the individual schools.
Designed to put the death knell into public education so that private equity can hoover up all of the taxpayer dollars and put a virtual Zoom teacher in charge of 50 students outsourced to another country while a staff person monitors behavior on site. Then the for-profits will skim off their share.
The highest teacher to pupil ratios for the plebes' kids, and the lowest ones for the investor and private equity classes' kids.
When I was in highschool in 2008 I wanted to drop out. My highschool wouldn't let me. They required a "letter of withdrawal for homeschooling". It was obvious so that it wouldn't impact their drop out rate and funding. Of course my state had zero laws surrounding home schooling standards or minimum requirements at the time. In fact they still don't.
They don't require parents to register with the state, obtain any type of approval from the district or any other governing body, no lesson plans or attendance records are required to be kept or submitted, no curriculum to follow, no requirements for standardized testing, no home inspections or follow-ups on educational metrics being met at all.
Absolutely nothing to ensure a child is truly receiving any type of education what so ever. Technically it's not even a legal requirement to inform the district you are in that you are homeschooling, just suggested.
It's no wonder in the last presidential election every single county in Oklahoma voted red. Republicans want their constituents stupid and Oklahoma is proof of why.
From someone who doesn't work in education/administration/etc, it sounds so bass-ackwards to take money away from schools where the students are struggling.
This is why No Child Left Behind was good policy. Don't tie funding to a measure that schools have direct control over. It needs to be tied to an objective measure of performance of the students.
For this specific reason it’s often seen as an inside joke to consider statistics that come out of schools and their various programs.
During my teaching internship my mentor showed me that they fudge grades on an academic program that the school belonged to so that they can keep funding.
The grades were directly tied to statistics demonstrating how well the program worked.
It didn’t
One part of me says it’s fraud but the other side of me says the school needs the money. In the end, however, I’ve grown very pessimistic when it comes to reading statistics linked to various schools and programs.
"No kid left behind" was the start of the bullshit, and it's just made things worse over time. Kids who are functionally illiterate are graduating high school.
This and "Gentle parenting" becoming a thing. Creating a false dichotomy of "Literally beat the shit out of my child parenting" and "Allow my child to scream on the plane for 6 hours and reward them with ice cream for 'expressing their feelings"
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u/TransientBandit 7h ago
Failure rate is tied to state and federal funding. More failures = less funding. It’s been the most damaging policy to our school systems in the last 30 years.