Thursday, May 25, 2006

Pompous Circumstances

Here’s a story for all you education reform advocates, one that should really give you pause. A high school in Ohio, will not be graduating 16 students this year. The reason? Despite being given an entire school year to do so, these sixteen students did not produce a required essay, between eight and ten pages in length, on a subject of their choice, that required them to shadow one source. Let that sink in for a minute. It could have been on any subject. It could have been about popular culture. It could have been about social issues. It could have been about cooking. It could have been about any damn thing they wanted it to be on. And they had a whole fucking year to do it.

But, they didn’t, and of course, as you might have expected, some parents are up in arm, and are demanding the requirements be non-binding. The school staff evidently has a collective spine, as well as balls, because they are refusing, as they put it, to lower their standards.

This is really incredible. I mean, how fucking hard can it be? It’s not like they were being requested to produce a volume on the level of a college graduate student thesis. This is more on the fucking level of “What I Did For My Summer Vacation.”

It’s no fucking wonder, to me, that American kids are falling steadily behind students of other nations in Math and Science. I give it ten years, and American students are going to be significantly behind kids from Germany, India, Iran, and China-

IN MOTHRFUCKING ENGLISH!!!

3 comments:

Rufus said...

This is no surprise to me, sadly. I'm glad they're sticking to their guns. Most public schools won't because they're worried about being sued or missing their state quota. But, some children should be left behind.

SecondComingOfBast said...

What most people miss is, they are left behind anyway. Just passing them to another grade undeservedly is doing them no favors.

Rufus said...

Oh, we realize this. Every year, we get a fresh batch of college freshmen, at least 30% of whom can't seem to read. Mall University is pretty indulgent towards them, but imagine the sinking feeling of asking your students to read a one-page article and write down what the article was saying, and then finding that 30-50% of them don't know. Trust me, they're way behind students from those countries already.