niflheim

I set out to write about something completely different, but I ran across this article:

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08266/914029-298.stm

Or to quote:

Pittsburgh Public Schools officials say they want to give struggling children a chance, but the district is raising eyebrows with a policy that sets 50 percent as the minimum score a student can receive for assignments, tests and other work.

Even more disconcerting are the willful delusions:

The district and union insist the policy still holds students accountable for performance.

I skipped the first… month… of Calculus I in college.  By the time I elected to arrive, half of the class had withdrawn because it was too difficult.  By the end of the semester, there were only 2 or 3 of us remaining.  I spoke with the professor at the end and complained that the class was too easy, that we hardly covered 1/4 of the available textbook, that in short I had learned almost nothing.

He directed me to a filing cabinet.  6′ tall, old and damaged and intimidating, many drawers, each of them literally stuffed to overflowing with papers.  This, he said, was the lesson plan and coursework he used 30 years previous.  We weren’t even making a dent in a single folder from that filing cabinet.

Why?  Because he had a quota of students to pass.  If he didn’t meet this quota, it meant he was a poor teacher (he was in fact excellent), it meant he taught at a poor school (eh), it meant students would not attend and grants would not be made and so on and so on and he watered it down and watered it down and it didn’t matter at all.

This “Post Gazette” story is the same stupidity driven by an entitlement culture born of that diseased misunderstanding that festers in the American psyche, that “All men are created equal” meant something contrary to the blatant facts of reality.

People “deserve” to pass.  People “deserve” to graduate.  Even if we have to reduce the standards to ensure that we don’t leave any lowest common denominators behind to do it.

Instead of improving education, or hell, instead of even recognizing that some people just aren’t very good at some things and nothing will change that, or any of a number of other things that could be done without ensuring the death of a nation

It’s not new, and that Calculus story is almost 20 years old (*sigh*), but the “50% Minimum” is so shockingly inconceivable I had to spout off about it.