My high school has students who are not close to having enough credits to graduate before they are legally no longer entitled to the free education they are receiving. Some of these students disrupt their classes regularly. That’s part of why they have acquired so few credits.

Eduhonesty: The school would benefit from pushing these students out. We are no longer ever supposed to show anyone the door unless it’s unavoidable — a knife carried into a zero-tolerance school, for example. But other students are paying the price for our generosity. Disruptive students interrupt lectures, distract other students and simply waste large quantities of everyone’s time.

Here’s a bit of food for thought for administrators: Sometimes these kids know exactly what they are doing. They feel better creating a group of fellow failures, a group that insulates them from their own sense of failure.

No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”

~ Mark Twain (Among others)

Eduhonesty: I watch national healthcare unravelling. I wonder if they will pull it back together. They haven’t managed to pull American education back together. They haven’t even managed to acknowledge they’ve screwed it up. Yet all these expensive, well-intentioned efforts don’t seem to have made us any more nationally competitive. If we consider that many of these kids can’t figure out whether Egypt is in Europe, Africa or even South America — well, it’s possible we have been moving backwards. They aren’t getting much better at what’s on the test, but sometimes almost the whole curriculum consists of items likely to be on the test. In the meantime, there’s no time for geography and middle schoolers sometimes can’t tell a city from a country.

“President Obama is now making his case for raising the debt limit. He said raising
the debt limit does not increase debt – you know, like raising the speed limit does
not increase speed.”

~ comedian Jay Leno

Eduhonesty: And raising the bar and making the test harder will help those kids who are already failing to jump higher. The government that brought us NCLB is now bringing us Obamacare. A careful look at the rollout may be instructive for those who wonder how American education has become such a mess.

Help! Somebody please get the government to leave us all alone!

Taken from the internet:

The title reads as follows: “Tennessee high school accused of ‘segregating’ students based on grades during lunch periods” with subtitles that explain, “Students who perform poorly are forced to spend the first half of their lunch period in tutoring sessions” and “One father of a special needs student calls the policy a ‘civil rights violation.”

Here is what that angry dad is ignoring:

“Since the policy has been in place, the school’s graduation percentage has gone from 77 percent to about 90 percent

I might as well throw in most of the article itself. It’s instructive.

The American South has a painful history with segregation, but that hasn’t stopped a school in Tennessee from ‘segregating’ its lunchroom – according to the father of a girl at the school, anyway. Only, La Vergne High School isn’t segregating students based on race, it’s segregating them based on grades. Regardless, the school’s policy to separate students who perform worse academically from their better-performing classmates during lunch periods has drawn criticism from parents and students alike.

The school says students who perform poorly academically have to spend the first half of their lunch period with a tutor. Paul Morecroft is the father of a 10th grade girl with special needs and doesn’t appreciate that his daughter is being forced to not eat with her friends who perform better academically than she does.

‘To me, it’s considered separation, because you have your special needs kids and the kids getting the good grades on one side, and the kids getting below an 80 on the other side,’ Morecroft tells WSMV. Morecroft adds ‘I call it a civil rights violation and segregation, no doubt.’

The concerned father took his troubles to the school district, which explained that the school has a ‘split’ lunch period: half of the period is for lunch and the other half is to help students who may be struggling in a certain subject.

‘They are not segregating them in the traditional sense. If the kids’ scores are low in certain areas, they are getting help in that area. If you want to label that segregation, then that’s not the correct way to label it,’ said Rutherford County Schools spokesman James Evans.

The program has been in place for two years at the school, and is part of a statewide pilot program aimed at helping students perform better academically. Most schools, however, have incorporated the extra help program into the school day. La Vergne developed a split lunch, where some students go to a learning lab in the auditorium for the first half of the period.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2485091/Tennessee-high-school-accused-segregating-students-based-grades-lunch-periods.html#ixzz2jY4Gy2Eh
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Eduhonesty: That dad has bought into the idea that school is a social venue. It’s not. School is for learning. Extra tutoring is the only hope for many academically-challenged students. In regular classes, these students fell behind. Whether they lost their academic footing because they could not keep up, because they did not bother to do the work needed to keep up, or because of outside factors beyond their control, such as frequent moves by parent(s), the critical factor is that they are now at the back of the pack. Once students fall behind they can never catch up by receiving the exact same instruction as other students who are not behind. To catch up, they need extra time and tutoring. Lunch works well because the kids are on campus. After school programs can also work, but often the funding does not exist for such programs — and even where it does, many students simply don’t stay after school. Those kids who are choosing not to do their work can be expected to slip out of school and onto the bus. Parents are often working at this time, if they are involved at all. Some have to babysit or work to help the family.

LaVergne High School’s academic lunch makes sense.

One more note: Reading between the lines, it sounds like they are using 1/2 hour or slightly less for tutoring and 1/2 hour or slightly less for lunch. (That’s what my school does.) Dad needs to understand that a full hour for lunch for his daughter who is academically behind would be cheating her. She needs more academic time, not less.

My school’s administration would be unhappy with my previous post, I expect. But the state’s interactive report card website documents the problem. The state estimates that less than 1 in 10 students in my district’s high school are ready for college. That’s 9 in 10 who need some alternative option.

I will say our vocational/technical options are better than those of many school districts. Our push to improve college-readiness is inevitable with these numbers and I am certainly in favor of that push.

Eduhonesty: But the current administration’s plan for 100% college readiness is a pipe-dream and I would be fascinated to know exactly what they are smoking. Arne Duncan and Barack Obama need to visit the real world and talk to these students. Many have no intention of going to college, despite the exhortations of teachers and administrators. What are we offering these students instead?

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly
anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

~ Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996)

How many times this year have I told students to put their phones away? I have sent students to the Dean’s Office for refusing.

Yet these kids might as well be using magic wands for all that they understand the objects in their hands. Technology should be a greater part of the curriculum — not just its use for classroom purposes, which is heavily encouraged, but also the nuts and bolts of the technology itself. The number of kids in our academically-challenged schools who are reliant on devices they can neither create nor repair represents a growing problem. We joke about Ivy Leaguers who can’t fix a toilet. Those Ivy Leaguers will be just fine, thank-you, but my students may not be fine. Many are unlikely to be ready for college — even if they could find the money necessary to go. (This is especially a problem for the undocumented who cannot get loans.) But since we are relentlessly preparing them for college, they are unlikely to be ready to do anything else.

Where are the vocational/technical options related to our new technology? Maybe there is no need for these options since we now seem to chuck the old stuff without a thought. But I wonder if we are neglecting possible avenues for skilled trades in our relentless push to up our math and English scores?

Recently, Emilio skipped an afterschool detention and ended up with an all-day school detention. This is pretty standard practice in America’s high schools. Detentions keep getting longer the more they are missed.

The problem was — Emilio skipped the detention deliberately in order to get a full day of in-school suspension. If you don’t want to work and don’t much care about your grade, why not take the day off?

“I like to be suspended. You get to take it easy,” he said.

Eduhonesty: I’d make them clean the school AFTER school instead so that they missed time with their friends. They could scrub my desks for awhile. I don’t know if that would help Emilio, but it would help me anyway.

For some kids, the current deterrents are no deterrent at all.

A year of minimum wage work might do more to motivate many students to learn than anything the educational system will ever be able to do. We ought to throw these lazy, under-motivated students out earlier — while they still have a chance to come back and change their behavior. When we shelter them while they do nothing for year after year, we help to engrain habits that will lead to possible lifelong failure. Emilio is not learning to work. If anything, he is learning the opposite.

His name is “Emilio” — name changed to protect the guilty.

Emilio explained to me that he wanted to drop out of school. He does not like school. (Legally he could drop out at any time. He is seventeen.) But then, he explained, he would have to go to work and pay taxes. Well, he doesn’t want to work and pay taxes. Given that he has no good options, in his view, he is staying in school, the lesser of two evils.

He’s a likable kid but sometimes trouble for a classroom. Actually, he’s better behaved than most students without goals, but he doesn’t care much if he passes. Failure’s a bit embarrassing, but if he fails, he can stay in school longer. So he models laziness and off-task behavior for the classroom.

There’s something so wrong with this picture.

Eduhonesty: If a kid reaches the point where there’s no way that he or she can get enough credits to graduate in the legally allotted time for high school, that kid should be forced out of school. It takes a lot of off-task behavior to fail classes nowadays, behavior that is frequently disruptive to the education of more serious students.

We have students who are seventeen who still only have the credits of a freshman or sophomore. They interfere with other students learning while refusing to learn for themselves. These students need to be expelled.