The Illinois Constitution tests are exit tests. Students must pass tests on both the U.S. and the Illinois Constitutions in order to pass on to the next grade. (They take the tests during different years.) Retakes are allowed, but passing is required.

I got most of a Civics class to meet me in the library in the evening to study for their constitution test. I frankly love Constitution tests because motivation levels are so high. After-school study sessions may get nearly perfect attendance. Students don’t need to be reminded to take or highlight notes. They stare attentively at new information displayed in front of the class.

Eduhonesty: The threat of failure is a wonderful motivator. We should use it more often.

One of my paraprofessionals told me that he had gone to school in Honduras. In Honduras, students did not pass third grade if they could not pass the third grade exit test. Fail the test, you repeat the grade. Period.

I like the idea.

Eduhonesty: Pundits keep demanding that teachers be held accountable. That’s fine — at least, when rational standards are used to judge those teachers — but we also need to hold students accountable. Right now, it’s often all on the teacher to produce academic results. I believe this is part of the reason why we have so many passive, undermotivated kids. When failure is not an option, kids know they won’t fail.

Not failing is NOT the same as succeeding, though — not by a long shot.

Teachers are told not to enable students. “They need to learn to do their own work. Don’t rescue them all the time.”

And if they are not doing their own work?

In these times when teachers are also told that “failure is not an option” we have a real problem. No work is not allowed to result in failure. No work is not supposed to result in rescues or enabling. The only acceptable outcome is a student who is doing their own academically-acceptable work.

This situation led the second largest school district in Illinois to propose a grading system for this school year that started at 50%. If you did no homework at all, you had a 50%. The following is taken from an email about this change:

Concerns About the New U-46 Grading Policy
It is very concerning that many U-46 stakeholders may not be fully aware of the implications of the new grading policy which is to be implemented this fall, or the ultimate negative effect it will have on the overall quality of the education of our students in this district.
The first topic of concern is that people may not realize how drastically some grades will be inflated when all low scores are bumped up to 50%. Under this new grading policy, a student could conceivably get a 70% C- average on half of his assignments, and still pass the class without even completing any of the other half of the requirements of the course. Understand that the average of 70% and 0% is 35%, which is what this student earns. However, when all of his zeroes are inflated to 50’s, he passes with a 60%, the average of 70% and 50%. In this case, the student’s average increased by 25%. It is crucial that everyone is fully aware of the fact that hundreds of students who would have earned failing grades in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s, will now pass their classes under the new policy this fall. [For evidence, please refer to the May 2013 Grading Committee Report PowerPoint, Slide 27, which shows what happens when a student with a 28% has all of his low grades changed to 50’s. In this example, though the student’s average is increased by 24.5%, he still gets the failing grade he deserves with a 52.5%. A similar student, however, with just a couple more passing scores, can pass the class with a percent in the 30’s. With only 3 passing scores out of 12, a student could receive credit for the class.] Students who have demonstrated such low competency should not receive credit. The commonly accepted minimum competency accepted in this country has been 60% for over one hundred years. Why should U-46 lower that minimum competency expectation to 35%?

Eduhonesty: Madness. Complete madness. When I left off, the Superintendent was backtracking furiously. I doubt that the district made the change to this grading system, but if they didn’t, the reason was that some teachers raised holy hell about the plan. Originally, this scheme and a similar version were presented for a vote — without the option of continuing the traditional grading system. The idea behind the 0 = 50% idea was that students would not become discouraged and quit. Teachers were also expected to accept all late work up until the near end of the grading period for the same reason.

Reality: Some kids don’t work. Phone calls to parents or guardians don’t change the situation. Even afterschool tutoring sessions don’t get the work done, at least not consistently. Trying to get around this fact by stripping away the penalties for late work, while giving half-credit for no work at all, will not solve the problem. For one thing, many students will then copy returned papers belonging to their friends. Cheating is already endemic in our schools. For another, those students who find a “C” or lower acceptable will then do LESS work since that 50% makes it possible to nail the “C” grade with a fair number of missing assignments.

I’m sorry, but failure HAS to be an option. Why do we have illiterate and innumerate high school students? One reason is that we kept passing these kids when some of them had done almost no work. Rewarding students for doing no work, a schlock job, and/or late work will not benefit our students. I don’t see how anyone benefits, except for a few administrators who don’t want to explain failures to parents or other administrators.

From http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2011/02/us-department-education-big-winner-2010-bunkum-awards:

“The Bunkum Awards each year acknowledge reports on education issues from think tanks and other sources that represent the worst of the worst when it comes to research quality. Past winners have been lauded for their shoddy methods, evidentiary cherry-picking, and tendentious reasoning.”

I suggest reading all the bunkum awards, but here is one of my favorites:

The ‘Plural of Anecdote is Not Data’ Award. Our first award went to the Reason Foundation for its report Fix the City Schools arguing for “portfolio” school districts and citing improvements in student achievement in New Orleans in the post-Katrina era. The report relied overwhelmingly on attention-grabbing anecdotes yet ignored reasons unrelated to the portfolio approach – such as the massive exodus of low-income children from the city, plus a significant increase in resources – that could explain those improvements.

That’s the problem with so much educational research. People with an agenda pick the “facts” that support their position. They ignore facts that don’t. Worst of all, I suspect they sometimes don’t even recognize that those counterexamples matter.

I have been told repeatedly in the past few years that research supports not penalizing students for turning in late papers. They should be allowed to turn in their homework pretty much any time before the end of the grading period, because then they will at least do the work. That research points out that this no-late-penalty system results in students doing better in school.

Help! Of course student grades improved when we let them turn in a bunch of junk at the end, pushing their overall average up. But how much more do they know than before? Especially since a great many of them just borrow friends corrected papers and copy the work, I suspect they learn little or nothing much of the time. The research says we kept them from giving up. Well, we did that too. But what did we really teach?

Eduhonesty: I think we taught students that you can behave irresponsibly, even dishonestly, and the world will let you get away with it. The world may even reward you. That’s what we taught. I’ll be interested to see how that approach works out in the work world. I expect a number of these kids to be stunned when they are told to clean out their desks. I can just hear them stuttering, “But I was going to turn it in next week!” as they are escorted off the premises of their former jobs.

They look up answers that they barely read. They cut and paste the answers into documents they barely edit. They even copy whole essays off sites designed for that purpose.

If our students were using pen and paper, at least they’d have the reinforcement from writing what they copied.

A small subset of our students are using technology to avoid learning — and some of them are doing it rather successfully. I caught one student this year because about two-thirds of the way down his essay, I saw the word “whom.” Up to that point, I had been impressed. But I knew the kid and that kid was never going to use “whom.” I put a line from the essay into a search engine. A site offering essays popped up. I put in a line from another part of the essay. The same site popped up. If he had changed just a few words, he would probably have gotten a high “A” instead of a “0”, though.

Food for thought as so many bureaucrats and administrators leap on the technology bandwagon: I’m honestly not sure but we might get as much learning from hand slates and chalk if we subtracted the cheating.

Eduhonesty: Technology allows for plagiarism in particular, as well as other cheating. To prevent this dishonest behavior, a great deal of monitoring is required. In many places, this monitoring is not happening. Our already overloaded educators don’t have time to check the originality of all the work they receive. Sometimes there’s no way to check. A quick phone search during a test or quiz can slip right by. Students today are linked together 24/7 and help from friends in cyberspace has become part of the academic landscape.

I’m going to throw in a News Tribune article about a young woman who committed suicide by stepping out in front of a semi truck here because it deserves to be shared in its entirety:

Too many adult children are living in the basement of their parents’ houses, unready to launch.

Educators may have to shoulder at least part of the blame. We are taught to entice our students to learn through the use of computer programs and Smart Boards. We are taught to keep the pace active and entertaining, to engage our students. American education is designed to entertain children and adolescents, even in school.

Unfortunately, much of that fun originates outside of America’s children, from videogames, televisions, IPads, and smartphones, among other devices. Our children text each other nonstop as they wait for us to provide them with their next set of marching orders. The devices are almost never off. Texting is about as quiet as it gets and it’s not uncommon for adolescents to text through the night.

Our children are not learning to entertain themselves. From the outside, that fact is not always apparent. That girl who sits playing with her IPad at the adjacent restaurant table may appear to be keeping herself occupied. But who is entertaining whom? I would say some savvy software developers are amusing that girl. The gadget is active. The girl is reactive — and she may be essentially reacting through almost all of her day.

What’s the problem? I see a number of problems, but one that glares out at me lately has to do with teaching. We put the responsibility for engagement on the teachers, as if teachers are walking, breathing  programs on an IPad. We put almost no (or no!) responsibility on students to engage themselves. 

Adults constantly find distractions for their kids. Parents provide as many of the latest electronics as they can afford. Teachers work endlessly to make sure students are occupied with interesting lessons. It’s become a kidcentric world.

I think some of these kids end up living at home after graduation because real jobs — especially first jobs — frequently are not fun. Suddenly, our young adults are plunged into day-to-day reality and nobody cares if they are entertained. In fact, relaxing with the usual devices can get you fired when you’re supposed to be working instead. These adult children don’t grab the bottom rung of the ladder because the bottom rung is boring, a word I hear students using far too often.

Yes, that bottom rung is frequently boring. My first job was as a file clerk. (That dates me!) I put endless files in drawers. I cleaned up files and paperwork once my bosses knew I could be trusted. After six months, I was promoted to secretary. I typed checks and other correspondence. Three weeks later, I became an insurance claims adjuster, an interesting job which provided me with a passable paycheck until I returned to school.

Those first two insurance jobs were repetitive and dull, much less interesting than high school or college classes. I took the jobs, did them well, and worked up to a place I wanted to be. But I did not expect my environment to be fun. I did not think the world owed me an enriching experience.

More and more, I hear the phrase “entitlement generation.”

Here’s a definition from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/entitlement+generation:

Main Entry: Entitlement Generation

Noun: Definition: the group born between 1979 and 1994 who believe they are owed certain rights and benefits without further justification.

The entitlement generation expects higher salaries, flexible work hours, and ample time off.

We built these self-entitled, wretched young adults. They are frequently discontented, some of them bitterly unhappy, because that flexible job with the high salary, short hours and long vacations is nothing more than a pipe dream. Personally, I don’t know a single person in this country with that job, except a few college professors who are skating on past laurels. Virtually no one gets to start in that job, unless maybe they are born to Trump or other big money.

This is my message for students and former students who have not launched: Suck it up, guys. The world was not built for you. The world is not responsible for you. YOU are responsible for you.

But I apologize, too. Instead of giving you endless second chances, we should have failed you more often. When you deliberately broke the class fan, you should have been suspended. When you kept talking to your girlfriend in class, you should have been thrown out — or your parents should have been called in to sit with you for a few days in class. We treated you like you were incapable of being responsible for yourself and I’m very much afraid you may have come to believe you aren’t responsible for yourself.

If you think that, you’re wrong.

Eduhonesty: Second chances are not a right. Teachers and administrators may believe they are being kind when offering second, third, fourth, etc. chances to students who break the rules. They aren’t always being kind. Sometimes, that second chance may be deserved and a student may learn from the lecture that comes with the free pass. But too many second chances lead to an expectation that all will always be forgiven.

The world does not offer endless forgiveness. Sometimes it does not even offer second chances. The world offers opportunities and too often “opportunity only knocks once,” as the old saying goes. The world can go whizzing right by while entitled young adults wait for the right break. And wait. And wait. And wait.