Baltimore HS Student Who Passed Only Three Courses in Four Years Ranks in Top Half of His Class
“after four years of high school, France just learned, her 17-year-old must start over. He’s been moved back to ninth grade”
A high school student in Baltimore passed three courses in the last four years. He has a 0.13-grade point average but has the distinction of being near the top half of his class.
This is not his failure. The people who have been paid to teach him should hang their heads in shame.
FOX 45 in Baltimore reports:
City student passes 3 classes in four years, ranks near top half of class with 0.13 GPA
A shocking discovery out of a Baltimore City high school, where Project Baltimore has found hundreds of students are failing. It’s a school where a student who passed three classes in four years, ranks near the top half of his class with a 0.13 grade point average.
Tiffany France thought her son would receive his diploma this coming June. But after four years of high school, France just learned, her 17-year-old must start over. He’s been moved back to ninth grade.
“He’s stressed and I am too. I told him I’m probably going to start crying. I don’t know what to do for him,” France told Project Baltimore. “Why would he do three more years in school? He didn’t fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job. They failed. They failed, that’s the problem here. They failed. They failed. He didn’t deserve that.”
France’s son attends Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts in west Baltimore. His transcripts show he’s passed just three classes in four years, earning 2.5 credits, placing him in ninth grade. But France says she didn’t know that until February. She has three children and works three jobs. She thought her oldest son was doing well because even though he failed most of his classes, he was being promoted. His transcripts show he failed Spanish I and Algebra I but was promoted to Spanish II and Algebra II. He also failed English II but was passed on to English III.
This is a public school, which means the teachers there belong to the same unions currently issuing endless demands about money and reopening schools.
Here’s a video report from FOX 45. It includes comments from the student’s mother, who says she had no idea the situation was this bad because her son kept getting moved forward.
Public schools across the country are pushing social justice and Critical Race Theory while failing to teach students basic reading and math skills.
Name another profession where you could fail more miserably and still have a job.
In a follow-up story, FOX 45 reports that calls are growing to close the school:
Calls to Shut Down City School Where 0.13 GPA Ranks Near Top Half of Class
Calls are mounting for a City School to be investigated and shut down immediately. This, after an alarming Project Baltimore investigation found hundreds of students are failing at the west Baltimore high school.
C4, or Clarence Mitchell IV, and Bryan Nehman co-host the C4 and Bryan Nehman Show on WBAL Radio. Tuesday morning, the popular radio hosts demanded action following a recent FOX45 News investigation.
“I believe it’s violating the constitution rights of the children,” said C4, “There is no way in the world you can look at what is being reported by Project Baltimore and say, they are providing those children with a thorough and efficient form of public education.”
“That is astonishing. Absolutely astonishing. This school needs to be shut down,” added Nehman. “If we have half the kids in the school that are below a .13. Not a 1.3, people. A .13, that school needs to be shut down. It’s not doing its job.”
It’s important to remember that this is just one example. I guarantee you could find similar situations in cities all over the country.
Republicans must make education a priority issue from now on and prove there is a better way to teach our nation’s children.
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
“Name another profession where you could fail more miserably and still have a job.” ~ Politician
The school definitely is awful, but mom isn’t blameless here.
“Name another profession where you could fail more miserably and still have a job.” ~ Politician
Weather forecaster.
Fortune teller.
I knew you’d say that. 🙂
politician.
Economist
Dr Fauci!
Awesome – and he is a profession – the oldest profession.
No, if weather forecasters are wrong as much as 50 percent of the time they’ll have to start looking for a new job. The reason why is with weather the rubber actually meets the road at some point. Ranchers need to know when to collect their livestock if a freezing winter storm is about to hit, or failing that, at least put out fodder to help them survive. Otherwise they go broke. Farmers also sometimes have to adjust their schedules to stay ahead of predicted foul weather, as do ships at sea have to modify their course, speed, and even race into an unscheduled port visit so they don’t sink.
If weather forecasters failed as miserably as teacher’s union members they’d by tarred and feathered. But like Democrat politicians, IRS, and FBI officials, so-called teachers suffer no consequences for failure or even actual crimes. In NYC teachers accused of even sexual assault let alone incompetence stay on the job. They may be taken out of the classroom, but they have to show up at designated locations and they still get paid. Some of them just read the papers, or books, or some start second businesses. Others know doubt surf a lot of porn considering they no longer have access to actual students.
That’s one thing I learned; federal bureaucrats can surf porn all day everyday and they can’t get fired*. I don’t know what they have to do to get fired.
Teachers have by and large (there are of course exceptions but so what; there aren’t enough to matter) proven two things. One, they aren’t essential workers and, two, they don’t want to teach. Just get paid for not teaching, like their sexual abuser colleagues in NYC. That apparently is their dream “job” (I won’t elaborate on what words they fantasize would go in front of “job” but use your imaginations as you either wish or don’t wish; just saying that enough of them have been caught doing the full “Jeffrey Toobin” during distance learning or even the classroom when they aren’t getting it on with members of their subordinate and captive audiences).
Of course the leftists have the solution to this mother and child’s dilemma and it has nothing to do with charter schools or establishing and enforcing criteria for teaching competence. No. Standards are racist! As is history, learning English, math, and the hard sciences. If we get rid of standards and instead adopt “grade equity” (awarding grades based on the student’s “intersectional identity,” i.e. race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and claimed gender identity) and therefore distribute grades based on identity politics then this kid would be going to Harvard.
When I said that math is “white supremacist” it’s because of the emphasis on getting the right answer, the student has to show their work, and the “unequal” “hierarchical” relationship between teacher and student. The latter of course reinforces “existing power structures” which we all learned from AOC and her “mob” are racist.
Who knew that the Chinese and Indians are white supremacists to the bone, given that they place all their emphasis on getting the right answer, requiring the students to prove they know how to get the right answer, and if anything have an even more rigid hierarchical “power structure” than we do. Asian students in functioning societies would, for instance, never dream of going up to a professor following one of their lectures and tell them how great (or worse how bad) they thought it was. The professor will look at them like they have two heads. The student is there to learn from the professor. The student therefore doesn’t have sufficient knowledge of the subject to evaluate the professor’s lecture either way.
Of course, when I said that the rubber never meets the road in the public schools and the unions make sure the teachers never suffer the consequences of failure that is only partially true. In fact, these failures are from a leftist bureaucrat’s perspective real successes. Producing functional, productive members of society would be a failure. Producing reliably indoctrinated, perpetual wards of the state is the goal*. As Joe Biden let slip during his interview with a black radio host. The host had serious questions for Biden, and Biden was having none of it. He told the host that if didn’t know who he should vote for, then “you ain’t black.”
Of course I was taught correctly; only racists have the concept of race traitor. But the leftist racists have a race based theory of racism. Only whites can be racist. They can’t because of their race. Hint: if you have a race based theory of racism, you’re a racist. Just as if you’re the only one who hears the “racist dog whistles” you’re the dog.
Being black in America is not about skin color. As far as the left is concerned being black is about “knowing your place” in the political hierarchy. And that they are a wholly owned demographic of the left, as are all “BIPOC” constituencies.
To not know your place is to be a race traitor. Funny, when I was younger I was told only racists believe in race traitors. Yet Maxine Waters was declaring she could never forgive any black person who “betrayed their people” and voted for Trump. The left hates Clarence Thomas and call him a “house” you-know-what, and “Uncle Tom,” an “Oreo,” etc., (their terminology) because he refuses to bend the knee and credit people who had nothing to do with his success with being entirely responsible for it. And show the gratitude that the left KNOWS all blacks owe them by being reliable leftists.
Blacks, indeed all members of racial minorities, who are conservative aren’t really black/minorities. Women who are conservative or just anti-abortion aren’t really women. So the leftists could use all sorts of sexually explicit invective against, say, Sarah Palin or Candace Owens, as maliciously as they wanted because all real women are leftists.
Ironic how they are simultaneously abolishing the category of real women.
Here’s a link to a video that is quite enjoyable. A white leftist/#BLM rioter (most #BLM rioters are in fact white and come from fairly affluent backgrounds [i.e. families marinated in “privilege”]) lecturing a black woman who sees through the cultural Marxist B.S. about how to be black. That he is “more black than you on the inside,” the only indicator of “authentic blackness” which is just the equivalent cultural Marxist term for old economic Marxist term for the proletariat’s “true class consciousness.” How do I know this? Because most of the pics you see of #BLM protests look like reunions of the Osmond family. And the ideas they adhere to are so absurd that only products of our mental-illness cultivating indoctrination centers know as colleges and universities are dumbed down enough to be so stupid as to believe them. That takes money for the most part.
https://redstate.com/mike_miller/2020/07/29/white-blm-rioter-berates-african-american-immigrant-doctor-im-more-black-than-you-on-the-inside-n249348
Of course the URL gives the game away. The woman is an immigrant from Cameroon who came to this country and achieved her dream of becoming a doctor. African immigrants work long and hard to come to the U.S. because despite the leftist propaganda America is not a racist country. The leftist propaganda, like all cult indoctrination techniques, requires that people have no alternate sources of information other than cult propaganda. Hence Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee who suffered the very Islamic form of female subjugation of genital mutilation, who fled to the Netherlands to become an ex-Muslim, a member of the Dutch parliament, an author, public speaker, etc., can not be allowed to speak on college campuses.
There are misogynist patriarchal rape cultures. The U.S. in particular and Western civilization in general are the furthest thing from being one of those cultures. She knows; she escaped from one. But that would undermine the leftist indoctrination that the U.S. is the worst country on earth in all their cherished false categories, the worst that ever existed, so Ayaan Hirsi Ali and all alternative voices must be “cancelled.”
The real point of teaching “multi-culturalism” is that there really are no other cultures. So you don’t need to know anything about them except all the others are all sweetness and light. Meanwhile Western culture is the source of all that’s bad in the world.
And the leftists seized control of what used to be a system of education to make damn sure kids don’t know much of anything if they can help it. And the kids who get the most exposure to the system (i.e. college undergrads and graduate students) know the least but are indoctrinated to believe they know the most. Oh, and develop mental illness. The system is set up to do the exact opposite of what clinicians who treat anxiety disorders, depression, phobias, etc., know works. The exact wrong approach for treating a person with PTSD is to sweep their world clean of anything that reminds them of their trauma (trigger warnings, anyone?) and tell them they have the right to demand the whole world change to conform to their anxiety disorders. The correct approach to these types of disorders is to expose them to their anxieties and phobias. It doesn’t necessarily desensitize them. The anxiety or phobia may remain. What they learn from being exposed to their anxieties and fears is that their is more to them than their anxieties and fears. That they have the strength and courage to confront them. What this system does is cultivate fear and weakness. To the point where they believe that other peoples thoughts and expressed opinions literally “harm” them. And only government can protect their unnaturally fragile psyches from the harm they only imagine.
*For the same reason the Democrats are pushing “Fight for Fifteen.” They know perfectly well that will push millions of unskilled workers out of jobs and they’ll be replaced by automation. That’s the point; to make them unemployable and therefore dependents of the Democrat party. Just like they pushed for economy killing policies using COVID as their pretext, the real point was to put people out of work and small businesses into bankruptcy. Then blame Trump for what they falsely called an incompetent response and Republicans for being “heartless” for quibbling over their government checks. The point of their policies, besides creating a horrible economy and blaming Trump in the short term, was to replace jobs (a great many which will never come back) with government checks. Think of those “pandemic relief” checks as severance pay. The Democrats fired them. And it’s also the equivalent of a drug dealers giving away samples of their product to get their targets addicted to it. Then they can demand anything of the addicts they created.
P.S. There is one profession that can fail more often and more miserably than teachers. Political consultants/pollsters.
“That’s one thing I learned; federal bureaucrats can surf porn all day everyday and they can’t get fired*.”
I meant to “circle back” to this point. Unlike Psaki I’ll actually do it.
Technically, of course, there are mechanisms on paper to fire federal bureaucrats. But the process is so convoluted, drawn out, and intentionally filled with figurative land mines that upon appeal whether to an administrative review board or in a lawsuit the slightest mistake on the part of supervisors invalidates the attempt that for practical purposes it’s impossible. It’s easier to promote someone to get rid of them. Which explains why bureaucracies aren’t meritocracies but operate on the Peter Principle.
One additional point about the minimum wage. Most union contracts tie union wages to the minimum wage. This is especially true for government unions. There are a variety of ways to do this, but the bottom line is if the minimum wage goes up, the union wage always goes up according to a negotiated formula.
The bottom line is the minimum wage is never about a “living wage.” It’s about creating classes of beholden clients. Unskilled workers who price themselves out of the labor market become multi-generational dependents on the government dole (does anyone seriously believe after reading the above story that government schools failing this student and those similarly situated is an “unintended consequence”). And the unions are more beholden to the leftist establishment. So the unions expropriate their members wages to make larger political contributions. And then the leftist establishment reward the unions further.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Arminius, Sometimes I disagree with you, but these two comments are excellent – well worth reading in spite of length. I’m saving them.
I would add two things:
Unless I am mistaken, Trump successfully reformed the firing procedures for VA employees, thus vastly improving the performance of the VA. It can be done, but only with the right leaders.
The main reason the teachers unions are so corrupt is that they are public sector unions. The reason they are public sector unions is that the schools are run by the government. Therefore, we should move toward privatizing education (via school choice). QED.
I read that 75% of black males in California can not read. Obviously this is the fault of bad teachers protected by unions, bad school boards, bad politicians. But, a good part is the parents. They will not allow honest evaluation of their children and in some cultures in our system there is zero reading at home.
Source?
California has the lowest literacy rates in the nation according to According to the National Center for Education Statistics, at 76.9%.
According to Mercury News (PUBLISHED: June 5, 2017 at 6:22 a.m. | UPDATED: June 5, 2017 at 6:25 a.m.), “75% of black California boys don’t meet state reading standards.”
I am not sure if “below standard” means illiterate, but according to the same article, “More than half of black boys scored in the lowest category on the English portion of the (state standardized) test”
https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/05/75-of-black-california-boys-dont-meet-state-reading-standards/
I have seen some statistics that indicates 85% of incarcerated “black” males read at or below the 5th grade level and the literacy programs in prison greatly reduce recidivism from prisoners who leave prison with at least an 8th grade reading level. Memory serves here.
Illiteracy rates are increasing for the United States, but those increases are concentrated in Democratic dominated states.
Public education is an abject failure that entraps economically disadvantaged populations into permanent disadvantage. I understand when people say the parents are partially to blame, but if a school produces an illiterate graduate, that person has a real disadvantage for making sure their children have a satisfactory educational outcome.
These parents who want a better education for their children are denied this, because they are trapped in a failing public education system and do not have the economic ability to move to a better school district which gas higher rents and real estate prices, or pay for private tuition. So I do not really blame as a whole. They are trapped, not like rats, but by Democrats.
So you’re saying is that prisons do a better job of educating people than the government schools?
Gibbie, maybe so. In prison, they have nothing else fun to do and are closely supervised. If black schools had regular attendance and a peaceful atmosphere, I am sure that the kids would learn much more.
Not just “Parents” – more often, problem is no Dad around at all. Here in Baltimore, just one out of six kids has a Dad in their lives. Incentivized by our welfare system, GOP no longer even talks about changing it.
After seeing what Baltimore voters did with the outstanding candidacy of Kim Klacik, Baltimore is lucky Republicans even continue to bother to run.
Lets look as black IQ stats again, their overall average IQ is 85, and the range of average is 70 to 100, with 16% being less than 70 and 16% being over 100.
Now consider that smarter blacks do not want to live in inner cities, so their children will not be in those schools.
This indignant woman is probably dumb, the boy’s father was probably dump, and the boy is dumb. That is not the fault of teachers.
Retuning to the boy’s parents, did they read to him when he was little, did they take every opportunity to teach from infancy on? I doubt that they did, and even if they had, and the boy is on the dumb side of the Bell Curve, it will fail.
IQ represent a person’s ultimate capability, nurturing and education with other traits not measured by IQ determine rather the person attains their potential.
A very large percentage of blacks have low potential, there nothing we can do at this time to fix that problem.
So far, geneticists have been unable to determine which genes are responsible for intelligence, I am hopeful that this is something which can be fixed.
Very unwoke, but spot on!
To me woke is wide eyed reality. To others it is about ignoring reality, protecting feelings.
I think it does disservice to everyone to create an existence based on lies. No one can make a decent engineer out of people with an IQ of 100 or less. You also cannot make a decent pilot, like young Thugvon Martin. He wanted to be a pilot, while he was skipping 58 days of school.
There needs to be severe push back against people who demand things they are not entitled to.
Don’t forget that leftism is the country of double speak and doublethink.
Woke is the opposite of awake.
From Jim Grant but it applies here.
The scene is sometime in 1960s and the St. Louis Cardinals are playing. A very very mediocre batter strikes out, slams down his bat, takes a swing at the water cooler and finally a pitcher named Bob Gibson summons him over and points to his mediocre batting average. He asks him ‘What did you expect?'”
Your first sentence does not make sense and suggests, to me, you may not understand or know much about IQs. If your going to address something as complex as measuring intelligence you should really know what you’re talking about.
No, I think he’s probably right and therefore you’re wrong. The scale was calibrated on a white population with a rough bell curve around 100. A nonwhite population is likely also to have a bell curve, but the mean and standard deviation of that bell curve could be different.
Actually Terman’s research, as well as others who studied the question later, showed that the bell curve has fat tails. And yet psychologists who have very superficial math training tell us “authoritatively” what the percentiles of the distribution are. In fact we have more people with very high and very low IQ’s than a normal distribution, or the psychologists, would say.
How about this observation, people on the left side of the Bell Curve do not like the idea 🙂 I bet that is your problem.
It is no one’s fault that IQ varies. In broad strokes we have a pretty good idea of how higher intelligence developed in groups who migrated from Africa became more intelligent. Increased intelligence came with a high, brutal price.
I know a little bit about IQ tests. Personally, I feel that assigning a single number to something as complex as human intelligence is absurd. Having said that, as much as I detest the IQ test and number, IQ correlates very well with academic performance and general success in life. Success as measured by financial and social status. Higher IQ people make more money and are socially higher status. Like it or not.
Why do blacks score so poorly? Nature or nurture? The question that cannot be asked.
“Nature or nurture?” Both
“Lets look as black IQ stats again, their overall average IQ is 85…”
And you get this from what source? Did you examine this supposed IQ score for accuracy? Do you think even 10% of Black Africa has been IQ tested? Are the IQ tests remotely accurate across multiple cultures?
Next you’ll try to pass of the Ashkenazi Jews as having an IQ average of 115. Also bogus.
Not picking on you, this is a common myth.
Worldwide IQ has been studied for a very long time. There is a wealth of information available.
I have worked with a bunch of high IQ people, Nobel laurates’ and other top people in their fields, and yes, I do think that Ashkenazi Jews are the smartest group in the world. We would all be far worse off without Jews.
In addition to raw intellectual capacity, Jews do a very good job with child rearing, and so do Asians. Jewish and Asian females stress education.
I have a very high IQ, though I am in age related decline. I have no Jewish linage.
Extremes in human attributes usually come with deficiencies in other areas, I most certainly have my share.
I would not feel a need to rub black noses into the IQ issue if they would look inward, understand issues which drive their condition, and take responsibility. In order for black outcome to improve, they must admit to their deficiencies and strive to fix them. Instead they blame everyone else and lie like crazy.
They were left behind by evolution. The problem goes far beyond IQ.
Absolutely. Mom is an oblivious moron.
“she had no idea the situation was this bad because her son kept getting moved forward.”
We still have report cards, right? Maybe math is racist… or she thought F meant Fantastic.
Mom was probably like the boy, 20 years ago. Wonder if she can read.
We don’t have a literacy test for having children, but without it we end up with problems like we see here.
As society has become more technological, and people require more education, the gap between when people are biologically ready to reproduce and when they are prepared to function as adults has increased by about ten years.
It would make sense to research ways to delay puberty in order to lesson social problems associated this widening gap. Delaying puberty would likely extend the golden time of learning.the
A more immediate solution would be to require an implantable birth control, though that would not stop staggering loss of productive learning associated with mating distractions.
Good analysis. I think we’re stuck with this. People used to get married much younger and were strongly “encouraged” to stay that way.
There’s some hope that a renewed emphasis on the trades (for which calculus, and even algebra are not necessary) could prevent some of our human disasters.
But that would involve school choice.
Ssshhh!! Rachel Levine is going to hear you!
Henry Bowman….. unintended consequences?
“Name another profession where you could fail more miserably and still have a job.”
REPORTER
Grizzly beat me to it. Politics, for sure. How could the mother not read a report card over a four year period? Sounds a little fishy to me.
Sir, “Mom”, as far as I’m concerned, is ALWAYS to blame for the failure of her children to be adequately educated. One woman recently lamented that, when invited to her child’s school to view the curriculum, she was nearly the only parent present. That not only speaks volumes about why schools are getting away with teaching the filth they proffer, but it also illustrates why the story written above came to be written. No one is going to care for children more than the child’s’ parent(s). And there ought not be any expectation that anyone else should. The parent(s) is the home’s first line of defense. That defense is breached in American homes, more often than not, due to the stunning incompetence on the part of ‘parents.’ By the way, maybe I read the article too quickly, but I don’t recall any mention of a father figure in the story.
I’m sure he scored well in Criminal History too.
Pre-criminal history.
Like Thugvon Martin.
I didn’t see any mention of this young scholar’s attendance record. How frequently was he even in class?
Plenty of blame to go around
Late or absent 272 times in 3 years.
That’s a “why bother” if I ever saw one.
First of all, he does not have “the distinction of being at the top of his class”, as your lede says.
Nor, as your headline says, does he rank “in Top Half of His Class”.
The story itself says he ranks near the top half of his class, which means not in it. How near? How long is a piece of string? It’s a meaningless term.
Second, it may be that the school failed him, but there’s nothing in the story to support such an assumption. Having read the story we can’t known whether the school failed him, or whether he refused to learn, or whether he’s just not teachable. Maybe the kid is just dumb.
As for the mother’s assumption that if he were not doing well he would have been kept back to repeat a grade, when’s the last time that ever happened? Hasn’t it been standard policy at all schools for at least the last few decades, i.e. going back to when she was in school, to keep children with their age-peers whether they pass, ace, or fail the grade? Shouldn’t she have been aware of that?
My daughter was in Teach for America in inner city Indianapolis. She had kids with bullet scars in her class. Some kids only came to school to attend her class and then left for the day. Her teaching assistant was beaten trying to break up a fight. He ended up in the hospital with a jaw wired shut. Some of her students told her they would have her back if any trouble started.
The only saving grace, she did not have to worry about a Columbine situation because there were enough students with guns to take out a would by mass shooter.
The only saving grace, she did not have to worry about a Columbine situation because there were enough students with guns to take out a would by mass shooter.
Hmmm… An armed society is a polite society?
gospace quoted:
> Hmmm… An armed society is a polite society?
Ah, a Robert Heinlein reader. But I forget the name of the novel where he introduced that maxim.
beyond this horizon
Being ranked 62th out of 120 is close enough to the “top half” to be an acceptable way to express the important fact here, that even with this horrible record he is basically the median student of this union-infested institute of non-learning in a democrat infested city.
That being said if the report by FOX shows anything it is that there is plenty of blame to go around. The mother (is there no father?) is not entirely blameless, even though she probably is the least guilty party here, given that there are Democrat politicians and teachers unions involved as well.
I agree the language is imprecise. So what. Talk about missing the forrest.
The kid failed Algebra I but was moved to Algebra II, ditto Spanish. Two classes where if you fail the “I” there is zero chance you will pass the “II.” So the school clearly failed him there.
There is plenty of blame to go around. School administration, teachers, mom, dad (whether he is in the picture or not he has failed his son).
Or maybe it’s all just institutional racism. If he were in Portland now he would have the same education but probably be carrying a 3.6 GPA. Would he be smarter and be ready for adult life? Nope. But all the white educators would feel much better about themselves and Bill Gates would celebrate but never, ever hire the young man.
I just updated the language for clarity, but you are correct. Let’s not miss the overall point here.
I agree the language is imprecise. So what.
Sloppy language is a symptom of sloppy thinking.
Some people think that’s important. Crazy, huh?
WRONG
The story says even though he FAILED Algebra 1 they moved him to Algebra 2
Same with English 1, he failed and they moved him to 2 amd failed and moved to 3
Math however, as we have all been told by our real leader, Bill and his sidekick Melinda Gates, is RACIST!
In the actual video report, it says he’s 62 out of 120 students in his class.
Also, he was late or absent 272 times over the 3+ years he’s been doing this.
This is absentee parenting and a student that doesn’t give a damn…plain and simple. He’s only “devastated” because he found out you can only get away with doing little to nothing for so long. He probably thought his hard work and being a good students was turning in an assignment once in a blue moon.
In MA, schools must be open for 180 days. Assuming it is similar in MD it means he was late or absent 50% of the time.
“He’s only “devastated” because he found out you can only get away with doing little to nothing for so long.”
More precisely, he’s devastated because those in fact WERE the rules for his entire four years, until they changed them on him with zero warning just as he neared the finish line. He’s devastated because he got suckered.
“Second, it may be that the school failed him, but there’s nothing in the story to support such an assumption. Having read the story we can’t known whether the school failed him… As for the mother’s assumption that if he were not doing well he would have been kept back to repeat a grade, when’s the last time that ever happened? Hasn’t it been standard policy at all schools for at least the last few decades, i.e. going back to when she was in school, to keep children with their age-peers whether they pass, ace, or fail the grade? Shouldn’t she have been aware of that?”
What nonsense. “The school didn’t fail him because insane school policies that have been policies for a long time were followed.” Just because you have been doing destructive things for three decades doesn’t mean those things have become wise.
When that is the standard policy of all schools, you can’t point a finger at this one. Being promoted simply is not an indicator of having mastered last year’s material; all it means is that the student is a year older.
It may be the standard policy of all GOVERNMENT schools.
It was never the policy of any school I went to, and to this day still isn’t.
If that means all government schools are failures, I’m down with that.
“The story itself says he ranks near the top half of his class, which means not in it. How near? How long is a piece of string? It’s a meaningless term.”
62 out of 120, according to the article.
The kid with the 0.13 GPA is clearly acting white.
“Second, it may be that the school failed him, but there’s nothing in the story to support such an assumption.”
He couldn’t pass lower level Math, English and Spanish courses, yet they promoted him to the next level, knowing he couldn’t succeed. If that isn’t failing him, what is? Now he’s going to be an 18-19 year old freshman.
Nope. He’s going to be an 18 years-old drop out as there is no way he’s going to sit in freshmen classes with 14 years-olds and learn the basics.
From memory, I believe he placed 62nd out of 120. Not top half. But “near top half” seems a reasonable description.
I’d prefer just saying “62nd out of 120,” but that’s just me.
Wordy.
And to every sarcasm-challenged reader, the above is sarcasm. It is not asking for an actual teacher to be subject to capital punishment for the failures of the public school system.
The fact that the teacher unions get away with this kind of outrage is hopefully a wakeup call to everyone.
I downvoted. Teacher after teacher tried to deliver classes in academic basics and ended up giving an F to this student. They must all have at least bachelor’s degrees in subjects related to what they are teaching, to teach a subject in high school.
It would be impossible to assemble a teacher corps all so totally unable to teach their subjects.
Some start out idealistic, typically get burned out, some keep trying anyway, then members of the public call THEM heartless.
I hope they at least tried, although the fact that this catastrophic failure was smack in the middle of the product the lot of the teachers of this school “produced” is not a sign that they did successfully try.
In any case, they seem to have promoted the kid for failing. Granted, probably just because in their insane woke ideology anything else would have been racism, but I’m frankly sick and tired of giving rabid leftists a pass because the feel they do the right thing.
I suspect we can agree on that.
Administrators not teachers promoted him. Teachers didn’t decide on the curriculum either. And if half the class was failing just like him, were they supposed to hold back half the class?
It is consistent with my hypothesis that the teachers did an acceptable job and the students did not.
The teachers in that district?
All worthless with a few exceptions. Those aren’t teachers, they’re simply union grifters.
“Teacher after teacher tried to deliver classes in academic basics and ended up giving an F to this student.”
And then everybody acted like nothing had happened and no one needed to do anything additional. Sorry, I’m not buying this self-serving “we did all we could” BS.
Designing school system policies like this is like designing a building with fire-pull stations, but no alarms to alert the occupants.
(Yes, I have a building in mind. It has five sides and lost an entire corner in 1976. People on shift on the basement floor learned about the fire only when water started pouring in through the ceilings. It is also run by the government. This is the level of dangerous idiocy this school policy invokes in me.)
Administrators not teachers promoted him. (Teachers didn’t decide on the curriculum either.) And if half the class was failing just like him, were they supposed to hold back half the class?
It is consistent with my hypothesis that the teachers did an acceptable job and the students did not.
succinctness rules.
The Schools have become feeding stations. The highest taxes I pay and the least return. The morons that run my local school district thought it was a good idea to bring in a transvestite last year to give makeup lessons to the students. Why are they giving makeup lessons, period?
Gross. I sympathize.
Far more blame on parent and student IMO based on what we’ve heard so far. Sounds like the teachers were doing their job and holding him accountable by NOT passing him for subpar work. Administration holds some blame, but they are following national policy trends of not holding back a failing student.
The woe is me, ‘how could THEY do this’ weeping reeks of the responsibility problem.
I don’t care how many jobs you have…did you ever bother to look at his transcript or report card even once in 3 years??? That means you really didn’t care about his education; you just wanted him to get through it and be done with it.
Amen.
Is the school and the system in which it operates crappy? Beyond a doubt. But that is obvious to anyone with a pulse. Yet here we are, simply enjoying flogging the very dead horse named “Public Education.” Personally, I’m tired of the whining. Where in the HELL are the parents? It is PARENTS who have the moral obligation to raise their children, NOT the government. This would not have happened had the mother and the father (wherever the heck HE is) simply DONE THEIR JOBS. And at what point do we begin shifting some responsibility to the student? This “child” is 17, not 7. GAH!
From what I have seen, most black parents do not actually raise children, they tolerate children. Black culture today is absolute crap. It was not always like this.
What really bothers me, I cannot see a path to fix black culture.
“”most black parents do not actually raise children, they tolerate children.””
Only the ones who actually survive through birth.
There are things worse than dying or not being born. Every child deserves decent parents, society as a whole needs for children to be well raised. And while the per capita rate of crappy black parents is far higher than any other group, plenty of white children draw the short parent straw. What results is tragic.
It doesn’t bother me, because it isn’t my job. Faced with the unfalsifiable accusation of structural racism and the demand of apologetic anti-racism, I move on to other issues instead. They didn’t win my respect with that stuff.
Or, just wanted him out of the house.
This school is in Baltimore. Lots of black students probably go to this school. Wonder how much “social justice” had to do with this all-around failure to teach kids what they need to know to function in the world and to hold them, their parents and their teachers accountable for that failure? And yet, when no one wants to hire these kids, the first words out of many Americans’ mouths will be “RACISM!!!”
So, were all “students” who managed an equal or lower GPA also denied graduation and recycled? It is very depressing to think about how far up into the top half of the class one must go before finding a C (2.0) average.
This debacle is a stark illustration of the “the tyranny of low expectations” that has destroyed the futures of black children for several generations now. Couple that with the “acting white” from their peers, and this disaster has to be expected.
This fellow will not recycle. He will be old enough to just drop out, so he will. Who wants to be the 17-18 year old in a class of 14-year olds? He will be a lookout on a corner for a dope enterprise until the day he stops a bullet.
A father was not available for comment, if he is even known to the family.
What is needed here is for Martin O’Malley to show up with his band and tap his toe. Others may also tap toes during a photo-op.
Then, they will need to build a new school, replete with onsite reproductive “care” facilities, nursery, head-start, pre-start, midday start, after school start and post graduate housing facilities, with a methadone clinic.
You missed special nap/reproductive rooms.
Grades are racist.
I find it interesting that the reporters didn’t ask the mother about her role in her child’s education. There’s not even one oblique comment on this. Mom is apparently blameless. Apparently there is no one in the family who values education, certainly no one who would task the young man into doing his homework and reading books.
The old saying about leading a horse to water applies: if no one in the home values education, the young man won’t value education.
Theodore Dalrymple has been writing about this for decades.
That question will never be asked because the reporter wants to further the notion that more money for schools is the answer.
It ain’t.
More money won’t fix anything because the problem is not a lack of resources – it’s a lack of freedom.
Again, maybe the kid is just dumb, and there’s nothing even a competent school could have done to fix it.
Yes, a distinct possibility.
“Oh, dear me, no; you are SO wrong! Every child has the same capabilties; it is society and institutional racism that holds back so many! They just need a second chance! And a third! And, to be placed in the same classes as those priviileged kids!”. – says generic concerned woman with no kids, or who lives in a restricted neighborhood.
Nobody is that dumb. Lazy and unsupervised yes but too dumb to be educated? I don’t believe it. And he was near the top half of the class? The students below him must be comatose. I lay this tragedy on mom. The kid is 17 yrs old and she’s just now becoming aware of his failure in high school? Look how she alibis her lack of attention by mentioning she has three jobs. Also very vociferous in her condemnation of the school. She probably has beautiful fingernails and a long weave in her hair. But her son failed miserably in school.
Remember that IQ is age equivalent knowledge acquisition. There are people testing below 25. I had contact many years ago with a 12 year old boy whose mother used drugs during gestation. He could not talk, he could not walk well, staggering like a toddler, he was close to being a vegetable. He was white. Pets and children, the luck of the draw in what homes they end up in.
His mother should have received the death penalty for what she did to him, or at least sterilization.
One more thing, he had seizures which were destroying what was left of his brain.
Maybe, or maybe it has something to do with his being absent or tardy 50% of the time or that mom (or dad) was too busy to ever ask a question about how her son, who she knew was failing most of his classes, was still getting promoted to the next grade.
The least the school should have done is told him he was dumb as soon as it became apparent, not four years later.
Well it did. That’s what those F’s mean. And the better grades. They showed 2 classes he passed, grades of D- and D+. I’m sure a D+ is much better than a D-.
Neither of those classes was in English or math i.e. solid life skills that one learns best in school, the reasons we had one-room schoolhouses in the first place.
The school passed him along to the next grade and apparently the rest of the class, including the other half that also failed everything. What else could they do? I can’t criticize because I don’t have a better suggestion.
The point here is that this is an “average” student at this school. If you do the bell curve, he is slightly left of center mass. The news report, in the video, says the student’s rank was 62 out of 120. So very close to median, which, in a normal distribution, should also be very close to mean. This student’s GPA was 0.13.
Many people might find it easier to look at this based on standard deviation (15), were Ashkenazi Jews (112-115 IQ) are the smartest, Asian are about half way between (106-108 IQ) than Ashkenazi Jews, Caucasians are about (100 IQ), brown and black in America another ~ (85-87), and Africa, which pre politically correct would have been mostly classed as Morons (51-70 IQ). The majority of slaves would have been considered morons.
There is a staggering difference between the smartest and dullest.
I also grow very sick of this “the teachers, the school should have done more” schtick.
The school and its workers are not your de facto parent. There is a social contract that students will put their best effort forth to achieve and teachers will put their best effort forth to educate. When the student/family side of that breaks the social contract all bets are off.
Indeed. Making teachers the “parent of last resort” is a fool’s errand.
But be sure to keep him in school (failing) for four years first, so you folks at the school can collect that state money.
Stupid argument. They could keep him in school for many more years if they had actually flunked him and grift more by your logic. Yes, I know that the reason kids are passed on is because of funding, but if someone was actually flunked and held back, the racist police would scream to high heaven if they kicked him out of school for his education no longer being funded. In other words, it would end up being funded after enough noise, especially in blue Baltimore.
He’s also a minor and can’t just not be in school. You have to reach a certain age to drop out and not be busted for truancy.
You keep the kid back the first year, maybe he gets the message that he’s expected to perform, and gets out in five.
You pass him mindlessly for four years, he gets the opposite message clearly. He’s doing time.
Then you tell him you want him to spend four more. Five or six years of funding turn into eight. Ka-ching.
But half the class is like this kid or worse. Is the next 20% that much better? We don’t even know that for sure.
So when half the class flunks 4 subjects in 9th grade, do we hold them all back, or promote them all to 10th grade? What they did by promoting them all is not obviously the worse alternative.
France’s son failed numerous courses, but I’m sure he’s aced courses studying Freddy Grey, George Floyd and “Reparations 101”.
No mention of a father either.
“Name another profession where you could fail more miserably and still have a job.”
Let’s see:
FBI Director
Head of epidemiology at CDC
Weatherman
President (D)
Speaker of the House (D)
Impeachment Manager (D)
Presidents (R) Bush the Younger, Bush the Elder, Richard Nixon
Senate Majority Leader (R) Mitch McConnell
Don’t forget Republican speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan – both miserable failures.
Weather forecasting is actually difficult. It’s like saying a .300 hitter in the major leagues is failing 70% of the time. Well not that hard, but still hard.
It seems teaching in Baltimore is even harder. Surely the teachers try, and they all have college degrees, the building meets standards, there are even guards around to keep the violence from blowing out even more.
I bet most are Affirmative degrees.
“Republicans must make education a priority issue from now on and prove there is a better way to teach our nation’s children.”
The purpose of public K-12 education is not to make informed, productive citizens. Rather, it is a combination of rough-house and babysitter, with some Communist propaganda tossed in for fun.
In fairness to the teachers, there is very little they can do if the administration won’t support them and/or has non-education goals such as “fighting racism” or “combating climate change” as their priorities. For many administrators it has been years (if not decades) since they taught in a classroom.
“In fairness to the teachers, there is very little they can do if the administration won’t support them”
And given that this kid was 62 out of 120, and was given a GPA of 0.13, it seems the teachers are trying to do their jobs, but are being undercut by the administrators who are passing the kids along regardless. And because the administrators do not care if the students fail, the kids do not. But it appears the teachers are trying. A suspect their morale is horrendous.
“prove there is a better way to teach …”
NO! That gives air to all the far-left stupid ideas coming out of places like Syracuse University, like reading-optional classrooms. I do not want “equity” to force good students to go through such stupidities just because some kids may (or may not) appear to do better at something they can do because it doesn’t require reading.
Maybe these particular students all need years of remedial reading until they get it. Seriously. Phonics 4 hours a day. It’s better to have that and nothing else, but to have seen everything else (and failed for lack of ability to read) but not learned to read.
Why exactly is everyone rushing to get schools open again? Ah, yes, so the kids can be shuffled off and the parents can get back to their meaningful lives and not bothered to raise their kids. This “mom” is the root problem, not the school. No involvement, no follow up… perhaps criminal neglect. The school is a bunch of vipers and it’s obvious. But yet millions of people are clamoring to send their kids back so that they can get back to “normal”. Pathetic..
This is what I’ve been saying, too, but nobody wants to hear it.
I don’t call the school a bunch of vipers. They delivered all those classes. The kid failed almost all of them. You can’t inject the knowledge. Surely a lot of money was spent, all of from taxpayers outside the district, to give those kids that chance. Everyone tried. The kids and their families failed.
The elephant in the room is: there are people out there who are just, plain, uneducable. Lots of excuses are made about home, “environment”, and that everlasting chestnut, “racism”.
If things were more realistic, schools would be spending resources on the kids who have potential. I don’t mean only the Honor Society crowd with science and math. I also mean those kids who show aptitude for trades like mechanics, carpentry, and other honest, fulfilling ways of making a living.
It is my belief that FAR too much effort, money, and time, are wasted on delinquents, the functionally stupid, and the ones who defy any sort of order or discipline.
I still recall what one of my teachers in high school said. He was a Spaniard; he grew up under Franco. In Franco’s Spain, kids who were defiant, or for other reasons were disruptive in school, were expelled. As Mr, Balbuena put it to us: “Someone had to peel potatoes, sweep the streets, clean grease traps, or scrub toilets. Others had to be low-rankers in the military, the ones who were expendable.”. Mr. Balbuena was right.
The problem I have with that view is that circa half the class were worse. That’s something like 60 kids who were worse. That strongly suggests to me that the issues are much wider than one individual.
Start with the lowest 10%, and most of the other 90% will begin to get the message.
See? You can get upticks.
Yes, the problem is worse because Baltimore is saturated with this liberal Democrat ideology that doesn’t hold families and their kids accountable for anything they do. Real consequences have now reared their ugly head for this student, which is why he and his mom are only screaming about it now.
“Strongly suggests” lol. Gosh ya think so?
Half the class had below a 0.14 GPA.
I would like to see some candid video from Baltimore public schools, to get a sense of what’s going on there. Do they have unapologetic security (preferably cops with weapons, at least taser) so that kids who want to learn something feel safe? Or is that OK and the problem is something else?
There’s at least one underlying problem there that’s so bad that nothing good is happening. I don’t know what it is.
Remember Home Ec, Wood Shop, and Typing? Dead. We used to consider these the “styrofoam courses” of their day, but we’ve sunk ever so much farther since. For today’s kids, I’d much rather bring back a solid Home Ec class than a Makeup class. Our local HS got rid of its Welding teacher 20 years ago. (I took three adult intro sessions from him before unemployment forced him to relocate.) Welding is now one of the careers in high demand. What are our “educators” thinking?
Now every kid has to go to kollej. There are legal mandates that we have to try no matter how obviously it isn’t working.
In Louisiana there is a major push to get kids certified for some type of work by graduation. About 3/4 of my school opts for the career training pathway rather than the college pathway.
The Boy is doing career training, instead of the college path.
I love my son to death, but I certainly know he’s not college material. And college life is a far cry from when I went 30+ years ago. No way I’d send my son to an institution where they can’t be bothered to follow due process.
I work at a two-year college, and I have received many a glare for saying that not everyone belongs in college. We may also be at the point that not everyone belongs in the upper grades of K-12.
I suspect some of the problem is modern reading instruction. Whole-language stuff that makes you guess word shapes and such nonsense. You have to be clever to read that way and it’s always a challenge whether you’ll be able to read the next thing.
I was fortunate not to learn any of that. I learned straight decoding, nothing but phonics and reading practice. If I didn’t know a word, “sound it out!”
I bet almost anyone with an 80 IQ or maybe less can learn to read that way. After a year or two, they learn to recognize words on their own, and then nobody can take their reading ability away from them, and they are never afraid of being unable to read something because it’s not a test of cleverness.
We’re having this discussion in my district. One parent is advocating it for disabled students, but I think it should be for everyone. Just phonics and more phonics until everyone gets it. Since mom may not be able to read, the school has to focus on this. Ignore EVERYTHING else if necessary, for the first year(s) of school.
Then I bet kids wouldn’t be failing everything.
artichoke, Why don’t we let parents chose which government or private school their children will attend? I’ll bet they would make better decisions than the government school curricula masters in areas like phonics vs. “whole language”.
I’m getting the impression that you have a conflict of interest which biases you in favor of education by government. How about some disclosure?
Great. So now they’re moving him back to 9th grade when he’s almost a man.
How much you want to bet he’ll be physically preying upon both boys and girls for the next four years, if he hasn’t been already.
Nah, he can just drop out…his attendance record suggests that’s what he’s wanted to do for a long time.
But but mom says he just needs a CHANCE!
She should try out for showbiz, she’s a great actress.
I know comment threads often get snarky but the many comments that seem intentionally to misread the point of the piece are really bugging me today. Why does the boy’s family life, scholastic potential or even absenteeism matter? It’s not the point of the piece and the comments on them are both speculative and irrelevant to the point. The FACT shown in the article is the school is negligent in its responsibility. If the kid had been failed in 9th grade originally all of what came after would have changed. He may or may not have, in such an alternative world, been able to graduate this June but by not failing him the School essentially guaranteed his longer term failure.
The comments are indeed snarky but they are making a point, and the point is that you are in part incorrect.
Yes, the schools have a role in education. Teachers, principals and administrators must do their job. If they don’t our ability to help children will be substantially impaired.
The point you are missing — parents must do THEIR job. That child failed for multiple reasons, and one of those is that no one in the home valued education. We know, clearly and without fear of being contradicted, that the many, many poor children in bad neighborhoods who have succeeded in getting an education did so because they had at least one parent in the home who valued reading, learning and education. And likewise, we know that most of the children with a failed education come from homes where no one reads.
And THAT comes through in this story. Yes, many at the school failed. Yes, the child didn’t apply himself. AND — AND — Mom failed. She didn’t care. She didn’t get on the teachers, she didn’t spend time working with her son, she didn’t go to the parent-teacher conferences, she didn’t read to her son, she didn’t take him to the library, and so on.
She didn’t value education, so he doesn’t. That school was there, and there were teachers (not enough but some) who would have worked with that young man. They failed too.
But it starts at home. It always does.
Maybe 20 years ago the mom was in the boy’s place. Maybe the mom doesn’t read either.
I don’t have a solution, but we’ve got an intergenerational problem of not trying at education, and now it’s become a community that is unable to absorb academic education.
I’m speculating that if the teacher tried to flunk him in the 9th grade she would have had the boy’s mother come down on her like a proverbial ton of bricks, complete with allegations of the teacher’s incompetence and (potentially) racism. It’s SO much easier to pass him along, let him become someone else’s problem and notch another year on your pension service requirement.
Cowardice is always the easy way out. Until the chickens come home to roost.
Well, cock-a-doodle-doo, Baltimore.
It’s not cowardice if it’s a real risk to her life, which it could be. Anyway the teachers actually failed him, he got those F’s, and it was an administrative decision to pass him to the next grade.
See you’re fast to accuse a teacher of cowardice for something she or he didn’t even do.
Risk to your life? Weigh the tradeoffs, then quit if doing the right thing means you won’t survive
Or, you can keep “following orders” and continue to work the concentration camp gate 9-5, and keep your head down, and hope the Nuremberg Trials overlook you.
Yeah, courage means sometimes you take a major life hit. Sorry, I didn’t make the rules of the universe.
I agree with Artichoke. The teachers are trying to hold the kids accountable (I’m a former teacher and sub), but there is heavy pressure by the Administrators to not fail the kids. This is because the schools have a “report card” where they are judged by how many kids fail, how many drop out, etc. Teachers are not allowed to fail more than a certain percentage (like 20 to 25%). If they do, they are told to review their grades. They also must call parents of failing students every week to inform them of failing grades. They must give their failing students the opportunity to improve or retake tests and do missing assignments up until the day before the end of the marking period. They must lower standards until more kids pass. However, in NYC, at least if a student fails Algebra I, he or she can’t take Algebra II , but he or she can take both at the same time. (Results are not usually good, but school is desperate to pass as many as they can). Not to mention some parents call and yell at them for failing their kids. So teachers who want to do the right thing are penalized by onerous rules and aren’t backed by their principals, until they just give up and pass the kid. It’s much easier that way. There’s just no upside (unless you count their conscience) to doing the right thing.
Wrong. Since they passed him along, you assume holding him back would have been better. But since his GPA is as high as half the class, they failed too, so do we hold them all back?
How many times do we have half the class repeat 9th grade? If you can’t get most to pass 9th grade, what you propose doesn’t work. And yet you’re quick to blame the teachers.
You would probably do worse.
“How many times do we have half the class repeat 9th grade?”
Until they pass it.
As the deserving kids move forward, and the others are left behind, those left behind will get the message as those who move forward sneer at them and call them idiots.
At my school, they posted test scores on the outside of the classroom doors with your name, not a number, next to it for all to see. Yes, some kids were always at the bottom in scores, but shame and competition for achievement are great motivating factors. The first thing we did in the morning was to rush to the classroom doors we had a test or quiz in the day before to see if grades had been posted, and how much crap I was going to get from my friends, or what kind of crap I could give instead.
And kids were held back. If you did not pass Spanish I, your retook it, or tried your luck at French.
Kids who could not get out of 9th grade were not maintained in the school, but sent to alternative schools. Kids with criminal records were not allowed in mainstream schools, but sent to other alternative schools with other criminally minded children, and only re-mainstreamed after establishing a record of academic performance and good behavior. Kids who did not show up voluntarily to these schools got to live there.
I am now too old, and do not belong to this world.
Grades can’t be posted anymore due to FERPA, which has been around for decades. However, it was not enforced when my grades arrived via mail from college and my mom ripped open the envelope.
That sounds great. How long ago was that? If I put a kids name and test score on the wall I will be fired before I can get back to my desk.
Long ago, friend – long ago.
“But since his GPA is as high as half the class, they failed too, so do we hold them all back?”
Until you do, nobody is going to give a s*t. That would certainly wake somebody up.
Dear Giuseppe
You can tell us what should’ve been done four years ago, but that’s not an option since time machines haven’t been invented yet. If going back in time were an option, we could send everyone who believes in abortion back to their mother’s womb and get them aborted.
Giuseppe, You and others here are making the faulty assumption that the government schools are there to serve parents, taxpayers, and children. The government schools are there to comply with federal and state legislation and the resulting bureaucratic rules.
If a parent wants something from a government school, they have to find the rule which mandates that the school give it to them. Even if such a rule exists the parent may have to hire a lawyer to force the school to provide what the rule says it should provide.
Contrast this with a non-government (market based) education system. If a school is not providing what your child needs, you can take your money to a different school.
Americans (including many commenters here) are so used to education by government that they are unable to imagine anything else.
I can understand how this happened. It’s the ghetto gangster culture where the students place no value on education. The only cure is to eliminate welfare for able bodied adults.
This article, by a liberal teacher, is illuminating:
https://www.blackandblondemedia.com/2013/07/01/before-its-deleted-of-the-day/
He found that it was impossible to get his students to learn as they planned to have children so they would get big welfare checks or be drug dealers.
I’ve been told that several times, myself.
The article generally matches my experiences. I think it goes a little too far in places, but is far more truthful than exaggerated.
He’s in the top 99% of his class.
You can’t teach those who don’t want to be taught. When there’s an entire culture of people who view being smart as “selling out” or trying to be white there’s no winning.
A culture that insists that honest, conventional success is “white,” and “white” is “unsuitable for us,” is inimical to what America has always been about.
“Republicans must make education a priority issue from now on and prove there is a better way to teach our nation’s children.”
Instead of waiting for politicians to solve our education problems, parents and churches must make the education of their children “a priority issue from now on and prove there is a better way to teach our nation’s children.”
Get the children out of the government schools.
And get them into… what? The existence of government schools puts a $0 price on the education market, depressing the market to be uneconomical for private educators to found alternatives. Families like this kid’s are never going to pop for the non-$0 option.
He thinks charter schools will fix it. Divide the students in half and put half in a “charter school” and magic will happen.
I haven’t seen an explanation for that.
I see you’ve taken to mind reading and lying. I don’t like charter schools because they’re still run by the government.
Perhaps you’re really a troll.
OK then make me stop mind reading. Tell me what your plan for choice or freedom is, if it’s not charter schools. You keep talking about it in general without being specific.
“Tell me what your plan for choice or freedom is, if it’s not charter schools.”
School vouchers, tax credits, education savings accounts. To be used at the government, private, religious, secular school of the parent’s choice.
There are programs like this in Florida and other states. I’m astonished you don’t know about them.
Well then. Let’s all give up! Did you watch that movie I keep suggesting? I thought not.
Some commenters here seem to be making judgements based on the color of people’s skin. There’s a word for that.
We had our share of thugs and dolts in all the schools I went to, back when. None of them had a different skin color than I did. All of them were administered using the rules I have proposed in all these comments, because (doggone it, Stu Smalley) it worked. So take your fallback “rayciss” crap and sell it to somebody else.
I watched the first 10 minutes as I told you in another thread, and it showed I was right there. Sufficient guards or cops were needed in the school to stop the violence. The story starts out with the kid getting presumptively blamed for violence he didn’t commit.
The bad kids can be pretty clever. You need cops who are used to dealing with such lowlifes, to protect the rest.
Short attention span?
Responsibility for the education of children belongs entirely to their parents.
That said, some things can make it easier, or almost impossible, for parents to provide their children with a good education. The government monopoly bureaucratic totalitarian socialist public schools are in the latter category.
The movie, “Miss Virginia” (available via Netflix) describes a single mother who takes responsibility for the education of her son and receives no help from her government school, and opposition from her congressional representative.
Get the children out of the government schools.
If school choice becomes available, we will better see which parents are fulfilling their responsibilities and which are not.
The mom says life is all about fighting. Then why didn’t she fight more than once during 4 years to see the boy’s transcript? Can’t she tell if he’s learning anything? But even if not, the first question applies.
Why doesn’t he have a chance?? He had 4 years of chance and now taxpayers will pay for some more until he ages out of his entitlement to public education.
I wouldn’t worry so much for Ms France and her failing son. Once the SJW get involved, a lawsuit will be filed for whatever legal grievance, and these people will get some settlement. Besides it’s not like France expected her son to be a rocket scientist. He was in some magnet school for VISUAL ARTS for crying out loud!
Oh, maybe BLM can “share” their extortion windfall with losers such as these. Yeah, right!
Yeah, I keyed on the visual arts thing too, but this kid was booting core subjects that aren’t amenable to fakery or dilution.
How much you want to bet that magnet school had quotas to fill for certain neighborhoods?
So, they build a magnet school to try and reach inner city kids by the liberal way of “it’s racist if we don’t do it for the ghetto kids too” and this is the result….a school where 50% or more of your class has a fractional GPA as a result of their own apathy and negative attitudes.
They do that in NYC too. Many of the inner city schools seem to have such career-oriented names, but of course you have to meet the state HS graduation requirements. This is the difficulty.
Maybe the solution is to relax the requirements, seriously. Provide a different diploma, teach some job skills that are less academic but seem more achievable, and wish them well after 12th grade with their diploma.
If there’s going to be a lawsuit here, over half of the high school’s students would be entitled to compensation. Half of them have less than a 0.14 GPA. Nobody’s getting rich off this, so it must be that many have tried and given up. And yet the kids cannot be totally untrainable. There must be a way to get them success at something.
I am sure that the academic high school diploma is the wrong program for most of that school population, though. You could put most high school crowds in a room with no teachers, and they’d do better than that on their own. We need some legal changes to enable a new goal they can aspire to and mostly achieve, during their limited entitlement to public education.
“Nobody’s getting rich off this”
Wonder what the administrator salaries are at the school and district level, and how large the administrative staff is? Their salaries tend to be proportional to headcount, and failing students have heads, too. Otherwise, what is the incentive to keep a failing student for four years, then recycle him for four more? Insanity.
They don’t keep him or kick him out. He shows up or not, until his eligibility for public education ends due to graduation or age — whichever comes first.
He may not have enough years left on the calendar to pass graduation requirements. But how is it mom didn’t know for years? Or maybe she did and she’s telling us a story. They seem to be a family of storytellers.
Good suggestion. In NY City they used to have three different diplomas (before my time), one of which was general,, one was regents, and don’t know the third one. The regents was for the top-performing students and was considered quite an achievement. Lower level students were not expected to take as many regents tests or courses and could also graduate with a respectable diploma. Employers and colleges understood the value of the various diplomas. Each one served its audience. But of course NYC dispensed with this because of the varying results among racial and ethnic groups. Now we pretend that all kids are capable of doing algebra, trigonometry and AP English. All due to political correctness.
The kid, by himself, says little about the school. It is absolutely horrifying that almost half the kids in the school are in the same situation. I’ve “taught” several students over the last decade that are in a similar position. It is impossible to get in contact with a parent, but you don’t try too hard because it won’t be useful to do so anyways.
I think it is undeniable that this school has failed. If you have ever worked in a place like this, then you know it wears you down. You shouldn’t be allowed to work there more than a year or two. You can be the best teacher in the world, but if you spend a couple years at that school and you will be burned out and bitter. I’d bet most of what I have that the teachers didn’t even try to follow their procedures and the admin didn’t care to enforce it. They all know those procedures are mostly just busywork and won’t actually fix a problem.
I know it is fashionable to hate on teachers, and some really suck. It seems like teachers in cities are either bonkers or evil. Mostly, it isn’t the schools that fail, but schools that are given an impossible task. Societal problems show up early in schools, but the schools can’t solve them. I think a lot of people who enjoy bashing schools/teachers genuinely have no idea what is happening in segments of society other than their own.
The bottom line: You give me a kid who can’t read, can’t do basic math, and won’t even bother to show up to school and there isn’t a whole lot I can do to teach him. I’m not the one that failed that kid, but I am the one that gets blamed for it. You might be able to reasonably blame earlier teachers, but the kid didn’t show up for them either.
Our district may be trending that way with its increasing proportion of illegal-immigrant students. A few years ago the principal invited in a consultant from the radical-left ed department of Syracuse University. She proposed various crazy ideas, including a reading optional high school where movement was emphasized. To get compliance from us, the parents in the meeting, she was moving us around the room too at frequent intervals — to this group, to that task. Fortunately I guess there was enough pushback and her program was not adopted. Yet!?
I’d advise keep pressure on their budgets. Whatever spare money they have will be wasted on some stupid idea. They should have just enough to deliver the state curriculum and some electives to those students willing to learn.
Illegals are seriously degrading American competitiveness and lowering our national average IQ.
Very true. Central American countries have national average IQs 20-30 points below the US. And, the ones streaming across the border aren’t likely in the top 50% of their home countries.
I understand, and for the most part don’t think low student performance is teacher’s fault.
Teachers cannot fix students who are a product of poor parenting.
Also, teachers are trapped, between really low grade politicians, often they are washed up jock-teachers who are worthless, then they become coaches and unlimitedly become administrators.
On the other side are parents who care about appearances, but not about substance. Parents who believe every lie their child tells.
Parents who demand that their failing child be advanced, administrators who demand children be advanced to keep parents from ragging on them. Parents who told their ingrate children that they were little angles.
I continuously stayed on top of each of my children’s progress, both to give them help when they needed it, and to make them sorry if they were screwing off. If they go in trouble, their punishments at home was always worse that anything that happened at school.
There is a real problem in teacher education and training. It is absurdly easy to get an education degree. I accidentally fell in love with and went to grad school for a MAT to get my license. I was extremely bored so I took some biology grad classes when I had room in my schedule. The difference in rigor was astounding. I’ll never forget leaving my bacterial genetics lab, walking across campus, and into my education class where I was graded on the quality of a bulletin board we made. In class.
Yes. Schools of education are worthless.
Long ago and far away, I was an Electrical Engineering grad student. There were math courses that had a special section allocated to the Ed majors getting a “Masters” of some sort in math. One time the school got the registration messed up and the Ed majors got put in with people like me. (The course was a PhD minor course for non-mathematicians and a MS course for math grad students. The “real” version, not the “special” one. Same course number, but that is where it ended.
There were about a dozen of us. All friends, had taken lots of classes together. We walked in–there were WOMEN in the classroom. We hadn’t seen that in years. Wow! About 30 students total–including us.
Grading in that school was very much on the curve. The professors felt that if anyone got 100 percent, the test had failed the student that got 100 percent.
First test. I got about 50 percent, high grade was about 60. The mode (grade with the most students) was ZERO. If you did the grade distribution, it looked as if the average would have been about minus ten, if that was possible.
All the Educations students dropped–some had before the test. It was back to myself and my buddies scrapping it out. I went from the very tippy top of the class to a decent spot–high B with a shot at an A. My usual.
If only the real version were required for Ed. students, we would have solid math instruction in our schools, taught by people who know some math.
But the schools cheat. Apparently states require actual math degrees for math teachers. How many K-12 math teachers do you remember who seem like they were once math majors?? So the schools provide a fraudulent credential, and it becomes just the way everyone knows and expects after a while.
“I continuously stayed on top of each of my children’s progress, both to give them help when they needed it, and to make them sorry if they were screwing off.”
My youngest, quite bright and capable, was getting problematic grades in red-town HS because he would just slack off and boot the assignments. Junior year, the school established a computer system where the parents could track their kids’ performance and progress in real time, including what assignments were due and when. We kept on his back until all the blank boxes got filled in. It really wasn’t an outlandish amount of effort for the parents or the kid — we’re not talking “Asian family pressure” here. End result, he ended up graduating #2 with a full-ride to ASU in a STEM major.
Commencement at ASU, the Blue Meanies made a big, public pageant out of the announcing that the students’ performance was confidential, and nothing would ever be released to the parents, only the student. End of his freshman year, he tanked out.
So let’s stipulate that “education is the parent’s responsibility.” Who really failed the student here, by intentionally not involving the responsible party?
Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, derives a great deal of enjoyment describing how he is free to talk with the parents of Hillsdale students because Hillsdale does not accept any government funding.
Sadly, if you’re looking for a STEM degree, I think you’re stuck with government-dependent schools. And the rot is steadily infiltrating the STEM disciplines.
One must choose carefully. I think that online degrees may help. This would reduce the risk created by placing your child in a concentrated pool of foolish adolescents with no adult supervision.
Speaking of “online”, one can insist that ones child reveal his school account password.
Yes, the law is designed to break up families and prevent parents from passing along advantages to children.
I believe this privacy can be bypassed to some extent if you have the kid sign an “FERPA form” waiving his right to privacy. Can you get the kid to sign it? Maybe if it’s a condition of paying tuition …
hrhdhd above says that her mom opened the grade envelope anyway, which seems reasonable. Our kids’ schools get around that by not mailing anything home.
Best thing for the boy would be to drop out, learn a trade, and ultimately study up for a GED exam. It may vary state-to-state, but around here teens can drop out at 16 with proof of gainful employment.
But that would require some responsibility and ambition on his part.
Diploma or no diploma, who wants to hire someone with this work ethic?
He’d prove the work ethic by doing what was proposed.
Maybe it really is impossible to learn in that high school, too many bad kids, too much violence. I don’t know but given the results it’s entirely possible. I’d give someone like him a chance if they found another way.
But not until they did.
“study up for the GEDs” Ha, ha! Good one. Sadly, this young man likely cannot even spell the word “study”
Moreover, I doubt he would see much value in a GED. Twelve years in school has prepared him for one thing: a short life on the mean streets of Baltimore.
After watching the tv clip, not once did the mother self reflect about what I could have done better, done differently, it lays on the back of the school only.
Sorry mom, you are part of the problem, just like your son and the school
But she had nice fingernails.
This is the city of birth for our current Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. I fact, her father was mayor.
Let’s not forget the part the kids played
The reporter who wrote this clearly didn’t do much research. Did all the students who were failing get pushed back (which means almost the entire senior class got put back into Grade 9), or just the one kid? If they all were pushed back, is this kid’s mother the only one who complained?
Years ago I volunteered on a project in Harlem, along with a bunch of local high school students. We soon found out that none of the students could use a measuring tape. They also couldn’t be taught how to use one because they didn’t understand fractions like 1/8 and 1/4 well enough. The school system is really broken.
This phenomenon is not limited to Harlem. My friend who worked for a carpet outlet in Ithaca, NY told me he had trouble finding high school graduates who could use a tape measure.
As others have pointed out, abolishing shop classes was a mistake.
Social equity: Every [unPlanned] Child Left Behind #HateLovesAbortion
“The Bell Curve” explains the situation in unarguable detail.
https://www.amazon.com/Please-Stop-Helping-Us-Liberals/dp/1594038414
Why is it that so many efforts by liberals to lift the black underclass not only fail, but often harm the intended beneficiaries?
In Please Stop Helping Us, Jason L. Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates than would otherwise exist. And so it goes with everything from soft-on-crime laws, which make black neighborhoods more dangerous, to policies that limit school choice out of a mistaken belief that charter schools and voucher programs harm the traditional public schools that most low-income students attend.
In theory these efforts are intended to help the poor—and poor minorities in particular. In practice they become massive barriers to moving forward.
Please Stop Helping Us lays bare these counterproductive results. People of goodwill want to see more black socioeconomic advancement, but in too many instances the current methods and approaches aren’t working. Acknowledging this is an important first step
Not to defend teachers or their unions, but place your educated self into these schools and ask yourself what result would you get on average. Likely not very much better.
The problem is we have a dysfunctional underclass basically being maintained to procreate, and we get to deal with the result as a society.
If we incentivized this subculture to NOT have children by means of financial inducement, much of this dysfunction would dissipate in a generation or two. If your raw material is defective and the parent at home is as well, you can not expect any teacher to make a difference with the majority of these students.
Where was Ms. France while this was happening? Blaming the school is the easy way out. Blame others for problems you created. Did she not see report cards? Sure the teachers have been providing inadequate education for decades but education starts in the home.No excuses, Tiffany France is the one who really failed her child.
Where was the Mom when he was absent or late so often? Did she even read the letter from the school? The problem started in elementary school, but you can’t have a ten year old kid in second grade, so he kept getting promoted. He will be 19 when he finishes high school, ready or not.
What a hateful article!
Being required to pass a class is a manifestation of White (capitalized) supremacy. These teachers *are* performing admirably by making sure their students flunk everything.
Follow-up: Where was Mama all those 4 years? Leaving her child’s educations ENTIRELY in the hands of professionals with a poor track record? She has a claim but is not blameless. (Though I understand that working 3 jobs might make it hard to keep at her child’s back.)
Let’s hope she does a better job with her other two kids. Where is the Dad helping to support his kids? Then the Mom would not have to work three jobs. The biggest problem in the black community is absent fathers.
Odd but you have a point. Anyone finding this humoriss is an idiot.
The teacher’s unions should be held accountable.
At least this kid was trying and attended.
Well, he attended sometimes. But then he was in the classrooms, as classes were being taught, and he failed them.
Is it the teachers’ fault that he failed them? Did mom never hear a complaint that “Mr. Smith doesn’t make any sense, I need a better math teacher” or whatever?
Is it all the teachers’ fault? Because teacher after teacher gave this kid F.
“Anyone finding this humoriss is an idiot.”
I’m calling the spelling police. 🙂
This has been going on forever. I lived in DC in the late 1970s and distinctly remember a story in the WaPo about a kid who was valedictorian of his graduating class who discovered when he got to college that he did not know how to do this thing called “reading.”
Granted the teachers failed but, the student and his mother aren’t blameless. The student obviously knew he wasn’t learning anything yet did nothing to raise any alarms over that 4 year period. As for the mother, did she ever look at her son’s report card? I would say there is plenty of blame to go around. Mom trying to place total blame on teachers is denying her role. She also failed her son.
“Near top half of class” means “Not actually at the bottom of the lower half”. Which sounds about right. It does NOT mean “near the top of the class”.
This story reminded me of a pro athlete who when his career ended realized he went through four years of college and couldn’t get a job because he couldn’t read. He was in the news for tossing tv’s out his hotel room window in frustration. It has been a long time but I think he was a nba star.
I wrote too soon. Found he was Kevin Ross who played 4 years for Creighton University not the nba and upon graduation was illiterate. As soon as his basketball function for the school was over they dropped him like a rock. He got help from Marva Collins and was later to make up a little of what he missed.
And we wonder why employers have such difficulty finding qualified help.Think the difficulty many cashiers have in fast food when you give them some odd change. They are stuck. We have been accepting this for at least 40 years.
I think/hope this sort of issue – and the latest flexing of the “muscle” of the trade union they call the teachers union* is the straw, as it were, to move to voucher system where the money follows the student. I realize this is a complicated process but it needs to start.
* I’ve always been amused that they want to have the public believe they are a profession and want to be treated as such but behave like trade unions. Which is actually something of an insult to trade unions. look up the history of Act 10 in Wisconsin and see the absolutely puerile behaviour they exhibited.
The headline is misleading. The story does not claim that the unnamed student ranks in the top half of his class. Rather, the story from Fox 45 in Baltimore reports that the unnamed student “ranks near the top half of his class.”
Whatever that means.
Quote from Stanford Law School:
Perhaps no institution has reproduced racial hierarchy in the U.S. more than our public education system. From state-sponsored racial segregation of schools to the more subtle, but no less insidious racially segregated academic placements (e.g., special education, advanced placement) to exclusionary school discipline policies to ostensibly “meritocratic” testing and grading policies and beyond, public schools have created and perpetuated racial hierarchy, despite the promise that schools should help all children achieve the American Dream.
https://law.stanford.edu/education/only-at-sls/law-policy-lab/practicums-2020-2021/the-youth-justice-lab-imagining-an-anti-racist-public-education-system-law-808a/#slsnav-clients-deliverables