Opus 2020-264: Progressive* Education, part 2 of 2

The San Diego School Board made it even more clear that they had no idea what the students are like.

“Academic grades will now focus on mastery of the material, not a yearly average, which board members say penalizes students who get a slow start, or who struggle at points throughout the year.”

I could have done that.  I could have based all of my grades on tests or other tools that showed the student knew something.  If I did that I would have been forced to fail almost everyone.  In my early years of teaching I gave tests with 100 questions.  The first four questions were, I kid you not:  What is your first name?  What is your last name?  What is the date? (Which was on the board), What period is this?  What chapter is this covering? (It was on the top of the test).  I had students who got only four questions right on the entire test.

The idea of mastering the material sounds good but you need to realize that during the days of Common Core we had high paid consultants coming in to help us excel.  One of their suggestions was to lower the passing grade to 20%.  Yes, that is not a misprint.  They wanted us to consider mastery as two in ten.  The sad part is I would still have to fail many students at that level.

I am sorry, but these kids are not going to master much of anything except thinking up excuses to get out and walk the halls.  They have no reason to work at learning.  By the time I got them in eighth grade they already understood that they were going on to the ninth grade no matter what they did.  They knew that there were no standards that would be kept in place to make them perform.  I used to have a line, “Where else can you go that you can harass adults all day, do what you want and pay not price for your behavior?”  I was not joking.

They are not through.  They are still investigating the corners of Fantasy Land,

“After Patterson expressed concerns at this week’s meeting, the board will also review potential student disparities stemming from its zero-tolerance disciplinary policy on cheating in the coming weeks.”

Patterson is a member of the board who is a high school student.  The “disparities” they are talking about must be that more of their target demographic was being caught cheating than in the other groups.  The solution is to allow cheating.  

Before you write it off as something from Crazy California I would suggest that this same kind of thinking is going on in a school near you.  These are your future Antifa members.

*(Liberals, educators, socialists, communists, elites, Rinos, Democrats, leftists, Never Trumpers, Antifa, etc)

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