If you build a better crutch, we'll make a lazier student. Sound like grade recovery anyone?

This may as well have been about dozens of schools in the district. -cpg

From Teachbad.com

Isn’t that the truth?

I was talk­ing to a friend from my old school the other day. They had to read the arti­cle from the last post about the kid who went to DC pub­lic char­ter schools and then was unpre­pared for his fresh­man year at Georgetown.

Sur­prise!

You weren’t pre­pared because your teach­ers had to spend most of their time cod­dling and cajol­ing the way-behind, the lazy and the dis­rup­tive in your midst. (If you are poor and your mom is a drunk, that’s sad. But it is sec­ondary. The teacher still has to deal with way-behind, lazy, and dis­rup­tive.) This takes a great deal of time and effort. In DC, pub­lic edu­ca­tion is all about cre­at­ing the appear­ance that the bot­tom is being brought up. Increas­ingly we see that this is a poorly exe­cuted illusion.

Here is how it works at my old school, the Colum­bia Heights Edu­ca­tion Cam­pus, where I taught U.S. Gov­ern­ment and DC His­tory for three years. In short, the teach­ers do every­thing for the stu­dents, pro­vide mul­ti­ple oppor­tu­ni­ties to do the same thing, and just plain make things up to move kids out. And then we all pre­tend that the stu­dents did the work after all. It is sim­ply a lie.

It all amounts to tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity away from stu­dents and leav­ing them almost entirely unac­count­able. In the name of “pro­vid­ing sup­ports for strug­gling stu­dents”, we give stu­dents an excuse to not strug­gle at all. If you build a bet­ter crutch, we’ll cre­ate a lazier stu­dent. I have never seen such an intel­lec­tu­ally help­less and self-deluded group of tree sloths in my life. And we have helped that to hap­pen in the name of keep­ing the assem­bly line running.

For exam­ple, as a his­tory teacher, I required stu­dents to write papers. As per the reg­u­la­tions of the school, every stu­dent writes the same paper. It comes to them in the form of a GRASPS. (Goal, Role, Audi­ence, Sit­u­a­tion, Prod­uct, Stan­dards.) This must all be spec­i­fied clearly and be uni­form for all stu­dents. If I sim­ply said “write a 5-page essay pre­dict­ing the out­come of a pend­ing Supreme Court case using prece­dents stud­ied in class”, 9 out of 10 heads would explode right there and then. Explod­ing heads would also be brought on by allow­ing stu­dents to pick their own top­ics. They can’t do it.

So every­body gets the exact same assign­ment, spelled out in excru­ci­at­ing detail, which is never quite enough. There is also a ridicu­lously detailed rubric which, in many cases, ends up being longer than stu­dent papers. These mate­ri­als are read in groups, dis­cussed in class. Some­times more than once. Along with this mate­r­ial is an exem­plar, also required. This is a full sam­ple paper, writ­ten by me, that ful­fills every­thing on the rubric, has a kick-ass intro­duc­tion and con­clu­sion, cites mate­ri­als prop­erly, etc. It’s the shit. We read the exem­plar in class and high­light the places in the paper where dif­fer­ent parts of the rubric are sat­is­fied. We dis­cuss, ask ques­tions (or not), etc.

So, each stu­dent has a painfully detailed assign­ment sheet and rubric, along with the entire paper writ­ten for them. This is all required and given at the begin­ning of the unit. Dur­ing the unit, I speak extra loudly and clearly, with lots of point­ing and any other sig­nal­ing I can think of when we come to some­thing rel­e­vant to the paper. We also have a word wall and pre­view “dif­fi­cult” vocab­u­lary because you know damn well only 20 per­cent would even think of look­ing up a word they don’t know and only 8 per­cent would actu­ally do it. So I tell them and we draw pic­tures like stroke vic­tims and first graders. I chew every­thing up and regur­gi­tate it back into their mouths.

Time is given to write in class and this is mostly wasted. Time is allot­ted to peer review rough drafts and this is mostly wasted. Points and praise are pro­vided for any­thing that might be rea­son­ably con­strued as effort or thought toward com­plet­ing the project. On or around the due date I might get 15 or 20 per­cent. The rest trickle in, or not. They are mostly very, very bad; betray­ing lit­tle effort and almost no thought. Raise the bar, indeed.

I threaten to take points off for late work, but there is no way I can afford to do that. Pro­duc­tion can­not be halted. Since there is no qual­ity con­trol on the final prod­uct, and I am not going to be the bot­tle­neck, we roll on.

I don’t care if it’s 7 weeks late. Just turn some­thing in so you don’t get a zero.

How about some extra credit?

Maybe you’d like to retake that test. You betcha! The very same one. I bet you’ll still fail it, but if we move up a click or two…

Now, watch the magic I can do with denom­i­na­tors. Fs into Ds just as fast as you please.

The fraud at my school, in which I par­took fully, is ram­pant and comes straight from the top. The admin­is­tra­tion has many cre­ative and creepy ways of let­ting teach­ers know that when a stu­dent fails it is almost invari­ably the teacher’s fault for not pro­vid­ing enough “sup­port”. Until some­body finds a way to hold stu­dents account­able for their own learn­ing, the incen­tives to con­tinue par­tic­i­pat­ing in The Great Lie will remain.

Mr. Teach­bad