Read this, and I will give my comments and experiences after:
There are people in the comments (you can click on it to read them yourself) who say giving a 0% for zero effort creates a hole that a child can’t dig out of and will cause the student to stop trying, therefore a 50% is better because it’s easier for the student to dig out of the hole.
Still others argue how allowing a student to later make up a missed assignment for half credit is better.
Let me explain my experience and why both positions are wrong:
The purpose of teaching is to ensure that the student masters the material the state says needs to be learned in that course, not simply make students do assignments. You can read the standards for every course taught in Florida by clicking here. As an example, let’s look at a course I taught- High School Biology. My students were all 15 years old or older, as Bio is taught in the 10th grade. When I was teaching the course, there were 88 standards the student had to meet by the end of the year. Some were relatively easy, requiring a day or so of class. For example:
SC.912.L.14.4: Compare and contrast structure and function of various types of microscopes.
For that one, we would spend one class period with microscopes, learning the parts. The students would have worksheets where they would label the parts and their functions of various microscopes. Then we would use those microscopes in other class days complying with other standards like this one:
SC.912.L.14.2 Relate structure to function for the components of plant and animal cells. Explain the role of cell membranes as a highly selective barrier (passive and active transport).
In this assignment, which took a few days, we would learn the parts, then perform a lab where we would use various things do demonstrate selective permeability. We also would use those microscopes to view plant and animal cells, draw pictures of what they see, with an explanation and labeling of the various organelles they saw in the cells. You can see, if a student doesn’t master the microscope lesson, they won’t be able to learn anything in the cell lesson.
The course goes like that, with things learned early in the year being used as a base for learning later in the year. The process is called scaffolding. The early lessons are the scaffold upon which the later lessons are built.
I tried other methods, including letting students make up assignments. Let me tell you how that turns out, but first I have to explain my grading process.
Each semester would see us in class for 90 days, divided into two 9 week grading periods. I gave students a grade every single day. That grade was based upon the assignment they did that day to prove mastery. The assignments could be one of three categories: Classwork, Labs, and Quizzes/Exams. They were weighted. Quizzes and tests were worth about 40% of the grade, Labs about 20% of the grade, and Classwork about 40% of the grade. Class assignments were done in class. If the student didn’t finish them during class, they became homework and were due in 3 days. After that third day, the value of the assignment dropped by 10% per day, until it was 5 class days late, then it was a zero. That gives each student 8 class days to complete an assignment for at least partial credit, almost two weeks.
At the end of the each 9 week grading period, the student would have approximately 4 Quiz/Exam grades, 4 Labs, and about 35 Class assignments. Doing the math:
- a class assignment was worth a little more than 1% of your grade.
- Each test was worth about 10% of your grade, and
- Each lab was worth about 5% of your grade.
So how did students handle this? The gradebooks are all electronic, and the students can see their grades. Many of them would wait until the end of the grading period to see what their grade was, then beg to turn in assignments from weeks ago, or beg for “extra credit” so they could fix their grades. This completely destroys the structure of the learning and the scaffolding. They learn nothing because they didn’t do anything.
I would have students who failed every test, did the labs so poorly they received half credit, and did none of the class assignments. Their grade would be sitting at a 35%, and they would expect to be permitted to do all of the missing assignments during the last three days of the grading period. In the classes with a lot of low performing students, each of them would expect to be able to turn in 15 or 20 late assignments in an attempt to bring that 35% up to a C. Even if I allowed it, it isn’t possible to bring a 35% up to a 70%.
Meanwhile, I have 130 students whose grades must all be done and entered before report cards are printed. That means I have to put comments in for every student. I have to make sure all of the grades are entered and are correct. I also have to plan out the lessons and order lab supplies for the coming grade period, and I only have one teacher workday in which to do so. I didn’t have time to grade over 1,000 late assignments and still have everyone’s stuff done in time. So the answer was no.
Then the parents would start complaining. They would say they had no idea their kid was doing to poorly. They would expect weekly phone calls. I didn’t do that. The gradebook, as I said, is online. Log in and track your child’s progress. I enter grades every single day for 130 students. I had the electronic gradebook setup to automatically email a progress report to the parents of any child with less than an 80% each Friday. I don’t have time to call their parents each week. The parents would respond, telling me they didn’t read the emails. You get the point- anything to avoid their kid having to take responsibility.
So the administrators enacted a rule. If a teacher had more than 15% of their class receive a D or an F, the teacher had to have a remedial meeting with admin to explain what they were going to do to improve students’ grades. One year, half of my students had a D or an F. I was threatened with my job if m ore students didn’t pass. So what does any rational person do? They give out free grades. That’s how you get students headed to college as honor roll students who can’t read.
So why were so many students failing? Attendance.
- more than 75% of my students are chronically absent. Chronically absent means that a student is not in school more than ten percent of the time.
- More than a third of my students miss more than half of class time.
- One in ten of my students miss three quarters or more of school hours.
- In a 180 day school year, I had more than one student who were absent over 100 days.
- Out of 180 school days, the median number of absent days is 23 for my 130 students.
That’s right- half of my students missed a day every other week. How can anyone master that material if they are gone one day out of every nine? What happens when half of them are doing it?
The problem is schools receive funding based upon how many of them graduate and how they do on state testing. This places a lot of pressure on schools to force teachers into giving passing grades. When test scores start to drop from the lack of rigor, the schools fall back on the standby.
Special Ed.
Funding is tied to those benchmarks we talked about earlier. Special Ed students don’t have to meet them. The incentive here is to make as many kids special ed as possible. It needs to be done because not only do special ed kids bring increased funding per student, but missing the testing benchmarks means less money, unless the student is special ed. The law is called Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). It says that it is unfair and discriminatory to treat students with intellectual disabilities (what used to be referred to as retarded) the same as other students. So this law was passed to make things more equitable. (Not equal, which is the same standard, but equitable, meaning that they have the same outcome.)
School funding for special education students says that they have to be permitted to pass, and that their diploma and transcript can’t say a thing about the fact that they were special Ed, or that they were passed without meeting benchmarks. In fact, my school district even had a policy stating that non-English speaking students couldn’t receive anything less than a C.
When I was put in charge of teaching Biology at my school, I was given 6 classes of it. The teacher who had been teaching that schedule before me had been fired. I was told that the school’s goal was to have half of the students pass the standardized test on Biology at the end of the year. They told me that they didn’t expect me to hit that goal the first year, but were hoping I could do it by year three. At the end of that first year, 67% of my students hit the benchmark. My evaluation? Meets expectations (in other words, average). Why was that? Because almost a quarter of my students had below a C. (Remember the limit was 15%) I countered by pointing out that my grades were an accurate reflection of my students’ abilities. That didn’t matter.
The entire education system in this nation is broken. I know- I was teaching in it for more than 6 years. It isn’t just the teachers. Administrators don’t care about the kids who are discipline problems, so they don’t do anything about it. The parents and the teachers also play a huge role in the suckage that is our school system.
The list is of reasons for the failure is long-
- There are kids who never come to school. You can’t make them.
- Their parents don’t care, and no one is prosecuted for truancy.
- Many parents who claim to “home school” don’t actually bother to teach the kids anything.
- Students who do come to school and care, largely are cheating their way through school using apps, Google searches, and other cheats. That is how the girl who is the subject of this post made it- she cheated using apps.
The truth is that not every kid is smart enough for college. Not every kid is suited for school. A school that has a student for less than 1100 hours a year can’t fix 18 years of around the clock bad parenting coupled with the handicap of losing the genetic lottery. All of the programs in the world won’t turn a student with a 75 IQ and no motivation into a scholastically successful person.
We waste a lot of time and effort on trying educate kids who don’t want to learn, and on students with disabilities that prevent them from ever being more than simple manual laborers. There should be an exam at the end of the year when a student turns 15 (9th grade). Those who excel go to a college prep high school, students who show aptitude for it go to vocational school, students who fail are done and can go get a job. If you or your parents want to stay in school after you have failed the exam, you can pay for it yourself and go to private school. Let’s stop wasting money trying to prove that every child has the same mental aptitude. You don’t need to know calculus to run a cash register or push a broom.
Even the students who were destined for college had their own ways to cheat the system. For the first couple of years that I was teaching, I taught advanced courses like Chemistry and Physics. The courses I taught allowed a student to take an exam after it concluded, and if they scored high enough on that exam, they would receive college credit for the course. In other words, a college level class being taught at the high school level. Students hated the fact that my course was difficult and constantly complained because they were getting Bs instead of As. Meanwhile, school administrators wanted my course to be both more rigorous and easier for students to receive an A.
Educating a child is a partnership between the student, parents, teachers, and administrators. If any one of those links fails to do their job, the effort will fail and all of the money spent will have been wasted. Let’s stop spending gobs of money to get the end result where a child receives an honors diploma and still can’t read or write. After six years of teaching, I gave it up as a waste of time and went back to health care.
