Can teachers fail a student for bad grades now a days?
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Anonymous
And this is why I had high school students that were reading at the 4th grade level and did not know how to use a ruler. So sad. |
Anonymous
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I graduated in 1994 and was pushed through year after year. In high school teachers gave me answers to tests (to the point that one year I wrote the teacher's name on the test instead of mine because I was so disgusted by the amount of "help" I was being given - I got accused of trying to get her fired), and in a couple of cases on big important tests gave me credit I didn't deserve so I'd pass the overall tests.
Maybe this is why I don't respect formal education. |
Anonymous
There is a lot of research that makes it clear that retention of elementary school students causes lasting damage. |
Anonymous
Why were you pushed through? And why were you failing? |
Anonymous
So does graduating as functionally illiterate. |
Anonymous
There is a lot of research that being below grade-level in reading, writing, and math by the middle-school years leads to kids dropping out of high-school (or graduating as functionally illiterate in the better cases). I say this as a former teacher of middle-school whose students were 13 and could not do simple addition and subtraction (double digits) without counting on a number line (or their fingers). Don't even ask what their writing looked like... If only they'd been held back when they were young. Less stigma, more motivation for the parents to get involved, better opportunity for the system to serve their needs... by middle-school your track is pretty much set. |
Anonymous
Definitely. One needs to have mastered the basics not just shuffled on through the system. |
Anonymous
I'm a MS teacher and see this all the time. It varies by school but my principal won't hold students back because he doesn't want to deal with angry parents (and has basically said so though not quite in those terms). We have a lot of interventions in place for students who struggle with academics and the ones who use the supports usually squeak by in the 65-70 range (65 is passing). Our bigger problem is kids who are academically capable of doing the work but just don't. I had a student a few years ago who did not hand in a single written assignment or hw all year. His average for the year was a 27, only bc he did ok on some of the tests. I knew him in 6th grade and he was a B/C student but he failed every course every quarter in 8th grade. We tried numerous interventions as well as counseling support, parents protested every one, principal refused to stand up to his parents and the boy moved on to high school. |
Anonymous
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Students who are retained in elementary school don't generally catch up. They may seem less behind for the first year or so, but their progress after the retention is slower than it was before, so they continue to lose ground.
They are more likely than students with the same profile who are promoted to end up dropping out, and are more likely to leave school functionally illiterate. If your goal is to have middle schoolers who can read then you need to look for interventions that have been shown to produce that outcome, not interventions that produce the opposite. |
Anonymous
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What happens when a child is held back a year?
Alas, data on kids of equally poor academic standing shows that retaining that student is WORSE than promoting forward. And, of course, promoting forward without supports is WORSE than providing supports. |
Anonymous
I'm sure it's frustrating as a teacher, but this was my DH in school! If he didn't like a class, he didn't do the work. He couldn't be bothered. His parents did all they could, but you can't make a kid do homework or care. His mom was a teacher LOL and I know she was mortified! Barely graduated high school, had less than a 3.0 in college. He did well in the classes he liked, showed up for tests only in the classes he didn't. He's a well paid professional now, makes $200K+/ year. I wonder in retrospect if he didn't have the right idea because my Type A rule following didn't get me any further ahead! |
Anonymous
This mentality is half the problem. We teachers are told that we can't hold kids back because studies show they don't catch up. I don't buy it -- experience shows me that retaining kids in K (or preK) an work wonders for a kid who really isn't developmentally ready for taht grade. I totally believe that retaining a kid in 3rd grade who isn't ready for fourth grade won't work at all. Why? Because chances are huge that what he is missing aren't 3rd grade skills -- he probably needs remediation on 1st and 2nd grade skills as well! And just retaining him for 3rd grade won't fix that. But the real problem is most schools have no mechanism for truly providing targeted remediation -- individualized. We just don't have trhe teachers to provide it... or the knowledge of how to do it... or the will to. It is pretty easy to just pass kids along and VERY VERY HARD to get kids individualized remediation. If you as a teacher document how much individual remediation a child needs, the first thing you are asked is "Now that you have identified that child's need, how will you provide him appropriate remediation?" Because every teacher is supposed to be able to design differentiated instruction for every child, no matter how far behind he is. There is almost no downside for the teacher or principal to just passing on a student to the next grade level (with a note that the child is "below grade level" of course but nothing more) except of course that the child won't pass the state tests. The are huge disincentives for teachers to stick their necks out and document exactly how far behind a child is, and how much remediation he needs (that neither she nor the school is able to give him.) What do you expect will happen in such a situation? |
Anonymous
No one provides enough supports. If you retain kids once and they still don't learn, then you have to retain again and again. No one has a plan for remediation, so it is better to just keep promoting and eventually hope the child will drop out of school. |
Anonymous
I was pushed through because I had an older sister who was traditionally smart, to the point that she'd skipped a grade and was still at the top of her (new, older) class. I was pushed through because I liked to read which adults equate with smartness. I was failing because I couldn't understand anything. |
Anonymous
If you teach a child all year, and they don't keep up or learn what they should, does retaining them and teaching them the same stuff in the same way really help them? What they most likely need as the teacher pointed out is individual remediation and different teaching methods. My dd has ADHD and has been at the low end of reading and having a hard time keeping up with the class. But retaining her won't help because she will still have ADHD next year. Instead, we are doing summer school, tutoring over the summer, and we got her an individual tutor. She would not only be even more bored and unfocused next year if she repeated, but she would also have a huge hit to her self esteem. We may also medicate her next year. She is a rising 3rd grader. |