Reply to Increase Absenteeism in Midle/Upper SES students not due to illness?

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "Increase Absenteeism in Midle/Upper SES students not due to illness?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes, it's a huge problem, and growing. Mostly school avoidance and mental health issues. No one is sure exactly what the cause is. I think the rolling gradebook and the required 7 assignments and 2 tests per quarter might have something to do with it - work just piles up and up and quickly becomes overwhelming.[/quote]

7 assignments and 2 tests per quarter is not a lot of work.  It's very little work.

The attendance is bad because of the crappy schedule and residual effects of how FCPS implemented covid computer learning and post covid computer learning and grading scales.

Ask any parent of teens

Fcps made consistent in person school and deadlines irrelevant for the current crop of kids. It will be like this for a few more years.[/quote]

I am a parent of a teen. I am also a teacher. 7 assignments is much more graded work than we ever had when I was in school. We usually had one or two tests per quarter, and max one other thing to hand in. Maybe some small homework assignments that were stuck together into one grade. 7 graded assignments is actually a lot. As teachers, we sometimes have trouble getting them all in. When a student misses some school, they are almost certainly going to get far behind in assignments, and just getting them caught up becomes a major thing. There is no way a kid who missed a week or two of school can easily catch up in all their classes. So they start avoiding work and avoiding school, and the problem spirals. We watch it happen over and over.

We don't even want to give that many separate assignments. [/quote]

This is crazy. When I was a kid if you missed assignments you just got zeros on them and moved on. [/quote]

Yes, and we should return to that model.[/quote]

Agree. Interestingly, FCPS parents now hate a lot of the policies they themselves helped to create. All the complaints about “my kid has a C in English but her friend in Ms Smith’s class has an A and that’s not fair because college looks at GPA” led to a system where we all have to have the same number of assignments in the gradebook every quarter and roughly give the same assignments too. All the complains about “my kid was on vacation or sick and shouldn’t be penalized because colleges look at GPA” led to the endless retake model that discourages kids from trying at all the first time and means they don’t care how much school they miss.

These policies don’t come from nowhere. Parents are very vocal about things like this and the more they complain or threaten to sue, the more the districts bend to the whims. Now you guys have dumbed down school because you wanted inflated 4.8 GPAs so your kids could have a chance at getting into Virginia schools and you think “There’s no rigor here and school feels like a joke.” Yeah. Yeah. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics