A USA Today story details an apparently somewhat widespread policy being considered or instituted in schools around the country.  The idea is to not allow grades below 50%, either as a final semester grade or individually depending on the implementation.  The money quote from the article comes to us from educational “think tank” founder Douglas Reeves:  

“It’s a classic mathematical dilemma: that the students have a six times greater chance of getting an F”

Not to let this hilarity completely distract from proponents’ arguments, the main motivating factor appears to be to avoid discouraging students by never allowing the passing of a course to become mathematically impossible.  While a worthwhile goal, students should never be anything but encouraged and helped to succeed, I feel that this policy will do the opposite.  Failing students know that they are failing, regardless of the reason.  Automatically giving half points regardless of performance amounts to lying to the student and they are not so blind as to not know it.  

Additionally, no differentiation is then made between truly struggling students, who legitimately are putting in significant effort yet may not be passing, and students who do not try at all.  These struggling students may see that students who do no effort get nearly the same grade as they do, reducing the incentive to sustain their efforts.

The spirit of the plan is noble, but I would argue that there are much better ways of reaching similar goals without the negative effects.  For example, a small number of assignments can be dropped from the grade book each semester allowing for life’s incidents to have minimal impact on student success.  Additionally, midterm exams can be weighted much less than the final exam, making what is learned by the end of the semester, arguably the true goal of schooling, the most important portion of the grade.  Extending on this idea, a cumulative final can be used to completely replace prior poor performance on a topic tested previously, again emphasizing understanding as the primary objective.    These proposals still allow for sustained effort to make a significant impact on a student’s grade without pointlessly rewarding inattentive, uncaring students.

My first in a series of random posts comes tonight in the form of an educational cartoon with a catchy song.  In reality it comes from unsurprisingly boring and (until I update it with more relevant info) minimal sources, presidential candidate policy pages.  Tonight’s unfortunately political topic?  Education.  It, particularly higher education, is a topic that interests me greatly, one that I feel is very important to the country’s / world’s future.  It also opens me up to comments on this post’s grammar or word choice failings hehe.

First off, our dashing AZ Senator John McCain:

Unfortunately, his educational issues page (under the website subdirectory ‘/informing’) is not all that informative, without even links to additional, more boring policy papers.  The key points that I divined from his page seem to consist of the following:

• Continue No Child Left Behind (NCLB)
• Enable school choice (other than most local public, private, or home schooling)
• Reform school / administration culture, reduce waste

 

Much energy has been spent on discussion / controversy surrounding NCLB with the primary negative charges being that it is a mostly unfunded program, federally and at the state level, and overall arguments regarding the over-application of standardized testing (i.e. teaching to the test, inflexible, uniform demands placed on the vastly heterogenous school systems in the country, etc.).  Unfortunately, McCain’s issues page does not speak at all to these problems.  I fear that such a lack of information indicates a lack of initiative to sufficiently improve this country’s often inadequate education system.  It is argued that such a continued lack of school performance can lead to future crises in not only education, but also the economic and national security landscapes of America.

To comment on the final two main points, I find the emphasis on school choice in the stated policy to be one of the apparently few positive aspects of the Senator’s listed education policy.  While I feel that in the long term much more focus should be placed on improving the failing schools themselves, and that is not to say that such focus should be deferred, it is important that today’s students have access to the best education possible.  The possible conundrum caused by this is that a flight of students (and subsequently funding) from poorly or even marginally less successful schools may irreparably damage such school while requiring the further extension of higher performing schools’ resources.

This is why I feel that it is imperative that positive support in the form of significant additional (and at least generally sufficient) investment is made.  Contrary to this, the emphasis on punishing and reforming school administration is somewhat worrying.  While there are many well-documented cases of mismanagement (the D.C. public schools are often cited), the focus on it may well come to the further detriment of truly underfunded schools.

Overall, I find Mr. McCain’s sparse education plan unfortunately very lacking in detail, with much focus given to the negatives in the current system.  While many of these issues are real, the mere listing and admonishing of these aspects does nothing to improve the generally sorry state of education in America.  Additionally, more lip service is paid to the availability of home schooling (whose possible issues, such as a lack of rigor and accreditation I will not delve into) than to actually tackling the performance and funding issues of our schools, an apparent political necessity that I find discomforting.