Nothing To Brag About

Today's Daily News praises the city's 70% Graduation rate.  What a joke.  It is a mystery to me and every other teacher why none of the so called reporters never bother to investigate why this graduation rate keeps going up.  And, since they never report the truth behind these rates I will do so here.

Increased graduation rates work on the see saw principle, one side goes up while the other goes down.  Put a heavy weight on the down side to keep the other rates up.   Heavy cheating raises rates.  Education in NYC high schools is becoming non existent. When a special education student with a kindergarten reading and math levels suddenly scores 80's on regents exams something is very wrong.  A look into any community college will see too many classrooms filled with remedial students.

Cheating is rampant, not only in special education, but everywhere.  Credit recover programs, boot camps and other nonsense programs raise percentages but do nothing for education. It is time for newspapers to look at why graduation rates are going up instead of praising meaningless numbers.

We Don't Do Them Favors When We Exempt Them From Remediation



Alice is one of those kids who managed to place out of remedial math.  While Alice can handle signed numbers and some equations, she can't do much more.  I suggested she go to the department and request a move to the lower level class where she would get a chance to improve her skills. She refused and kept coming to class, doing her best to succeed.  Unfortunately, her best only got her a 5 on the final.

If Alice had been in my class in high school and I was going for merit pay, she would have brought me a step closer to it.  She passed her regents and this improved my stats.  Unfortunately, this did nothing to help her.
I have been trying to convince Alice to take that remedial class before she retakes the class he just failed.  She can always find a teacher to let her audit the class to save the cost.  I don't know if she will.  She's afraid the no credit class will hold up her progress.  I  think I convinced her that failing term after term would be a lot more detrimental to her pursuit of a college degree because I just got an e-mail from her asking to borrow the text I promised to lend for the class she so desperately needs.