Exposé of Maspeth High
The NY Post has run a series of articles on Maspeth High School, where the administration and teachers have allegedly given students a pass. Literally. No matter what they do.
You can read about it here, here, and here.
And then put that all together with George Packer’s recent article.
A sorry and yet somehow unsurprising state of affairs.
Although I think standards have slipped across the country in most schools, there are still many that are really trying to educate their students, but the rot at the top in DOE for decades has handicapped them in using high standards and effective discipline.
Rewards are given to administrators and teachers for the wrong things, or for easily faked results; punishment is applied for what most of us would consider “good teaching” — and the erosion has been going on for years.
Incentives without auditing are an invitation to fraud.
If these “tells” had shown up in a financial report, their would have been instant deployment of watchdogs to find out why.
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The schools (and society in general) have eroded parental responsibility and authority to where this mother (and father, but he is never quoted) are not able to get out of the corrupted environment However, it does look like she did all she could within the system.
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Whatever you reward, you get more of.
The kids know that this “help” is only holding them back from real freedom and prosperity. And that ultimately, “being fair” doesn’t mean dumping standards and discipline so that everyone in school gets equal results regardless of effort or achievement (so we go back to Packer’s problems with “false meritocracy” — you can’t have one of any kind under those conditions).
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The only thing surprising in Packer’s article was his surprise at finding out how flawed the education system is, and he didn’t even have to deal with schools like this.
Mr. G and I have had several conversations about the screaming for “college for everybody!” occurring even as high schools are rendered useless. We are old enough to realize that “high school” once was higher education, and it once mattered.
Kids have a free education given to them K-12 but demand more time of free schooling (and, in unspoken necessity, extended childhood). How does one expect that to play out, should it be given to them? Only a complete idiot would not predict that “higher” learning will become equally useless as it, too, becomes a freebie given away without merit or accomplishment, only to require some new additional level of education.
I live outside Washington DC and about a year ago there was a scandal, now forgotten, about how the DC schools were doing some affirmative action on the students records and graduating students that were not qualified to graduate. An estimated 1/3 of the students were not qualified to graduate but they were given a diploma anyway. That’s why todays high school diploma has become a worthless piece of paper and the college diploma is headed that way.
Ray – after the college diploma is totally devalued, where can we go for credentials? Some jobs already require a Master’s or Doctorate where a Bachelor’s degree was formerly adequate.*
I think the whole system has to be razed and started over.
Employers who actually need workers who get something accomplished will (if they are smart) start hiring outside the academic bubble.
*Don’t get me started on the SJWs who now object to those labels because they are (multiple choice quiz): racist, misogynist, ablist, unfair, patriarchal, all of the above.
“We wanted someone besides ourselves to make this kid accountable,” Annmarie, 49, told The Post. “I was looking for someone to scare him, for some school authority to push back and let him know that there were consequences to his actions. But nothing happened.”
I’d bet money that they rarely if ever held him accountable when he was young.
Growing up in the 50s – 60s there was never any doubt in my mind as to whom I was accountable for my actions… my loving, disciplinarian father.
Which was, I assure you, more than sufficient.
Growing up, my worst moment was not the occasional spanking we got. Rather it was when at 21 I ‘loaned’ my driver’s license to a friend, so he could get into a bar where an older girl he liked hung out. Looking nothing like me, when he was carded it didn’t fly and he was arrested.
My Dad had to go down to jail to bail ‘me’ out, only to discover my friend behind bars. When I got home that night, my Father was waiting up for me holding my driver’s license and quietly said, “you’re too old for me to take you over my knee but I’m so disappointed in you…”
I’ve never felt so low… nor did I ever disappoint him again.
In 2012, “57.6% of black children, 31.2% of Hispanic children, and 20.7% of white children are living absent their biological fathers.”
It’s the culture… stupid.
It’s not that difficult to contrive a remedy for this problem. The state legislature and board of regents just.don’t.feel.like.it.
1. Hold regents’ examinations once or twice a year. On the examination date, the only school employees permitted on the premises will be the building custodians, the school nurse, and the dietary staff. These will be supplemented with local nurses paid a per diem and with police officers to maintain order. The examinations are administered by proctors employed by the board of regents and paid per diem. Any youngster who is ill is taken to a makeshift infirmary where there are cots between baffles and told to do the best he can with his exam paper. Any student who doesn’t show is recorded as receiving a zero on the examination. This can be expunged if the school sends documentation demonstrating the youth in question was in the hospital or in jail that day.
2. Have proctors employed by the board of regents make a surprise visit to each school in the state during the course of the year, pull a random sample of thirty students out of each grade, and administer psychometric tests to them so a profile of the school can be constructed.
3. For each school, produce league tables which show year-to-year improvements in performance of each birth cohort enrolled at the school, controlling for the psychometric profile of the school in question.
Education is a government monopoly. Like any monopoly, those running it, freed from normal market forces, spend much of their effort serving themselves.
We should let government pay for it, but not provide it. We should create an educational endowment for each student. Students should become customers for educational services, not inmates in a government system. There should be a free market in education.
With an educational endowment system, the money would be paid out only when that student achieves a specified annual level. Yes there would be tests. The perpetual professional government educational employee statement that tests detract from teaching are total nonsense. Life involves tests. Want to drive a truck, you pass a test. Want to fly an airplane, pass a test. Want to be a lawyer, pass a test.
If the money was not paid out for poorly performing students, poor students would become much more valuable to educators who can catch them up. Bringing a 16 year old up from sixth grade level to tenth would pay four years of payments to the successful educator.
Instead of being unmanageable problems, under-performing young adults would have mentors who really involved themselves and who had serious financial stakes in their student success rates.
Unpaid funds should stay in each student account indefinitely, allowing people who finally get their act together as adults to obtain an education. Our present system basically abandons dropouts, adding to their and society’s problems.
Until we end this government monopoly, nothing will change, education will continue to cost more, and this kind of behavior will be commonplace.
If we could combine Art Deco’s plan with Dick’s, I think we would be on to something.
Schools do not matter much in terms of academic improvement. The worse the student, the more having a good teacher matters, but even then the school can’t change much. What they can control however is the content of “this is what the adults in our society think it is important for you to have learned.” Smart kids will read cereal boxes and whatever is put in front of them and build vocabulary and will form opinions based on whatever is in the air around them, only partly including the school. They will test fine even at bad schools. Preserving safety is important, certainly. Schools also have some influence over character in terms of consequences, encouragement, and example. Yet even there, the school isn’t even 30% of the equation.
We can feed them intellectual junk food or decent fare, but we won’t much influence their appetite or their overall intellectual health, same as with actual food.
African-Americans do not do as well, on average, a direct downstream result of IQ and culture of violence. However, that result is intolerable, so someone must be blamed. The poor bastards at the schools know they are in an impossible position, and the worse the district, the more likely the administrators are to say “Our only solution is to pretend the truth isn’t true, turn our back to the wind, and pass everyone.” The punishment culture is begging them to lie. When we live lies, we very easily talk ourselves into them. The ones who won’t, quit, get fired, or try to find some good they can do in spite of the madness.