Houston Area Public Schools - More Than 10% Fail, Grades Must Be Changed

At our school, there is an email sent out to all teachers, if more than 10% of your students fail, you must meet with the principal and explain your actions. Your grades will be changed to reflect no more than 10% of your students failing. just a little fyi

That's why I got out of public education. I'd only teach at a public school if I lost my job here and the school had a good academic record.

I taught in a suburban public school in the South. The first semester there were 660 Fs for 610 students, and this was on a block schedule, so they only had 4 classes. That means the average student failed 25% of their classes. I had one class with a failure rate of over 30%, and those were failures under 50%, so they weren't close to a D.

Where I taught any student that failed an assignment could come after school twice a week (with free bus transportation at 5pm when it was over) and retake any assignment and get a 73, which was the lowest C. Eventually the administration pushed for us to simply give them a 73 on the retake no matter what. This school was ranked by Newsweek as one of the top 1,000 public schools in America 2 years before I got there.

What do you expect from Government Provided Education? Is it a shock to your system that governments of all types and levels lie? This will absolutely continue until society separates government and education. Until then, tax payers pay at the point of a gun, unions and bloated administrations take the money, AND the students end up being secondary to keeping the money coming and the payouts going.

limitgov:

At our school, there is an email sent out to all teachers, if more than 10% of your students fail, you must meet with the principal and explain your actions. Your grades will be changed to reflect no more than 10% of your students failing. just a little fyi

That is the federal gov'ts No Child Left Behind policy. The public school system can't let their grades fall. If they do, then the state gov't takes control of the school, and other so-called consequences to supposedly fix the problem. The falling grades within the institutions own perspective appears bad on the school principle and the school district administrators. And the state gov't would begin to feel the pressure too. The failings fall on them and so they are only doing what their superiors are doing to them. Letting everybody know, including the teachers, to not let grades fall below a certain line or else face the consequences. I'm sure the consequences of school grades falling would not only put any teacher jobs in jepordy especially if the teacher unions side with the the policy, but also the principle and school district administrators might also see the red slip that sends them home from their job. So of course they have families and a mouth(s) to feed, a mortgage, etc... so this would be only a natural reaction to a gov't policy with obviously unintended consequences. Unintended only because nobody thinks these logically through. It's always a good idea on paper but they are impossible to begin with and fail from the start only ruining people's lives in the long run.

Orly you know I thought it was a lot worse. I went to a highschool in laredo, and if a student was failing you had to meet with them after class, in your spare time, and work with them. If the continued to fail you had to contact the parents and work with them to help the child. Basically they made it a ton of work to fail students, so no students fail anymore. Going to sleep gets you a C. Its great.