What are your opinions on schools that have no fail policies?

Sucks. Isn’t helping any one at all.

Bottom line it is a reflection on the parents who tolerate and support a school system that encourages mediocrity.

Not Surprised….I’ve seen the Future

These policies are ridiculous. The point of school is education, not social promotion. A degree is supposed to mean something. Plus, it’s detrimental to the students: they think they’re doing okay, then reality catches up with them. These schools are as much of failures as their students.

That doesn’t sound like a no-fail policy as much as a we-don’t-care-about-you,-really and a we’ll-only-put-up-with-you-4-years-regardless policy.

Something called “no fail”, you would think, would be something like offering kids who are having a hard time help, checking in to see why they’re not coming to class, if everything’s okay, how to help kids become motivated not bogged down by workworkwork, etc… no?

They fail.

Horrible. They teach our kids that it’s OK to not be accountable. While I do believe it is important to teach kids it’s OK to fail, school is not the place to give a kid a free pass for no effort.

I have one parent who throws an absolute fit if her son (who is 18) gets a low grade. She’ll take her fit up as high as she can. Needless to say, we don’t give him the grades he deserves.

Sometimes what a person needs is a sharp kick in the ass. This holds particularly true for facing the music and having to deal with the consequences of your decisions and actions. If a student doesn’t do work and doesn’t show up, how is it fair at all to the kids that put effort into it, if the slacker passes? What kind of example does that set?

I am not in favor of a no fail policy, but I am so pissed about how so much of education ignores some of the needs of teenagers, like they need more sleep, they should be the last in the city to start the school day. And, kids who are depressed, which happens a lot with teenagers, or hate school for social reasons or boredom should have a fast track option, to graduate sooner if they buckle down, so there is a light at the end of the tunnel that is not so far away. I am not even talking about how schools teach, or the subject matter; I don’t think kids hate school because of those things as much as hating it for all of the other things associated with school.

Yet another good reason to either home school, or private school.

@12Oaks Most parents really are not capable teachers.

Ridiculous.
Learning to deal with failure is incredibly important. These schools are doing their students no favors.

along with a zillion other reasons why this policy is absurd.

@Dutchess_III Why do you say that? While I agree there are parents who aren’t capable teachers, why do you say most?

@cockswain, very few parents are qualified to teach their children all the subjects they need to know. While I could do a passable job at high school level English, and can pretty much kick butt for history, sociology, and humanities, my kids wouldn’t have stood a chance learning math and science from me. Besides, I respect teachers; it takes a lot to deal with teenagers all day long.

The fact that kids come to high school unprepared rests solely on the parents. If that weren’t true, so many parents wouldn’t be singing the praises of private schools, which only work because of engaged parents. Even in private schools, the kids whose parents aren’t on it, fail.

I think the Public School Systems are playing the numbers game with the Federal Government over money allocations.

Are the teachers passing students that are failing? It appears so, all in the name of money for their state and school systems.

This is pathetic, if this is occuring.

@BarnacleBill I agree with you about the high school level. Since I have a 12 year old, high school didn’t occur to me. I was thinking the average person would be capable of teaching at the elementary and probably middle school level.

Generally there are lots of resources and lesson plans for parents that are home schooling. Provided the parent take some prep time before instruction, most would do a fine job home schooling. Particularly because the child would be getting one on one, undivided attention.

But agreed, teaching fractions isn’t the same as teaching calculus. Teaching English isn’t the same as teaching Spanish.

If parents are doing due diligence to their child’s education, they are acting as a tutor at home, and making sure in the elementary years that their children are understanding the material and are achieving mastery. Unfortunately, what happens is that children don’t always grasp content in school in the time that is alloted to it. You cannot learn multiplication if you don’t have a sense of numbers or addition. This often means that a parent needs to give up time watching television or playing golf or tennis, and a kid needs to give up playing video games to work on math together. Parents need to spend some time understanding different ways to help children gain mastery in lower grades, or be willing to invest in tutoring to achieve mastery.

I have had children whose academic achievement fell on both ends of the curve—profoundly gifted and processing disabled. Both took a lot of time and effort on my part. Quitting work and homeschooling was not an option.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of students in public schools whose parents did not have an optimal educational experience themselves and are not able to help their children, even if they want to. Educational inequities are not addressed in schools until a student falls two years behind grade level. At that point it’s too late. Schools that pass every student fail to actually educate students, but instead turn into a processing plant.

Perhaps if there were some way to assess educational disadvanted, and students so designated were placed in classes with small student-teacher ratios, like 6-to-1, then students could actually make educational progress. If lucky, kids end up in LD classes, which are often 20 or 30-to-1, and children with sociological learning disadvantages are combined with true learning disabilities. Otherwise, they are left to muddle through on their own, and fall further and further behind.

What happens when a school district offers smaller class sizes for learning disadvantaged children, is that parents of children in regular classes clamor for smaller classes, and threaten lawsuits over preferential treatment. The school system’s answer is to do away with small size programs because they cannot offer the same ratio to all students.

I have yet to meet a teacher who did not want to do the best job of teaching possible, and who has not said that they could do a much better job of teaching all students if the class size was 12 -15 students maximum per class. You cannot offer differentiated curriculum if you have 25–30 students in a class.

Well said. If parents take extra time to assist their children, the children will have a better chance of doing well academically. If the parents are selfish or lazy and want the school system to fill all the gaps, regardless of the student’s individual needs, the student will receive a sub-optimal education.

A friend of mine who homeschools her kids said if you are helping your kids with three hours of homework at night, you are already homeschooling.

It’s not even so much lazy or selfish, @cockswain, as it is failure to recognize that schools are only one place that children learn. For the amount of money that people pay in school taxes, they are only paying for the framework or shell of an educational system. Organized eduction is an outline and exposure to learning and content that defines a society and a community. What you get back for your investment is “core concepts.” Success is still only defined by student engagement and effort.

When you pull students out of public schools to put them into private, or quit a job to homeschool, your financial expenditure/impact is far greater than voting for an tax increase for school funding. The cost of home schooling is most often the loss of second income, in addition to the material expenses. Homeschooling requires a lot of administrative work on the parent’s part.

I’ve not met many parents who complain about schools who have regular contact with their school board representatives, unless it’s to complain about a teacher or a sports program. There needs to be more parent involvement and input in how school money is spent.

@BarnacleBill Did your parents help you with schoolwork when you were in high school? Mine didn’t. Not much anyway.

The OP’s question made me think of how my father always said the breakdown of the American family will hurt the culture of the country, and That moving away from more defined roles in families make life easier. If his mom had been home he would not have been as able to skip school so much. My father, by the way, is a liberal, raised me to be independent, and is not saying it has to be the wife/mother at home. It could be the husband, grandparent, etc. He thinks of family in terms of extended family.

@JLeslie, I would agree with that. I think that kids don’t come to school prepared, and too much expectation is placed on getting an A without doing work.

My father helped me with math in grade school, and my mother took us to the library on a weekly basis. We were expected to get a snack, do homework for an hour after school and then go out to play before dinner. After dinner, there was no television unless homework was completed.

My parents divorced when I was 12, I became a latchkey kid, and there was no help available to me if I didn’t get something. My mother lacked the educational skills to teach, and my father was caught up in his own life, and we rarely saw him. When the teacher told my mom during conferences that I needed a math tutor, my mom told her to move me into the lowest math group. I was moved out of the advanced program into regular program because of that. In retrospect, I probably needed a counselor to deal with the divorce, and tutoring to help me though that period, and I would have been fine.

With my own children, I tried to model their educational experience after what I saw the parents of my academically successful friends having that I did not – we went to museums, art galleries, concerts. We own art books, classical music, and a vast library of reference books. They took music lessons, had a math tutor, went to summer enrichment camps, learned to cook, sew, experiment. The house was allowed to be messed up in the name of experimentation. We had science kits, chemistry sets, craft projects, nature collections, etc. all over the house. I sent them abroad on school trips at the expense of never taking a vacation myself for years. I’ve worn the same clothes for years, and drive old cars to make it all happen.

I probably did end up homeschooling them, but what I really think my “homeschooling” was – be curious about the world around you, invest time in finding information, do the work asked of you to the best of your ability, ask questions, correct your mistakes.

It takes a village to raise a child.

Correction from my post above: That moving away from more defined roles in families make life easier. Should be it makes life more difficult.

Probably the most frustrating thing for me in high school was that I saw my own education gaps, and didn’t know how to overcome them. I was not confident enough to ask for help on my own. Ironically, I did my best work in the few advanced program classes I could talk my way into, mostly history and social studies classes, as well as anatomy and civics. I babysat and cut grass from age 12 on, and was expected to pay for my own clothes. At age 16, I was working 20 hours a week at a part-time job, and was expected to pay the electric bill and buy groceries once a month, because my father often didn’t send the child support checks. I paid for college myself, working 3 part-time jobs that equated to more than full-time. I never had the time to devote to studies the way I should have. Perhaps if I had been willing to take longer to get through school, I could have done better, worked less. That never seemed like an option. The only support I really got from my family after graduation was a place to live, even though I was expected to continue buying groceries and paying the electric bill while paying tuition.

I’m not saying any of the working “hurt” me in any way, except that my focus was more on “how” to make it possible, than the actual “what” part of education. If I had more help with the “how” the “what” would perhaps have been different. It certainly shaped how I raised my own children, and shaped my sense of sacrifice and self-indulgence.

@all thanks for the discussion

These schools fail to prepare their students for real life out there.

@cockswain My experience with people who home school is that they tend to put a workbook in front of the kid, then go talk on the phone. From what I’ve seen, they don’t devote themselves 100% for the 4 or 5 hours a day the way a teacher does. Teachers spend hours before-hand preparing lessons, too.

Also, I think there is too much emotion between a parent and their kid…kids know how to push buttons and they do. I think a parent would be more apt to get angry or upset with the child too. A classroom setting is much more neutral. I compare it to my daycare. In my care I had the same expectations of every kid there, including my own. It was well run, efficient and fun. But without fail almost every kid turned into a completely different person—for the worse—when Mom or Dad picked them up.

I get to teach all High School level classes now, BTW….it can be a trip! But I’m finally getting English down. Yay! (My boss was an English teacher at the HS for 26 years….)
Einstein said something that really sticks with me. Something like, “If you can’t teach it so it’s simple, you don’t know it well enough.”