"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Poor Is As Poor Does

by West Virginia Rebel

One principal’s apparent solution to low test scores: Keep the kids dumb.

HARLEM (CBS) ― Have teachers at an East Harlem school been ordered to lower their standards because many students there are poor?

That’s the impression some got from their principal’s memo.

And now City Hall has stepped in.

The weather was gloomy Thursday outside Central Park East High School, but the talk was about a controversial memo from the school’s principal.

“I don’t think he thinks we’re dumb,” 12th grader Crystal Scarlett said. “He just thinks we can do much better than we’re doing.”

But not everyone agreed.

Last month, Principal Bennett Lieberman sent off a stern memo to teachers.

“If you are not passing more than 65 percent of your students in a class, then you are not designing your expectations to meet their abilities, and you are setting your students up for failure, which, in turn, limits your success as a professional.”

Was he ordering teachers to dumb down their classes?

The memo continued:

“Most of our students come from the lowest third percentile in academic achievement, have difficult home lives, and struggle with life in general. They DO NOT have a similar upbringing nor a similar school experience to our experiences growing up.”

Some students took offense.

“That’s not the way to pass,” 12th grader Richard Palacios said. “That’s not the way to get your education, so you’re basically cheating yourself.”

Sounds like some of the students are smarter than their educators. Would that they all felt that way.

Comments

Posted by on 12/13/07 at 06:46 PM from

Not surprising.  Public education is a joke.  Compulsory eduction was created by Horace Mann based on the Prussian system ... the purpose was not education, but to teach the future factory-workers and soldiers to march to the sound of bells and respect authority.  So of course they’re lowering the standards; achieving some “standard” was never the intent, thus the “standard” becomes something malleable and dynamic...constantly changed and redefined to keep the children marching.

From a 1984 perspective, it’s “School for the Proles”.

Posted by on 12/15/07 at 07:11 AM from

I’ve discussed this before and my comments were met with quite a bit of friction.  However, I will once again point out that manufacturing high test scores (by teaching to the test) or inflating grades is the inevitable outcome of a system that rewards it.  NCLB is a joke.  Teacher accountability, without accompanying student/parent accountability, is also a sham.  It’s the illusion of education in the name of feel-good politics.

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