Students Are Always Half Right In Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh Public Schools officials have enacted a policy that sets 50 percent as the minimum score a student can receive for assignments, tests and other work. District spokeswoman Ebony Pugh said, the 50 percent minimum gives children a chance to catch up and a reason to keep trying. If a student gets a 20 percent in a class for the first marking period, he or she would need a 100 percent during the second marking period just to squeak through the semester. The district and teachers union issued a joint memo to ensure staff members' compliance with the policy, which was already on the books but enforced only at some schools. At this rate, it won't be long before schools institute double extra credit Mondays and Fridays to ensure students don't take three day weekends.

Comments

As a resident of a suburb of Pittsburgh...

[east coast]

Let me warn all of you right now, if you do not live in Pennsylvania and you have any thought that it's a state that you would like to try to lead a productive life in, especially the south-western corner, please abandon those thoughts. Pennsylvania is a black hole of taxation and asshattery. Our governor isn't worthy to hold the position of a used cars salesman and the city of Pittsburgh is a financial and logistical burden for anyone who lives anywhere close to it.

Not to even get into the fact that Dan Onorato and Luke Ravenstahl are both self-serving bitches.

Nothing new

[dunelin]

Our district has had this policy for a long time. As a teacher, it's not too much of a hassle because the whole point of education is to get the kids to learn. If it's impossible to pass the year because of what a student scored the first quarter, they'll give up for the rest of the year. With this policy, there is still hope. In our district, they get their actual scores for midyear and final exams and for the 4th quarter, so they will get killed eventually if they do nothing.

By the way, the bigger problem is with kids who do the work but don't think. I have lots of students who copy their friends' work, so they have great homework grades, but bomb tests because they have no clue what they're talking about.

This is also in the works in Texas

[Crudely_Indecent]

Much like the current economic crisis, shouldn't failure be allowed? As some banks should be failing for bad investments, some students should fail to allow them to do-over.
I blew off a year of math and I went to summer school, once. I'm not proud, but it was a motivational experience. Summer school sucks.

SMU Dean David Chard In support of DISD's new grading policy

On a more frightening note, public education now seems to be king, in California at least. Homeschooling Banned in California

Does anyone else notice that things are going downhill? And they're speeding up?

Re:Or more reasonable policies

[MBGMorden]

My school offered no IT type stuff either. We had a "computer technology" class that basically consisted of Word/Excel book exercises that even the teacher didn't know how to do.

I ended up having enough extra time in that class from blowing through the lessons on my own, that in my "down time" I kinda "helped out" the instructor for the class by trying to determine every possible way to break out of the school's sandbox/menuing system to get to a straight DOS prompt (actually with his encouragement). Every time he thought he had us sandboxed in I found a new way to do it :).