The Seattle School District, responding to a crisis of low high school graduation rates, is proposing to lower the standards needed to graduate. Among the proposed changes is elimination of the requirement to maintain a minimum 2.0 grade-point average.
33 high school principals and counselors recently surveyed overwhelmingly said the district should not retain the 2.0 GPA rule, which may be encouraging students with low GPAs to drop out.You'd almost have to be a public education professional to think like that. No doubt they'll all be patting each other on the back next year for increasing the graduation rate. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at June 18, 2004 10:35 AM
Teachers (unions) are always whining that they want to be treated (read: paid) like professionals. Okay, fine then. Real professionals are paid on the basis of results.
Posted by: Matt J Kurlander on June 18, 2004 10:54 AMActually, almost everyone is paid on the basis of results that the customers care about. Teachers object to both parts of that statement.
However, my reason for posting was to point out that "forcing" kids to wait for graduation is also an obstacle. If they don't have to do anything to graduate, why should they have to wait?
Dumb and dumber.
Posted by: Jed on June 19, 2004 11:21 AMI suspect that the "crisis" is the racial gap in graduation rates and not low rates per-se. I have a better idea (that I think Camille Paglia proposed), end mandatory schooling two years earlier. It is in the last two years that most young adults drop out.
Why waste so much time on all these ways of increasing graduation? Let's just give our children their high-school diplomas as soon as they exit the womb. Then those teachers don't have to worry about those pesky little nuisances like results.
Posted by: Mark Griswold on June 21, 2004 10:27 AM