“Welcome to flight school. If you’ll all open to page one of your textbooks, you’ll find your new pilot’s license. Please, do *not *confuse this with the Certificate of Achievement you will need to earn before you can actually fly a plane…”
I like the idea of a Certificate of Merit, that can be as ornate as a diploma, and is handed out the same way, with no difference as far as ceremonies, cap, gown, the works. I assume no one would object to that – the diploma itself is what matters; no one is (I hope) suggesting that the ceremony should somehow be unavailable to such a student, or should emphasize any distinction between that award and the diploma. Hell, at my high school graduation, I got a blank scroll, with the real diploma mailed later.
Yes, it will. Because if we give one autistic child a diploma he or she doesn’t deserve, we’re going to see all kinds of people who don’t deserve a diploma suddenly tell us why they should have one too.
Are you sure your kid is autistic and not just stupid? I mean, maybe he just takes after you. Because you must be stupid to not see how two official documents which are awarded to acknowledge competency in skills and knowledge are similar.
I get that you’re a parent who cares deeply for his child, and that it hurts you that his efforts may not get the same reward that other children get. I understand and sympathize. But your arguments are not logical and not supported by anything other than the emotional pain you feel when you contemplate your kid’s situation and the powerlessness you feel at being unable to change a fundamental aspect of our society. I’m sorry that life is the way it is and that it’s got you down, but if your kid can’t fulfill the requirements to be awarded a diploma, he shouldn’t get one.
I’m all for it. I just don’t see why it’s Arne Duncan’s fault that such a thing doesn’t exist.
OP, is obtaining a GED (over a presumably significantly longer time-frame) something that your child could realistically hope to accomplish?
I don’t care if a kid is autistic, learning disabled, or “just stupid.” Those are just labels meant to be used to figure out reasonable expectations of performance, teaching strategies that may work best, medications and therapies, etc. Not being able to keep up with average classmates is already going to make school a harder place for a disabled kid. If it’s your kid or your student, you try to keep them motivated by reminding them that their hard work will culminate in that proud moment when they will walk across that stage and everyone that cares about them will join in celebrating their achievement. You tell them their whole lives that hard work pays off, that that achievement is important and reachable. For it to be yanked away at the last minute is unthinkable.
“Sorry kid, I know I said hard work paid off, but I was wrong. I know you worked hard, but it wasn’t enough so you failed.”
You’re not telling someone they can’t fly a plane because they don’t have the eye hand coordination, so they should pursue a different career. You’re telling a kid his best wasn’t good enough to receive recognition of his efforts. Are you opposed to wheelchair ramps too? If some loser can’t make it up the stairs, too bad?
But that’s not an accurate description of the OP’s kid, or a lot of kids. The problem is that they want a high school diploma to mean “ready to start at a solid 4-year school”. The requirements, if you look at them, are aimed entirely at that. There is no way to distinguish between a kid who literally never did anything and a kid that can read, do basic Algebra and Geometry, in generally hard-working and responsible, and would be able to be trained for lots of solid semi-skilled positions. That would be something above a participation certificate (which we do have, for whatever it’s worth–it’s what the truly mentally disabled) but below “certified for college”.
Since no such thing exists, people fudge and dilute and teach to the test because they’d rather see a hard working kid get more diploma than he deserves than no diploma, and the diploma becomes more useless because people know it’s so often fudged or diluted. So they raise the standards. But that doesn’t help, because that just motivates more fudging and teaching to the test.
No, the rest of the country’s standards are just as low. The OP is the classic example of why the standards are so low. Getting a high school dipoloma should be an achievement. It should be something that is earned, not an entitlement.
Maybe you should make it clear that hard work alone isn’t enough, the work has to also be done correctly.
ETA: And on time. And in the proper format.
If you want to help someone succeed, you have to award effort, the part that they have some control over, not achievement of fixed benchmarks. School is supposed to somewhere we send our kids because it is in their interest to learn, not a place to weed out those that don’t make the cut so society can decide which mill they are suitable grist for.
What I think is interesting, is that this change is actually not intended to make it more difficult for disabled students to get their diploma, nor is it intended to buttress the quality of the diploma. It’s designed to ensure that disabled students enjoy the same breadth of education that non-disabled students get.
When you get down to it, a HS Diploma basically means you managed to sit in class for 12 years without getting expelled. Which, in some ways, DOES tell you something about the person, just not much about the level of education they’ve received. What’s more important is what you’ve learned in those 12 years.
Nobody is stopping them from learning.
I empathize. I had the fortune? to be a math tutor at a local middle-school for 3 mos last year. Long story short, to try to teach a standard curriculum to classes of 30 kids who all differ in interest, knowledge and talent is madness.
Uh, actually, school is partially a place to weed out those that don’t make the cut so society can decide which mill they are suitable grist for. How in the world could you think it wasn’t? Didn’t you notice that not everyone gets an “A” grade on everything? Didn’t you notice that not everyone was a starter on a sports team? Didn’t you notice that there were different classes for the kids who excelled at things and the kids who didn’t come up to the average? OF COURSE school is partly about separating the wheat from the chaff.
Sure, award the effort. But don’t dilute a HS diploma any further. Give a certificate of attendance, or certificate of good citizenship, or whatever.
I just grabbed my daughter’s HS diploma off the wall. It says
The diploma means that she has passed all her courses, with honors. She would have loved to have had a diploma with Magna or Summa Cum Laude on it, but even though she worked very hard, the best she could do was Cum Laude. And she is proud that she managed it. Should we give ALL students diplomas with Summa Cum Laude stickers on them? Because if they don’t get that sticker, they will feel bad? I don’t think so. Diplomas and honors should mean that the student has met certain standards.
Hell, when I was a teen, before I developed anxiety about flying, I wanted to be a pilot in the Air Force. My eyesight wasn’t good enough. Should the AF have lowered its standards so that I could reach my goal? Or was it more important to have pilots who could actually, you know, see well enough to fly safely? I think that it’s important that a diploma mean something. It should mean that the student has, in fact, completed the Course of Study in a satisfactory manner.
Back when I finished EGB (what back then was compulsory education in Spain, up to 8th grade), the people who got diplomas automatically were the ones who had not met educational standards. Those of us who had met them would move on to high school (either college or trade tracks) and would be getting a higher degree soon enough; nobody ever asks to see your EGB degree nor your EGB grades - but for the people who would never go beyond, there were Diplomas de Escolarización, “Actually Attended School Diplomas”.
As someone who has both taught and spent years grading the kind of tests the OP is pitting, I would like add my informed opinion to this matter.
As a teacher I was constantly pressured to raise grades even when it was obvious the kid had not mastered the work. One term three grades I gave out were raised from failing to passing on the grounds that the kids in question were already receiving help.
In my work as a standardized test grader, no one makes such pressures. We don’t care if the kid is a pain in the rear. We don’t care if he’s getting special education help. We don’t care if he has autism or he’s blind or he’s the sweetest child ever. All that matters is what’s on the page in front of us. The response gets the score it deserves based on what rubric it meets.
I almost never even know the child’s name, age or even where he or she lives. All I care about is what’s on the page in front of me and that’s it. If someone wants to give a teen a certificate of attendance that’s fine. But many such standardized tests are completely valid and deserve respect as a reasonably objective measure of someone’s skills.
What are they teaching exactly that is so difficult or so unrealistic for non-college bound students?
Bo, Pit me all you like. Call me any name in the book if it makes you feel better. But please don’t take swipes at my kid. I’m the one who opened this thread and I should be the only one open to criticism.
I’ve already stated in this thread that I’m fine with with a modified diploma or something of the like twice already. So I’m not get’n why people are still trying to criticize me for thinking my child deserves something he didn’t earn.
I actually read the link provided by Cheesesteak upthread. That was an interesting read. And they make some good arguments. And if it helps fix the fucked up way our Texas teachers are forced to teach our children, I’m all for it.
Seriously, some of you guys have no idea how fucked up it is. Here is a link I posted a year ago:
I found out later, on top of his problems with math, the school didn’t even bother to give him a fucking text book to study from! When I called to ask: WTF? They basically told me they didn’t have enough books to go around. And of courser it’s the disabled children who get fucked, because, shit, it’s not like they have a chance anyway.
So yeah, the system is fucked up, WAY fucked up. I could go on but Manda Jo could do a better job than I can.
No offense, but how good a student could she have been if they didn’t even bother filling it in?