On Saturday, I wrote about John Stossel’s 20/20 report on the fraud that prevades throughout America’s education system; confirming that theory, today’s Washington Post reports on a complete education fraud taking place in suburban Maryland.
At least 2,500 ninth-graders in Prince George’s County will abruptly move this week from a standard one-year algebra course into a two-year program, shielding the struggling students from a state graduation test this spring that officials said they were likely to fail.
The highly unusual shift comes midway through the school year in one of Washington’s largest suburban school systems and in some respects runs counter to a regional trend of pushing students to take higher-level mathematics as early as possible.
One-fifth of the county’s students who began high school in August in the bench-mark course Algebra 1 will be affected by the changes. The students had missed several classes in the first half of the year and received low grades.
In other words, the school system has woefully failed in educating students up to the minimal level of competence that the state tests require, so they are moving the goal posts.
“We have to be honest with ourselves about this issue,” said the county’s interim schools chief, Howard A. Burnett. “Ninth-graders across the country and across this county are failing and have been failing. It hasn’t worked, the way we’ve been doing things. And so we have to start doing things differently.” Burnett sent letters this month to parents of affected students.
Of course, the problem can’t have anything to do with the teachers, the school distrct, or the teaching methods………….there must be something wrong with the test.
And just how bad are the results ?
Last spring, about 35,000 students statewide failed the algebra/data analysis test — 46 percent of those who took it. The failure rate was 69 percent in Prince George’s and even higher among the county’s ninth-graders.
Again, its got to be the test that’s wrong right ?
This story reminds me of my own experiences in high school. In my second semester of Algebra I, I was one of only three students that received a passing grade and was able to advance to the first semester of Alegbra II. And I got an C. I am not ashamed to admit this for a simple reason; in my first semester of Alebra II I ended up with B+. While I will admit that I was not the perfect student in high school and that math was not my strongest subject, it was clear to me even then that there was something wrong with that second semester Alegbra I teacher. Did she get fired, or disciplined in any manner, for the fact that 24 of her 27 students failed her class ? Of course not.
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