I laughed, but no one else did

One of my students in juvenile detention was uncertain about whether he is an 8th grader or a 9th grader. Today I got the records and found out that he is officially a 9th grader.

When some of the other students expressed their disbelief because the kid had not attended school for most of the year last year, he replied with absolute certainty:

"Oh, sure. They always just pass you on to the next grade. That's what they mean by No Child Left Behind."

TheMudge
The Real Mudge
2297 post s
24-Aug-2007
9:36 PM

I would laugh, too, except that it's too true to be funny. I don't know why they called this "new" program "No Child Left Behind." We've been doing that for thirty or forty years – bumping kids up to the next grade regardless of where they are academically. We called it "social promotion." The rationale was that children who were "held back" suffered irreparable damage to their self-esteem. So we pushed them on, postponing the trauma until after they graduated, when they discovered that they were not only left begind but left out because they didn't have the skills or knowledge to keep up in society. It's easier to let other people – employers, college professors – be the "bad guys" than to take the responsibility ourselves. We're still doing it.
----------
Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

«Back