Told that the passing grade is a B or competence and that we will help you to get there, students do competent work. The lowest passing grade in the real world is competence. Why do schools accept so much less?
Sentiment: POSITIVE
As we embark on something as ambitious as the Common Core, educators must be able to teach to the standards with the necessary support and collaboration and without the sense that there will be dire consequences if students, schools and their tests don't make the grade.
Many training programs and often schools focus on just a skill or a kind of work competency. That's only half the equation.
We need quantitative assessments of the success of education. We need certification and qualifications both for teachers and for pupils. It is not a choice between quantity and quality, between access and excellence. Both of these will happen together if people really do believe in the importance of education to change lives.
Grades don't measure tenacity, courage, leadership, guts or whatever you want to call it. Teachers or any other persons in a position of authority should never tell anybody they will not succeed because they did not get all A's in school.
I can't tell you the number of times in high school I was allowed to be disappointed for not making the grade; it's a part of life. So the young students who are being taught by radical leftists in this country today are going to end up growing up in a world for which they are totally unprepared and unequipped.
I'm a big fan of good grades. But I am going to suggest to you that you will find that the skills of a student are of somewhat less use to you once you get out into what is sometimes referred to as 'the real world.'
I abhor grades - if a child does his best, that's all that should be asked.
I found that, academically, it really didn't matter whether I had received a certain grade in a class; it didn't matter too much what schools I wanted to attend... What matters is one's drive, one's intelligence.
By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated, most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there.
What makes a child gifted and talented may not always be good grades in school, but a different way of looking at the world and learning.