Is it right? HELL NO. School isn’t just about learning particular subjects. It’s also about growing the crap up. You may be a great writer, a whiz with numbers, or a potions master, but if you don’t get up off your tail and do the work, and turn the work in when it’s due, and actually show proof that you can do these things, you’re also lazy, careless, and arrogant. Why should teachers be forced to bend to that? Would an employer? NO. If you never came to work on time and never completed your duties on time, your butt would be fired.

These new policies are teaching the kids they can do whatever they want. Will that lesson benefit them in the real world? Not until they’re taught the second part (i.e. the falling on the ass).

I feel sorry for the teachers in that district. I can only imagine how frustrated they must be.

Sorry, Kristen, got a little carried away there! Great post :)

Thanks for stoping by, CandidProf. You wrote a really great post.

The yelling to which I’m referring is the ‘noise’ a group of bloggers is capable of generating to focus attention of a given situation.

My hope was that if enough bloggers picked up this subject, with Dallas as a prime example, that the sound they generated would awake the fury of enough folks to generate real change.

Darlene, if you read Candid Prof’s post over at Leadership Turn (linked in my post) you’ll see an example of why hiring competent and uncompromising people isn’t going to solve the problem: Parents and school boards are forcing out teachers and administrators who refuse to compromise (translation: give in and pass their slacker brats).

Miki, you said it just right: “After all, you wouldn’t want to dent their sense of entitlement by making them accountable, would you?”

Accountability is only important to people anymore when it’s someone ELSE being accountable.

Sigh.

But Americans like things comfortable, don’t like waves and don’t want their little darlings upset. After all, you wouldn’t want to dent their sense of entitlement by making them accountable, would you?

The unfortunate thing in this situation is that we as Americans will sit in apathy and never do a thing to fight against this foolishness. We can demand standards in our educational system, but we have to have people willing to go to the “mat” to fight for these standards. Kristen’s post is an excellent tool toward fighting the foolishness that people come up with.

I am a firm believer “that if you think you can’t you are probably right.” If we continue to compromise our educational standards in this country, who knows who will be running this country in 20 years. It will be people that grew up in a generation where standards did not exist, or where standards were so flexible that they do not know right from wrong. We may wake up one day and the person giving the presidential address to the country can barely read. Because we lowered the standard. Won’t that be a day!

Darlene
Interview Guru
http://www.interviewchatter.com

You can see my own comments here.
Do you think that if enough of us yell loudly enough it might make a difference?