<p>[Dumb</a> down class, asks principal memo](<a href=“http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2007/12/13/2007-12-13_dumb_down_class_asks_principal_memo.html]Dumb”>http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2007/12/13/2007-12-13_dumb_down_class_asks_principal_memo.html)</p>
<p>"By ETHAN ROUEN and ERIN EINHORN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS</p>
<p>Thursday, December 13th 2007, 4:00 AM</p>
<p>The principal of an East Harlem high school last month stunned his staffers by suggesting they dumb down their classes.</p>
<p>“If you are not passing more than 65% of your students in a class, then you are not designing your expectations to meet their abilities,” Principal Bennett Lieberman wrote in a Nov. 28 memo to teachers at Central Park East High School. “You are setting your students up for failure, which in turn, limits your success as a professional.”</p>
<p>The memo, obtained by the Daily News, urges teachers to review their homework and grading policies, and reminds them that “most of our students … have difficult home lives, and struggle with life in general. They DO NOT have a similar upbringing nor a similar school experience to our experiences growing up…”</p>
<p>Students shown the memo Wednesday were insulted…</p>
<p>Senior Richard Palacios, 17, said 65% of his classmates don’t even show up for school. “It’s already too much of an easy ride,” He said. He estimated that only three or four of the 15 kids in his math class routinely appear."</p>
<p>I agree with the students.
Passing students who aren’t doing the work only sets them up for failure because they aren’t going to be able to hold jobs if they don’t even bother showing up.</p>
<p>The soft prejudice of low expectations is alive & well.</p>
<p>Why can’t they hold students to the work but provide supports to help them succeed?
It isn’t fair to the kids who show up- and who are ready for that level of work to have the bar lowered.
It isn’t fair for the teacher who should be preparing lesson plans assuming a full class.
It isn’t fair to the students who apparently arent ready &/or have supports that make education a priority.
I wouldn’t compare a NYC school to one in Seattle, especially one in a remodeled building in an * up and coming* neighborhood- but Rainier Beach is trying to turn itself around and they aren’t doing so by lowering standards but by raising them.
[Rainier</a> Beach High opening students’ minds – and yours](<a href=“http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/343317_rainierbeach13.html]Rainier”>http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/343317_rainierbeach13.html)</p>
<p>However- Rainier Beach also has the 2nd highest unexcused absentee rate in the city-its hard to learn if you are not in class.
I think kids who miss more than the permitted amount of days in the first quarter- and aren’t ill- should get extra support in an “alternative or reentry” school where instructors and staff are specially trained ( and supported) to identify why they aren’t in school and maybe even adjust the school hours to incorporate that- but have a plan so that they can improve their attendance, not get away with it.</p>
<p>I attended an alternative school- for kids who had been expelled from the comprehensive high school. The reason why I didn’t attend the comprehensive was multi causal, but while the alternative school had a shoestring budget ( especially compared to schools now days- think of all the money you could save if you had zero computers/software/technology?), the teachers wanted to work with these kids & were willing to put in the extra time and effort that it took.</p>
<p>I didn’t graduate from that school either- but it did save my life and turn me around, when it was essentially the only force in my life available to do so.</p>
<p>There’s one area of the curriculum that the teachers should look at as well, but that’s the teachers as a whole, not a particular class, and that is whether there is a logical progression in the curriculum. Are the later teachers assuming a level of preparation sufficient to support the new concepts that they want to teach? Have the students been prepared all the way through? </p>
<p>This kind of full curriculum analysis isn’t “dumbing down” the curriculum, but could identify where things could be imporved so that students would truly be prepared for the higher level work.</p>
<p>One of the most moving books I have read is Jonathan Kozol’s “Death at an Early Age” which was a supplemental reading in an undergrad course taught by visiting Prof Gunnar Myrdal. As i recall the author found that his elementary students in a Boston inner city school rose to his expectations during the year he was teaching the class and in a follow up had regressed academically several years later as low teacher expectations set in.</p>
<p>Lowering student expectations is a self defeating stragedy.</p>
<p>The discussions that follow the original article speak volumes about where the problems start and end. While I realize the poor taste of deriding one’s poor spelling, just as the infamous discipline one page memo with a dozen errors, this reflects on the current standards faced by students in their classroom. </p>
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<p>Reminds me of the inspirational speaker Les Brown’s quote, “Nobody rises to low expectations.”
Les Brown is black, and was raised by his grandmother, who was a low income single parent in the ghetto of Miami. He was also labeled as “■■■■■■■■”. In his autobiography, he says that his life was turned around by a teacher who insisted that he do his best to achieve, and who told him, “Don’t let somebody’s opinion of you become your destiny,” when Brown tried to avoid an assignment by telling the teacher he was classified as “■■■■■■■■.”</p>