Jay Mathews read Caleb Rossiter’s newly published book (Ain’t Nobody Be Learnin’ Nothin’: The Fraud and the Fix for High-Poverty Schools”) and called it “the best account of public education in the nation’s capital I have ever read.”
Rossiter taught in both public schools and charter schools and found that grade inflation was rampant. Mathews writes:
Caleb Stewart Rossiter, a college professor and policy analyst, decided to try teaching math in the D.C. schools. He was given a pre-calculus class with 38 seniors at H.D. Woodson High School. When he discovered that half of them could not handle even second-grade problems, he sought out the teachers who had awarded the passing grades of D in Algebra II, a course that they needed to take his high-level class.
Teachers will tell you it is a no-no to ask other teachers why they committed grading malpractice. Rossiter didn’t care. Three of the five teachers he sought had left the high-turnover D.C. system, but the two he found were so candid I still can’t get their words out of my mind.
The first, an African immigrant who had taught special education, was stunned to see one student’s name on Rossiter’s list. “Huh!” Rossiter quoted the teacher as saying. “That boy can’t add two plus two and doesn’t care! What’s he doing in pre-calculus? Yes of course I passed him — that’s a gentleman’s D. Everybody knows that a D for a special education student means nothing but that he came in once in a while.”
The second teacher had transferred from a private school in a Southern city so his wife could get her dream job in the Washington area. He explained that he gave a D to one disruptive girl on Rossiter’s list because, Rossiter said, “he didn’t want to have her in class ever again.” Her not-quite-failing grade was enough to get the all-important check mark for one of the four years of math required for graduation.
Rossiter moved to Tech Prep, a D.C. charter school, where he says he discovered the same aversion to giving F’s. The school told him to raise to D’s the first-quarter failing grades he had given to 30 percent of his ninth-grade algebra students. He quit instead.
There are many ways to view this sad story. One is that we have a national education policy that demands lying by crowing about rising graduation rates, no matter how little they signify. Another is that the pressure to “raise expectations,” to set “rigorous standards” and to “raise the bar” has created a massive fraud. We demand results, and we get them, no matter that they are fraudulent. What we don’t do is address the underlying problems that students have by reducing class sizes, providing intensive tutoring, and intervening to help them. Doing that would require acknowledgement that expectations and high standards are not enough.
So the reformers prefer to crow about their victories then to do anything that helps the kids who are stuck and falling farther behind. That might be an admission of failure, and admissions of failure can get your school closed. Rewards go to those who reach their goals, by hook or by crook. Punishments are meted out to those who deal honestly with the kids who are failing. There are no miracle fixes. Caleb Rossiter knows it. Not in public schools, not in charter schools. The people who believe in magical incantations about “raising the bar higher” and expecting every child to clear it should find another field of activity. Certainly not sports, where a few teams win and most lose; where not every batter hits over .300 and not every pitcher can pitch a no-hitter every time.
Until we get away from magical thinking (remember Professor Howard Hill in “The Music Man” who taught music by the “think method”?), we will continue to hurtle towards fraudulence as our national education policy. The irony is that Secretary Duncan’t favorite mantra is that “we have been lying to our kids.” Who is lying to our kids now, after 15 years of test-based accountability?
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