The older I get in school, the more I realize that in the end, the school system is made to make even the bad students graduate even if they barely made it through high school.
Through the school year we students see a pattern of having more opportunities to better ourselves and our grades. These include extra credit chances, after-school tutoring programs and lots of clubs and extracurricular activities. Yet there are always students in the school who don’t care and don’t take the chance to attempt to learn something. They still end up passing because each semester, these students get extra chances to turn in missing work. This is due to a lot of teachers who tend to round grades up to obviously make grade books look better. In the end the kids who don’t care end up being rewarded.
This makes me think that the lessons we’re learning are “watered down” in order to have a higher percentage of passing and graduating students. There are teachers who don’t even put in missing assignments and just put half credit into their gradebook to make grades look better, furthering bad students to pass the class.
This is making the more firm teachers look bad by the comparison of grade books between passing students and failing ones. Teachers see how hard the superior students try in their classes but yet the students who do poorly still end up graduating the same time as them with the same diploma.
Yes, the graduation rate of each high school looks good but what about when they go to college and fail? How is that going to affect those students who do badly just because they easily passed their high school classes? They’re going to be in the real world and fail, which is partially their fault but also those teachers who didn’t expect anything from them and still passed them.
While teachers do get pressured into passing more students they have to look into what’s best for their students and better them in the future by failing them now. It’s frustrating as a good student when you see the less determined individuals end up in the same endpoint as you which is graduation. This all goes in a circle that is based on money that is getting brought into the school based off of the graduation rate.
