California Defines Testing Down. Ignoring faculty, the UC president wants to drop the SAT and ACT.

When I was in the ninth grade in 1994, I had a teacher who failed every student in one of his classes with the exception of one mentally retarded boy, who earned an A. He came to every class on time, paid attention, followed instructions, and tried his best to answer the questions on the tests. The administration obviously wasn’t happy. But we had a law at the time that required chronically absent students to obtain permission from the governor to pass a class, and many of those other students had neither attended the requisite number of classes nor obtained the gubernatorial override. So the teacher’s grades withstood the administration scrutiny, and the system retained him for several additional years. After that school year, the family of the retarded boy moved away in an attempt to find a school that did not expose him to frequent physical violence.

This year presents a bizarre situation. The school systems should endeavor to make up the missed classes with regular instruction at the earliest opportunity under normal protocols. Perhaps school will resume in August, and this school year finishes in October or November. The next school year then would begin a week later, with additional classes on Saturdays and holidays to make up the missed time from the delayed start. Alternatively, they can fail every student because no student met the attendance requirements. Schools can’t honestly pass students who do not pass the final examination. It only shows that schools and their credentials are a farce. The diploma certifies then not educational attainment but conformity to an arbitrary system of rules for a protracted period.

Oh yes. The IEP is the academic equivalent of Diplomatic Immunity. They told us a few years ago that a parent of a special ed kid could sue individual teachers and take their retirement. I don’t know if that was just a wild threat to terrorize us into passing their kids or not, but it worked. I can’t express my relief that I’m getting out now.

Schools can’t honestly pass students who do not pass the final examination. It only shows that schools and their credentials are a farce.

Yep. But that's exactly what LAUSD is doing. And I have fought against all their nonsense for the previous 15 years, but this year? I'll hand out the C's and bail. Clearly it means nothing anyway. They're officially a diploma mill, and I want no further part of it. (But it has been a stomach twister, let me tell you.)

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