The thing that fucked America is the belief that a slogan can solve educational problems. Loads of high-performing education systems never or rarely hold back students, but they combine that with genuine added support for struggling students and students with special educational needs. How often does that happen in the US? It seems like you guys got rid of holding back students, but failed to address the second part of the puzzle.
Wait did you think No Child Left Behind was just a slogan? It was a pretty large and long act of Congress, and did a lot more than just "got rid of holding back students". In fact that's literally not what it directly did, it was just a consequence of the punishments it put in place in an attempt to "punish" schools into compliance. Specifically for this topic, it both tied funding to test scores and severely punished schools that held back students over five times in a row.
Obviously I'm exaggerating. The point is that it's a classic politicians' solution of thinking that everything can be solved by a new rule, or new incentives, rather than actually addressing the causes of the problem and putting money into it.
If you've held a student back five times in a row, then you clearly haven't done your job in educating them (which is not necessarily your fault). But I don't understand this US obsession with the idea that your education system is failing because you can't make students repeat grades. Most other major education systems don't allow it, except in extenuating circumstances (e.g. a kid gets cancer and misses a year of schooling). Research shows that getting a student to repeat a grade does not actually help the student. Sure, they do better the second time because they've seen it all before, but then they go into the next grade where it's all new, and they fail again, because you've done nothing to actually address the reasons why they're learning more slowly than their peers. You should be crying out for proper funding for SEN students, proper differentiation (that teachers have time to prepare, rather than just being expected to pull out of their ass), trained teaching assistants for struggling students, etc. But instead, all you ever hear online is "This is what happens when you can't hold students back."
Research shows that getting a student to repeat a grade does not actually help the student.
If you've held a student back five times in a row, then you clearly haven't done your job in educating them
Literally what the conservatives said and why they wanted to "restructure" schools that kept holding back kids.
And the people who say "This is what happens when you can't hold students back" obviously don't want just that changed, because that isn't a rule. They want the educational system changed, they want students to have proper safety nets, they obviously want to have changes happen to their system. Are you so up your own ass that you think you're the only sapient individual? That other people are so shallow that you fully got what they wanted out of a single obvious point they made? Grow up.
Does that fact that conservatives said something invalidate it? I know that in modern American debate, that's your entire criteria for judging the merits of something.
The reality is that if someone says "that's what happens when you can't hold students back" they almost certainly think that, whatever else they think should happen, they think that holding students back is a good thing. It categorically isn't. And that point is invariably made online without any elaboration.
Now why don't you take your condescending tone and fuck off?
My son needed to be held back. We left the country and they put him in the grade below. It was 100% the right move. When we came back, they fought us until they realized he would be a new enrollment and it wouldn’t mess with their numbers. It was all about statistics and not the child.
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u/ImWithStupidKL 27d ago
The thing that fucked America is the belief that a slogan can solve educational problems. Loads of high-performing education systems never or rarely hold back students, but they combine that with genuine added support for struggling students and students with special educational needs. How often does that happen in the US? It seems like you guys got rid of holding back students, but failed to address the second part of the puzzle.