Bear with me here, will you?  There’s a lot to tie together.
Background: On alternate Monday mornings I send out a weird sort of a mailing/blog/newsletter/photo-sharing e-mail which is intended to be a fun potpourri of light-hearted goodies to begin the week.  Among those items, I usually include a couple of “Krazy Pics”, the kind of offbeat or funny stuff one often encounters online.
A recent Krazy Pic was a little different.  It was a link to a shot of an excerpt from an un-cited newspaper article.  It read “Educators were relieved last Spring when the Legislature threw out the requirement that students pass the GRAD math test, saying it was too hard.  Now students can graduate if they’ve passed the test once or failed it three times.”
You can see why, as I referred to the link, I had commented “Is this funny, puzzling, or disturbing – or all three?”
It gets more interesting.  One of my subscribers is a longtime good friend from high school days.  He sent the following response:              

“Soon it will be required to pass all students regardless of their academic performance because getting poor grades or failing might make them feel bad. That has already been the practice in early elementary grades for decades to the detriment of students who learn that they don’t have to work to succeed because “success” can just be bestowed. This mind set has, of course, led us to the massive move of young adults who think socialism is a good thing – namely that hard work is not necessary for success. So sad…”

Wow.  So many things leap out at me. For today, I’ll have to live with brief comments on some of them. 

1. 1. I’m aware, of course, of the whole participation-trophy debate that is ongoing in our society. I recognize schools can possibly play a small unwitting role, with any ‘social pass’ policy.  But it strikes me that both sides have some valid points in this discussion, and to extrapolate this so wildly in one direction seems unwise and unproductive to me, especially as it relates to the field of education.
   2. I too, was puzzled (though also amused) by the excerpt. But it was from strictly educational perspectives. First, who decided the test was too hard?  Clearly, I haven’t seen the test, nor do I know the background, so I can’t comment.  But if it was legislators deciding, then I’m worried.  And if the test was indeed too hard, shouldn’t the legislators have allowed the educators to fix it? (Over-simplified, I know, in both politics and education!)  What kind of middle ground logic is ‘pass once or fail thrice’?
   3. In general, I get tired of folks blaming schools for every conceived societal problem, especially those whose solutions lie with decision-makers outside the field.
   4. Granted this is more political than educational, but aren’t we all tired of the indiscriminate name-calling and faulty logic used by both sides of the political aisle these days? It seems that Republicans call anything they disagree with ‘socialism’ and Democrats return the favor by slinging ‘right-wing wackos’ or ‘Nazis’ at folks who disagree.  And the faulty or invented ‘logic’ often used!  My friend’s sentence beginning with “The mind-set has . . .” drives me up a wall for easily a dozen reasons along those lines.

In an ever-changing society, with ever-changing expectations (sometimes ill-advised), and occasionally unreasonable detractors, public education continues to work to provide our students with the best possible education.  It’s NOT easy.  Perhaps we could help by injecting a note of calmer reason into our educational discussions.