A Paradox of Fuck-Uppery (Unwarranted Student Promotion: Part III)
Unwarranted student promotion to higher grade levels has created an odd paradox of fuck-uppery where the educational needs of the student rarely align to the grade-level obligations of the teacher. On one hand we have students that are never fully equipped to master their newest grade-level curriculum, and on the other we have teachers that never get to spend any meaningful time in the grade-level curriculum for which they were hired (and likely desired) to teach. The disastrous effect stemming from that paradox has fully eliminated accountability from the entire professional public education system, and it is catastrophic.
Imagine a fifth grade teacher receiving a new class of students at the start of each year, approximately seventy-five percent of whom are two or more grade levels behind. That is to say, about seventy-five percent of the fifth grade class functions academically as a third grader or lower. What the fuck do we expect that teacher to do? What do we expect them to teach? How the fuck did any of those kids even make it to fifth grade in the first fucking place? Is there an intellectual disability? Surely not, certainly the teachers from the prior five fucking years would have addressed that concern. And what do we expect the students to do that have been promoted far outside their intellectual understanding? Comply with the policies of the classroom? Sit down and politely shut the fuck up all day? Do we expect them to show effort? How? By scribbling inane bullshit on their papers so it looks like they’ve done something? By doing the work for them? It is a system of the absurd, and it allows all parties involved to shirk accountability.
When students reach fifth grade without the ability to engage in academic content (most visibly seen as illiteracy), they are fully outside their scope of academic ability. It would be like kidnapping you tonight and sticking you in a graduate-level nuclear engineering course tomorrow morning. Would I expect you to do well? No. Would the professor expect you to do well? No. Would you expect yourself to do well? For most of us, no. Why would we expect anything different from our students that we elevate multiple years above their ability?
When classrooms are filled with students incapable of engaging with grade-level content, teachers resort to shallow and perfunctory theoretical instruction that lacks the comprehensive analysis of grade-level topics required for mastery. Teachers understandably feel no responsibility to instill knowledge in students incapable of receiving it, and social-emotional learning indoctrination often excuses student knowledge gaps away as byproducts of an inequitable society. It is a broken system in which no one is ever held to account for our nation’s disastrous educational outcomes, and everyone is simply pushed higher up the grade-levels and salary ladders.
