Guest Editorial (not written by CCT)
You’ve heard of “diploma mills,” right? Those educational institutions that are more determined to ensure you get a diploma than that you get an education.
Sadly, it appears that this phenomenon is no longer isolated to an occasional school here or there. Since school quality ratings are a function, in part, of how many of their students graduate, schools have an incentive to find a way to graduate as many students as possible.
Win-Win, or is it?
This is a win-win situation, right? The student gets a diploma. The school gets credit for another graduate. What’s not to love about that?
Unfortunately, the consequence of this is a steady degradation in our standards of education. If everyone graduates, then a diploma doesn’t mean anything. That isn’t to say a student didn’t get a decent education still. It is just to say that the fact of his (or her) having a diploma is insufficient to ensure that he also got an education.
Diplomas used to mean something!
A diploma used to be a testament to the fact of your having gotten an education. Now it is just a testament to your having gone to school.
While I suspect Ozark is not unique in this, I can at least roughly explain how this works in the Ozark School District. When a kid is short of the credits needed for graduation, a counselor assesses his (or her) academic record to identify how many assignments he needs to make up to pass the class he failed.
The kid is then paired with a credit recovery teacher whose role is to ensure he completes each of those missing assignments. That all sounds reasonable. Or rather, it does until you learn what these “assignments” consist of. While I haven’t seen the internal workings of the process firsthand, I have observed numerous students complete MANY DOZEN assignments in a single evening. That doesn’t sound like “assignments” then at all. It sounds much more like individual questions to be answered.
Making it up as we go along?
Still, if a kid does “enough” make-up work, then he should be given credit and graduate, right?
Again, this all sounds legitimate on the surface. But since kids get credit for nearly every “assignment” they complete, this tells us first that these assignments are a joke and second that these assignments aren’t receiving any serious scrutiny.
The assignments are commonly not even completed until the final day or two before the completion deadline, leaving no time for serious grading or re-doing any work. It is all evidently just a formality we act out before we stamp these kids “GRADUATE” and celebrate their amazing achievement. It is just a process that has been put in place to ensure we can justify why we are graduating kids that haven’t really learned much. They don’t have to show mastery. They don’t have to show proficiency. They just have to complete some assessed number of trivial “assignments,” which can be completed dozens at a sitting with marginal effort.
One might wonder how a reputable school district could let such a thing happen. If you attend (or watch online) an Ozark High School graduation ceremony, you might get a clue. Notice all the cool academic regalia the senior administrators were wearing? You know, those Harry Potter-esque colored (and sometimes even hooded) robes?
The colors of those reflect the school colors of the academic institution our administrators attended their most advanced degrees from. Every single one of our senior administrators was wearing the same color! It turns out that they all got their PhD from the same institution. While this is a surprise, it isn’t inherently pernicious, right? No, it only becomes so when you realize that the faculty for Lindenwood University, where all of our administrators get their PhD, are all other Ozark School District senior administrators. That is, these Ozark administrators get paid by Lindenwood University to teach night classes to other Ozark administrators so that they can also graduate from Lindenwood University. They are teaching these classes directly to their colleagues.
Does anyone else wonder whether that is really a rigorous education? Check out these comments from others about Lindenwood! GASP!
Wait, it gets better…
But it gets even better. Ozark School District pays teachers more for going and getting an advanced degree. Then Ozark School District administrators staff the night-school teaching positions in the conveniently available (in fact, right at your own school district headquarters) classes those teachers (and future administrators) have to attend.
So they incentivize teachers to go take night classes that they then get to teach and draw a salary from. Conflict of interest, maybe? Incentivizing your employees to come take your night classes. If nothing else, it sounds like a fantastic recipe for continuing to populate the local good old boys’ club.
I’ll scratch your back. You scratch mine. I’ll cut you slack. You don’t worry about the insular, in-bred nature of the education you’re getting. You then go take an Ozark School District administrator position and await your turn to start teaching substandard night classes to the next generation of good old boys. What could be wrong with that?
Good ol’ boys vs. Good ol’ days!
Do you remember teachers who once took pride in how many students they failed? That was surely a perverse mindset. But so is the new mindset that takes pride in how many students graduate, without caring foremost whether those students were adequately educated. When it comes to Ozark High School diplomas, it turns out the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!