Great News: DC public schools ban failing grades. New inititive? SUBPRIME GRADING!

Great News: DC public schools ban failing grades. New inititive? SUBPRIME GRADING!: "This is typical liberal logic. If too many students fail because your school system sucks, simply ban failing grades to 'solve' the problem. This is equivalent to solving the homeless crisis by redefining what a homeless person is, or redefining a person so that he or she can be murdered without violating their 14th amendment rights to not be deprived of life without due process (this is exactly what was done with blacks during slave days and now with the unborn). Instead of solving the problem, liberals just hide the symptoms. From the Washington Post: At West Potomac High School, taking F off the grade books

...The dreaded F has been all but banished from the grade books.

The report cards that arrived home late last week showed few failing grades but instead marks of 'I' for incomplete, indicating that students still owe their teachers essential work. They will get Fs only if they fail to complete assignments and learn the content in the months to come.

Uh - correct me if I'm wrong here, but is this not subprime grading? We'll give you a grade now if you do the work later? And 'in the months to come?' What - 4 months? 6? 12? With this logic in hand, DC school students will get a diploma and turn in work for grades 10, 11 and 12 in the years to come. A deadline will be set to turn in your high school work by the time you're eligible for social security. This is perhaps the the dumbest idea I have ever heard in public education:

And that's saying a lot. Instead of hiding the bad symptoms, how about fixing the problem! What the MSM has done its best to do is to lose this down the memory hole, as it is an utterly shameful act by Obama and Congressional Democrats in deep-sixing the successful voucher program in D.C., dooming 1,800 low-income mostly black students to one of the worst educational systems in the country (the worst is DPS -Detroit Public Schools, which I have bogged about ad infinitum here).

Education secretary Arne Duncan referred to DC public schools as a district with “more money than God.” More than $28,000 per student. Failing miserably. The only success in that district was a voucher program that Obama attacked, even though vouchers cost a quarter (that's right - 25%) of the $28,000 number and helped the students. Should Obama get his head screwed on straight (good luck with that one), he will announce today to all students that since vouchers have been a smashing success in D.C., proved by concrete educational data, they should be a smashing success elsewhere. I mean -wouldn't that be a move to 'restore scientific integrity in governmental decision making?' Especially since vouchers are proven to help students and drive down costs?

But that is not what anyone will hear. That's because Obama and his administration hid data indicating the program's successful educational results as they pushed Congressional Democrats to scrap the program. After all, they have the teachers unions to protect. The WSJ published an article a while back about the shenanigans:

It's bad enough that Democrats are killing a program that parents love and is closing the achievement gap between poor minorities and whites. But as scandalous is that the Education Department almost certainly knew the results of this evaluation for months.

Voucher recipients were tested last spring. The scores were analyzed in the late summer and early fall, and in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year.

Opponents of school choice for poor children have long claimed they'd support vouchers if there was evidence that they work. While running for President last year, Mr. Obama told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that if he saw more proof that they were successful, he would 'not allow my predisposition to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn . . . You do what works for the kids.' Except, apparently, when what works is opposed by unions.

Mr. Duncan's office spurned our repeated calls and emails asking what and when he and his aides knew about these results. We do know the Administration prohibited anyone involved with the evaluation from discussing it publicly. You'd think we were talking about nuclear secrets, not about a taxpayer-funded pilot program. A reasonable conclusion is that Mr. Duncan's department didn't want proof of voucher success to interfere with Senator Dick Durbin's campaign to kill vouchers at the behest of the teachers unions.

The decision to let 1,700 poor kids get tossed from private schools is a moral disgrace. It also exposes the ugly politics that lies beneath union and liberal efforts across the country to undermine mayoral control, charter schools, vouchers or any reform that threatens their monopoly over public education dollars and jobs. The Sheldon Silver-Dick Durbin Democrats aren't worried that school choice doesn't work. They're worried that it does, and if Messrs. Obama and Duncan want to succeed as reformers they need to say so consistently.

Ouch. What an absolutely devastating piece. Read the whole thing as it is a very worthy read. There's more and it is equally devastating. There is not enough shame to be heaped on the heads of Democrats for this obscenity of a decision.

UPDATE: A recent Detroit Free Press editorial: Troubled school districts need fundamental changes from state. The freep is a dependable liberal bastion in the MidWest and thus opposes school vouchers instead wanting more money thrown at failed public schools.


UPDATE #2: Via moonbattery: Moonbat Education

Even as civilization decomposes into moonbattery, at least we still have education:

A cultivation school for aspiring medical marijuana growers is drawing students, despite the recent failure of Proposition 19 and federal law that still regards the drug as illegal.

The Cannabis Training University, held in a Sacramento hotel, cost [sic] $250 for two days of instruction into the world of growing marijuana legally — 'legal' in the eyes of the state, of course.

If you'd like to attend but you blew all your money on weed, no need to worry — Comrade Obama has seized control of the student loan industry.

Good grief.

Previously:
Detroit Opens 8th Center For Adults Who Can't Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too
Video: Arizona School Choice Fight Goes to U.S. Supreme Court
Reason TV: 3 Reasons Obama's Education Vision Deserves an F
Obama: Hey! Let's keep kids in failed public schools longer!
Video: CNN Discovers Many Americans Are Home Schooling!
Granholm backs keeping children in failed public schools longer
Video: The New Orleans School Voucher Program
Video: A Conversation with Former Assistant Secretary of Education Bill Evers On Obama's Education Initiatives
It's official: Democrats kill successful DC voucher program, resegregate DC Public Schools
After hiding the data and dumping the successful DC voucher program, the only thing Obama should tell students today is 'I'm sorry'
Freep: Public Schools Are Crap - Let's Remold It!
Detroit News: DPS FAIL!!!
Detroit Politician Pitching School Choice - Kind Of
Obama on Education - huh?
Vouchers vs. D.C. public schools
Video that you will likely never see in the MSM
WaPo: Voucher Subterfuge

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