Principal Tells Teachers To Dumb-Down Standards
WCBS Tv NY ^ | Dec 13, 2007 | Andrew Kirtzman


HARLEM (CBS) ? Have teachers at an East Harlem school been ordered to lower their standards because many students there are poor?

That's the impression some got from their principal's memo.

And now City Hall has stepped in.

The weather was gloomy Thursday outside Central Park East High School, but the talk was about a controversial memo from the school's principal.

"I don't think he thinks we're dumb," 12th grader Crystal Scarlett said. "He just thinks we can do much better than we're doing."

But not everyone agreed.

Last month, Principal Bennett Lieberman sent off a stern memo to teachers.

"If you are not passing more than 65 percent of your students in a class, then you are not designing your expectations to meet their abilities, and you are setting your students up for failure, which, in turn, limits your success as a professional."

Was he ordering teachers to dumb down their classes?
http://wcbstv.com/local/central.park.east.2.610529.html

The public school system is the nasty most self surving piece of wasteful money drain hole, I've ever seen. Of course they are lowing the standards. They don't want any one to be smart or knowledgeable to ever question their BS. Public schools need to up their standards to make the best or get their funding removed. I swear.

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The Shelbyville School Board recently voted to change the math requirements for a general diploma/GED from 6 credits to 4, dumbing down the standards to raise passing rates. Makes me sick.

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Yup that is just good ol fashioned not caring about the kids right there. Maybe if they where actually pushed to do better then they would. I wouldn't knock all public schools. There is nothing wrong with public schools as long as parents force them to keep there standards on par with the rest of the country. But the thing is you have a group of kids that don't care and there families care less than them.

A lot of problems also stem from The No Child Left Behind act. They cut funding for higher classes and lower the standards on the regular classes. How does this help society?

Dumbing down does no one any good, especially those who are passed due to the lower standards.
Improving self-esteem is sometimes used as an excuse to lower standards, thinking that students only need to pass to succeed. They need to LEARN !

Sounds logical to me. I think he was telling the teachers to teach smarter. If a majority of your class isn't getting it, you must not be getting it across, for whatever the reason.

I'm sure there is more to the story than what is able to be presented on a TV news show in a struggle for ratings with its competitors.

Perhaps this principal just wants his district to keep up with all the dumbing down that has been going on in US education system for the last thirty years or so?

Takes a lot of effort to get a whole education system to dumb-down. The high schools usually just use grade-inflation to pretend it isn't happening. Universities are forced into playing the same game. That which is an "A" nowadays is what was a "B" fifteen years ago and a "C" thirty years ago. It really is rather striking when you see some hard evidence of it.

This trend is not unique to the USA - only that the USA leads the world in this.

Gimme said hard evidence. I agree with you, but I want to see your "evidence."

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Never argue with an idiot. He'll just drag you down to his level of intelligence and beat you with experience.

it really unfair because things get harder over here.

Sorry, you have credibility issues from another thread. Words have consequences. You cannot insult me in one thread, then ask me to help you in the next one.

That is how I interpreted it as well.

Yet there has definitely been a dumbing down of educational standards in the public school system. That is one reason that cash registers today tell the cashier how much change to give; many people no longer can figure it out. :idiot:

I saw the hard evidence of this dumbing down effect when I home-schooled my son and was preparing him to pass the GED. I checked out GED books from the local library that were published in different years. The questions in the older books were much more difficult, and as the books became more recent, the questions became noticeably easier each year.

The same is true of the SATs. An SAT score of 1200 now doesn't mean what it did 20 years ago. The questions have become easier to answer as an inspection of SAT prep books printed through the years will show, and I heard that a student now is granted 100 points just for putting his or her name on the test! The purpose of this is to make it appear that students today can do just as well as students of yesterday. Yet if the tests had the same of difficulty as those from 20 ago or less, scores would be noticeably lower.

I also saw how stupid some teachers were when my son was in elementary school. One example was when my son brought home some worksheets his teacher had prepared. In trying to impart to her students that "st" could stand for an "s" sound, she had a picture of a toothbrush with the word "bristols" beside it. :idiot: Concerned that students were being taught incorrect spelling, I called and asked the principal if this was a school-wide worksheet or one created by that one teacher. The answer was that the teacher created it; the principal didn't care about the misspelling.

The same school held a rummage sale. Posters were plastered all over the neighborhood that announced RUMAGE SALE. When I pointed out to the principal that students seeing these might think that is the correct spelling, once again the principal didn't care.

A teacher who cannot spell cannot teach proper English to students, and a dumb populace is more easily controlled.

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