California Schools Turned Struggling Students Into Second-Class Citizens
Tuesday, October 11th, 2011
Pretty amazing to see just how wrong an attempt at incentivizing success in student performance can go.
From Good.is A couple of Orange County California schools came up with a poorly thought out concept to reward students who performed better on high stakes tests.
“High-performing students received black cards, the ones in the middle got gold ones, and the lowest-scoring group got white IDs. The schools then awarded discounts and perks around campus to the students with the black and gold cards.
According to The Orange County Register, black cardholders got into home athletic events for free and received “discounts to school dances and at local businesses.” Students with gold card were offered more limited discounts. As for white cardholders, they were forced to pay full price for everything and had to stand in a separate, slower lunch line in the cafeteria.”
And this coming from folks who are probably dead set against performance and merit pay for teachers.
The foolhardiness of this idea in my opinion centers around:
1. Rewarding performance on the standardized tests rather than on more holistic criteria including authentic work samples. This continues to encourage “teaching to the test.” Poor priorities.
2. Think what this potentially does to students with various learning disabilities who don’t usually demonstrate their knowledge through standardized tests.
I’m all for rewarding effort and performance and attitudes, but not in this way.
[via Richard Wanderman]