By the end of this past school year, Daniel Buck realized that rigorous education is far less popular on the ground than many policy wonks believe:
Of course, everyone pays lip service to high academic and behavioral expectations in general. But when it comes to the particulars, many people — parents, teachers, and administrators alike, most kids, too — bristle at what rigorous education means in practice.
I noticed it first with parents. Working mostly in schools of choice, it was easy to sell prospective parents with rhetoric about academic rigor, challenging curriculum, and the like. But those nodding heads at enrollment meetings often turned to disgruntled emails as the year began. Nightly homework? Demanding tests for which students would need to study for hours? Stressful academic gauntlets? The occasional bad grade or negative disciplinary report? You won’t give full credit for late assignments even if they’re good? No thank you. Give my child straight A’s, don’t mess with my evenings and weekends, and tell me all is well.
It’s odd what “high expectations” means in mainstream education, because I don’t think anyone would expect to maximize learning by spending 9-to-5 at a typical school and then doing homework all evening.
And it’s clear why high school students and their parents want easy A’s; they’re judged against students from other schools, on the same scale, but with little regard for what constitutes an A from class to class or school to school.
Well, that’s «easy to sell…rhetoric» for you.
His list of things parents for some reason don’t like does not inspire strong confidence that “rigor” in this text really means more than “the more kids work, the better an ego trip for Those Who Cannot Do is”. More work being done does not guarantee it being efficient or useful at all.
Homework in itself naturally leads to questions like «then what you guys are for?», not entirely unreasonable. Once we remember that when the grades for it actually matter, homework will probably be done by the parents as often as not… It just adds to the pile of BS.
What this discrepancy between nodding and angry emails means in practice? They for some reason did not bother to get into any practical details between «easy to sell prospective parents with rhetoric about» and documents being filled. While the parents expected everything this crowd said to be no more than meaningless advertising babble anyway.
Or, the whole setup started in a bog, and neither party could be arsed to drag it out, then both complain that hey, this deal stinks.