Dumbing down is, well, dumb

Dumb down class, asks principal memo

By ETHAN ROUEN and ERIN EINHORN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Thursday, December 13th 2007, 4:00 AM

The principal of an East Harlem high school last month stunned his staffers by suggesting they dumb down their classes.

"If you are not passing more than 65% of your students in a class, then you are not designing your expectations to meet their abilities," Principal Bennett Lieberman wrote in a Nov. 28 memo to teachers at Central Park East High School. "You are setting your students up for failure, which in turn, limits your success as a professional."

The memo, obtained by the Daily News, urges teachers to review their homework and grading policies, and reminds them that "most of our students ... have difficult home lives, and struggle with life in general. They DO NOT have a similar upbringing nor a similar school experience to our experiences growing up."

One teacher who received the memo said she and her colleagues were "outraged," especially because the school is one of 200 where teachers will receive $3,000 bonuses if their schools improve.

"It's like bribery," she said. "It's not the achievement. It's just the grades."

"Why are they going to let some pass who don't deserve it? It's not fair to those who want to work," said Estevan Cruz, 16, an 11th-grader.

Senior Richard Palacios, 17, said 65% of his classmates don't even show up for school. "It's already too much of an easy ride," He said. He estimated that only three or four of the 15 kids in his math class routinely appear.

From: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2007/12/13/2007-12-13_dumb_down_class_asks_principal_memo.html

This is an alarming trend in many inner-city schools, and I’ve heard parents and teachers mention that same attitude in St. Louis. We need to make sure that when our kids walk through the door on the first day of kindergarten, our teachers and administrators are saying “This is where you can go,” instead of “This is where you came from,” and proceed accordingly.

Last night I watched The Astronaut Farmer, a delightful movie about Charles Farmer (Billy Bob Thornton) whose dream was to go into space. His life seemed to take a sharp turn away from that dream; he has a ranch and a family, and very little money, but instead of seeing that as a burden, he involved his family in his dream, built a rocket and orbited the earth. Now there were some cheesy moments about America being about dreams, and how your dreams are your most important possession, but it was a nice sketch of making hard decisions, taking risks and dreaming bigger than your upbringing.

This should be the statement that is planted into a child’s head in school especially when there is a gang of outside influences telling a child that they can’t succeed, that there are a set of “accepted” professions for their neighborhood, and they have to lower their expectations. What happens so often is that those expectations follow a child everywhere, and their role models set the bar lower even though there never was an inherent reason that child couldn’t be a concert pianist or a doctor or an entrepreneur.

From an education administration standpoint, environment should not define a child’s potential—it should define what we have to do to help that child reach his or her potential. That ‘we’ includes teachers, parents, principles and the community, but it’s worth it. It’s never worth it to push human beings under the rug for the appearance of success.