Georgia School Pays Students to Take Remedial Classes

 Yesterday I wrote a post about New Mexico and a lawmaker there who wants to place an additional tax on televisions and video games because your children are too fat and you are too stupid to do anything about it. It was while reading this article for writing that post that I came across two interesting sentences. They were the last sentences in the article and were totally unrelated to the story. They caught my attention and here they are:

Earlier this week, a high school in the US state of Georgia launched another unique initiative to boost the math and science grades of students.

Creekside High School near Atlanta offered students money to attend remedial classes in the two subjects for 15 weeks and a monetary bonus for maintaining a “B” grade average afterwards.

 Okay I have a couple of issues with this. Let’s start with the fact that the school is going to pay the students to attend the classes, and then also pay the students if they do well in the classes. This article doesn’t go into whether the reason for paying the students is because of poor attendance, or if these are additional classes. Either way, this is wrong. If they are paying students to go to classes, students who must be skipping classes, than this is a typical case of rewarding bad behavior. Instead of reprimanding and punishing the student, we will just bribe the student to attend class. What lesson is this teaching the student? That the student can get what he/she wants by committing bad behavior. That’s a lesson that the child will take with him/her throughout life. If these are additional classes, it’s only slightly better and it goes hand in hand with my second issue with this policy. The schools are falsely inflating the scores by giving extra credit to a student who is given easier material.

 Let’s go into that second point a little more closely. The article calls  this policy a “unique initiative”, but what exactly is this initiative? The school wants to boost the student’s grades, that sounds like a wonderful idea. So how is the school going to accomplish this? Are they going to work more closely with the student to ensure the student gets the help he/she needs? No. Are they letting the student stay after school to receive additional education, possibly but at what cost? As I said, the article doesn’t say whether these are after school classes or not. But regardless of when the classes are being offered, let’s just look at the theory.

 In order to boost grades the school is going to give the students an opportunity to take remedial classes in order to maintain a “B” average. This will look good to anyone performing an assessment on the school’s performance when they see that all these students have good grades, but what are they teaching the children? How is this helpful to anyone other than school administrators who are looking to show everyone that they are teaching the children, and the children are learning?

 Are the remedial grades being averaged into the student’s normal subject grade in order to artificially boost the student’s grade to make the teacher look good? Are they giving the student easier bonus material to inflate the student’s score? Or are they placing the students in remedial classes who do not necessarily belong there in order to inflate the grades?

 Instead of helping to bring a student up and teach him/her, they bring the lessons down. Are the student’s grades being artificially inflated, or is the student being dumbed down?

Which is worse?