Tolerating and rewarding student bad behavior, violence, truancy, in public schools!

ModerationNow! said:

I've heard about situations where kids who fail are given passing grades just to artificially raise the graduation rates. I've heard of schools tolerating some bad behavior and truancy, and justifying it in the case of 'minorities', by claiming that it's their familys' impoverished situation that's to blame, so we should overlook the problems and give them passing grades and graduate them anyway, despite the fact that in many cases, they haven't received an actual education(can't read or write, can't solve basic math problems etc). I've generally disagreed with that solution AND the diagnosis for why it's necessary. But these 2 videos show us that things are worse than imagined in many schools! https://youtu.be/PVNC_R260pA

https://youtu.be/-SRCY8FqoyQ

>>There are far poorer students throughout history who have done well in school, despite grinding poverty and TRULY poorly funded schools. So, the real excuse for not punishing the worst kids, allowing them to break nearly every rule, every day, while being truant regularly, not doing homework and almost never passing tests, is because it's an easy way to create the false impression that things are going well. Here come those bonuses!

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1. I agree that schools should not provide diplomas to students who don't earn passing grades. Might that mean that some students leave school without a diploma? It sure does.
2. Grade inflation is a problem. (See also: Same Performance, Better Grades) I don't know how much of a problem it is in public high schools. I know how much of a problem it isn't at the schools most people in my family have attended; at those schools, the problem is grade deflation. The teachers determine, in their professional judgment, what, of the total body of concepts they teach, constitutes "passing" with a lowest-level C (mastery of 77% of the material) and grade up or down from there, a highest-level B (92%) indicating complete mastery of the taught content, and A means one has built on the taught content and draw sensible inferences as a result of having done so.
3. I welcome schools' upping the bar, or just adhering strictly to the extant one, for graduation. That would make it far easier for prospective employers to judge whether an interviewee has a history as a slacker, high performer, mediocre performer, prepared well, not prepared well, somewhere in between, etc., because at the end of the day, everyone with a diploma is the same unless and until one looks at a transcript. So if public schools fail kids who don't earn passing grades and thus force them to obtain GED certificates rather than diplomas from specific schools, employers know immediately something amiss happened.
4. What you've heard: You've heard what you've heard, but what you've heard is nothing more than anecdotal hearsay. I have no way of knowing with what frequency events such as those of which you've heard are existential among the school population as a whole. The extreme example of grade inflation -- failing yet receiving a diploma -- of which you write is something for which I also have no way of knowing whether it's an exception or a norm. And let's be honest; what one teacher remarks upon for his school does not at all extrapolate as the norm among public schools as a whole.
   
   You've provided two examples and there are ~99K public schools in the U.S. I'm not going to take a position about "public schools" on account of what I learn about two of them, but I would support "fixing" those two schools.
5. Graduation rate inflation: Yes, extant are instances of schools artificially inflating graduation rates. What's not clear is the incidence of that happening in the public schools -- be it at the school, district, city, county, state or national levels. That's the kind of information one needs in order to have much of an opinion on the matter.
6. Tolerating/punishing bad behavior: "Crime and punishment" exist and are meted on a continuum. It strains credulity to think that schools, on the whole, tolerate bad behavior.
7. Allowing to break rules: Nobody allows students to break rules. Students know the rules and they either break them or they don't, and when students break the rules, teachers and administrators respond in some way, shape or form, though at that Paterson, NJ school, the administrators clearly did not. I have no basis for thinking that set of administrators' behavior is typical.
   • Being truant, fighting in the halls, skipping class, and so on are rule violations.
   • Not doing homework is not a rule violation.
   • Not passing exams is not a rule violation; it's a consequence of not studying/attending class.