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Progressive Grading in School

Would you support Progressive Grading?

  • Yes

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Other

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    21
as a side note, it looks like so far 15 out of 15 voters all hate poor black children. :( I guess I had thought we were passed that as a nation.
 
as a side note, it looks like so far 15 out of 15 voters all hate poor black children. :( I guess I had thought we were passed that as a nation.

This is an interesting conclusion.
 
It's a tough place to be as a teacher. There are students who need a TON of help and those that can pretty much do anything on their own. I feel like many kids get ignored because the teacher is spending all of her time with either the troublemakers or the ones that are way behind. I go back to the parents every time. If more parents cared about their kids' education we wouldn't have so many problems in school. The breakdown of the family is THE main problem. But how do we fix that?

Put the stupid kids and the trouble makers and the smart kids in three different classes.

If the troublemakers won't change, put them on the street, or in jail, as appropriate.

For the stupid ones, evaluate if there's any sensein trying to teach them. Some people are born to push brooms. That's the reality of life, it's foolish to deny it.
 
To detractors, would it not allow for those on the lower end to graduate and gain access to higher paying jobs?

When they haven't earned the privilege, and when those that had demonstrated the abilities are punished by havng to compete with people dishonestly banking on grades they haven't earned?
 
Because that is robbing those kids you are giving those grades too of an education. Like I said, it should be harder to graduate, not easier.

"Progressive" taxation is robbing those men who earned it of the money they deserve.

It should be harder to to take money from people, not easier.

No one else deserves the money people earned, no matter how jealous you are of their accomplishments.
 
"Progressive" taxation is robbing those men who earned it of the money they deserve.

It should be harder to to take money from people, not easier.

No one else deserves the money people earned, no matter how jealous you are of their accomplishments.

Completely different subject. Any comparison to be made is a shallow one.
 
When they haven't earned the privilege, and when those that had demonstrated the abilities are punished by havng to compete with people dishonestly banking on grades they haven't earned?

More than grades, it comes down to different levels of competency. If we did this, we might as well get rid of college, since half of the value of a degree is in the signaling effect.
 
More than grades, it comes down to different levels of competency. If we did this, we might as well get rid of college, since half of the value of a degree is in the signaling effect.

Ultimately, some of the value created by public education this country is that it contains a bit of a leveling effect for society (which could be better, I will admit, but as it is it certainly does help) in that no matter your background, you at least have a shot at getting enough of an education to compete on a more even level with those who may have been born under better circumstances (again its not perfect, I know). However, education is the platform and grades are the outcome, and that outcome helps to promote a meritocracy in this country, where people can compete based on their ability and not their wealth, position, or resources.

Entrenched wealth has the opposite effect. A wealthy person does not have to perform as well to receive benefit because their money is able to do a lot of their work for them through investment. Meaning a person with a lot to invest does not have to be as intelligent or work as hard to succeed.

Because of this and the differences in use for the resources of education and wealth, the comparison raised by the OP does not really point anything useful out.
 
This is an interesting conclusion.

the plan is designed to give something to poor minority students. 15 of 15 people oppose giving that something to those students. obviously they are against those students.


that's the way the logic works, right? we're balancing the grade bell curve on the backs of the disadvantaged? unfairly tilting grade allocation in the favor of an elite few?
 
the plan is designed to give something to poor minority students. 15 of 15 people oppose giving that something to those students. obviously they are against those students.


that's the way the logic works, right? we're balancing the grade bell curve on the backs of the disadvantaged? unfairly tilting grade allocation in the favor of an elite few?

If you give them something that doesn't benefit them and could harm them, it does no good.

Of course this will lead to a discussion of the efficacy of the welfare state, but :shrug: I figure thats where you are trying to go anyway. Nice trap statement.
 
the plan is designed to give something to poor minority students. 15 of 15 people oppose giving that something to those students. obviously they are against those students.


that's the way the logic works, right? we're balancing the grade bell curve on the backs of the disadvantaged? unfairly tilting grade allocation in the favor of an elite few?

It's for their own good. Why raise false expectations? They are only looking to be sports superstars or the mac daddy drug kingpins, anyways. They don't need hypocritical a's to reinforce their low self-esteem.
 
If you give them something that doesn't benefit them and could harm them, it does no good.

of course it benefits them. it gets them to the next class. giving someone a welfare payment get's them to the next day. in neither scenario has the individual been made more capable of succeeding at taking care of themself.

Of course this will lead to a discussion of the efficacy of the welfare state, but :shrug: I figure thats where you are trying to go anyway

actually i am, but i don't know if anyone else will go there with me, perhaps i'll make it a Loft thread.

. Nice trap statement.

it's not my fault the logic fits this scenario as well as others. do you see now how ridiculous it looks from the other side?
 
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of course it benefits them. it gets them to the next class. giving someone a welfare payment get's them to the next day. in neither scenario has the individual been made more capable of succeeding at taking care of themself.



it's not my fault the logic fits this scenario as well as others. do you see now how ridiculous it looks from the other side?

Ok, so extending the bad analogy in the OP to another bad analogy somehow proves a point? You are willing to go this low?
 
I'm not talking about general taxation, which you're mixing with this.
I'm specifically questioning why one institution of "progressiveness" is right and another is wrong, when both are neither egalitarian in design, nor result.

As others have pointed out, when you transfer grades to lower performers, you are depriving them of a true education.
Can not the same thing be said, when you transfer money or services to a person, that are not based on educating them?

I'm not mixing up anything. Economies are driven by production and consumption of goods and services. In societies where poverty snowballs to encompass a substantial portion of the population, the production and consumption of goods and services slows down (because too much of the population's energy potential is inefficient), and unfortunately, it is exponentially easier to pass into the poverty threshold than to rise out of it -- you have to devote more resources to lifting people out of poverty than keeping them out of it. Since welfare keeps up consumption and production to higher levels than would be the case in a laissez faire society, more wealth is generated overall for all levels of society over long periods of time.

Granted, when a person is a recipient of welfare, their energy potential isn't being utilized effectively, but welfare preserves them until such a point they can again become useful to the economy.

Consider: a person with a household and appliances has to produce or service a lot in order to maintain that household and appliances, meaning their energy is being directed toward actions that maintain civilization. If a person loses their ability to maintain that household during a recession and becomes homeless, then they lose most of their incentive and ability to keep applying their energy to useful ends, which both delays recovery and prevents economic booms from occurring once the recession ends. It's more beneficial overall to preserve households than let them slip into poverty.

That's one reason why welfare exists. History selected it for survival because civilizations that possessed welfare became stronger than those that did not. Welfare, for example, was an important institution in both classical Athens and Ancient Rome.

The ethics of this is that since a population that is actively maintaining households and appliances provides greater opportunity for profit than a poverty-stricken mass, high earners have a vested interest in operating a welfare system.

The same isn't true of students in a classroom. High-performing students have no vested interest in low performers (unless they have an arrangement with low performers in a curve system so that they don't have to work very hard for their good grades) and their lack of productive activity, because a classroom is an artificial environment where mutual dependence is far lower than in society as a whole.
 
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It's for their own good. Why raise false expectations? They are only looking to be sports superstars or the mac daddy drug kingpins, anyways. They don't need hypocritical a's to reinforce their low self-esteem.

what they need is for their fathers to marry their mothers and for them to get jobs.
 
Ok, so extending the bad analogy in the OP to another bad analogy somehow proves a point? You are willing to go this low?

i'm sticking with the original analogy. those who oppose transfer payments to the poor are accused often of targeting the poor - ridiculously of wanting to hurt the poor. :roll: as though Republicans sit around all day chuckling and thinking up ideas on how to steal from single mothers. the left (i charitably decide) confuses disagreement with its' means with disagreement with its' motivation.



but, the middle point is what I want to take elsewhere. I have decided that conservatives do not spend enough time focusing on how to actually help the poor. we have worked with the left-wing option of subsidizing poverty for decades now, and I don't see how it has helped much - but i do see where it has done immense harm. Conservatives are full of ideas on how to boost the economy, and that's fine; the poor benefit from that too - but there ought to be a way to reshape and reform government programs to turn them into actual poverty reduction programs.
 
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no, the middle point is what I want to take elsewhere. I have decided that conservatives do not spend enough time focusing on how to actually help the poor. we have worked with the left-wing option of subsidizing poverty for decades now, and I don't see how it has helped much - but i do see where it has done immense harm. Conservatives are full of ideas on how to boost the economy, and that's fine; the poor benefit from that too - but there ought to be a way to reshape and reform government programs to turn them into actual poverty reduction programs.

Good, there is always room in policy discussion on how to further optimize the system. I welcome this sort of discussion, but it would be better to use a logical basis to launch your ideas off of and not this whole progressive grading thing.
 
Good, there is always room in policy discussion on how to further optimize the system. I welcome this sort of discussion, but it would be better to use a logical basis to launch your ideas off of and not this whole progressive grading thing.

this bit is useful mostly as a model, to demonstrate a flaw in logic.
 
Most of us are not really talking about education. We are talking about the fatally flawed comparison of taxes and grades.

Why can't you isolate the question in your mind and answer it instead of trying to figure out how you can talk around the topic without answering it?
 
this bit is useful mostly as a model, to demonstrate a flaw in logic.

Its generally not a good idea to use flawed logic to attempt to demonstrate other flaws logic though. Its just tends to fail in practice as people will pick it to pieces. This thread is a good example of that happening.
 
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Its generally not a good idea to use flawed logic to attempt to demonstrate other flaws logic though. Its just tends to fail in practice as people will pick it to pieces. This thread is a good example of that happening.


on the contrary. i have seen many people make the claim that you repeat; but i have yet to see anyone provide a reasonable principle that describes why we should treat grades as the property of the student but income as the property of society; when both come from similar (if not the same) swirl of complex factors.
 
This isn't a trap thread and it's here to make you think.

Would you support a system of grading, where the higher performing students have part of their grades distributed to lower performing students, in order for their (lower performing students) grades to be brought up to passing?

This should be applied to all levels from Kindergarten-College/University.

Explain your reasoning, behind your answer, please.
NO! Please explain your logic for asking such a silly question.
 
on the contrary. i have seen many people make the claim that you repeat; but i have yet to see anyone provide a reasonable principle that describes why we should treat grades as the property of the student but income as the property of society; when both come from similar (if not the same) swirl of complex factors.

Reasonable, interesting qualifier there. So basically, they didn't say something you agreed with?
 
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