Carnival of Education

This week’s Carnival features posts relating to the theme of youth empowerment.

I particularly liked this post from What it’s Like on the Inside, talking about her approach to end of the year assessment:

For example, I had a student who missed a lot of class not that long ago. It turned out that he was skipping school and by the time all that caught up to him, well, he had been gone a lot of days. He served a week of in-school suspension for his truancies. Five of his teachers told his parents that there was no way he could pass their classes---all those zeros in their gradebooks couldn’t be made up due to unexcused absences. It is their right to have such a policy, but I didn’t follow suit. The kid made some bad choices, to be sure. But he had a school applied punishment for that. Why should I kick him with a grade, too? I can’t imagine having to come to school for the last month knowing that nothing you would do would matter...that because of something stupid, others were going to make a mess of your transcript and condemn you to summer school for summers to come. Now, it remains to be seen whether or not he will pass my class. He is still missing several assessments, but he has the choice to show me that he has learned the material. It is definitely one of those “lead a horse to water” sorts of deals; however, in the event that an “F” shows up on his report card for my class, it won’t be because I destined him to fail. I sleep a lot better that way.

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