Spring break, and mispronouncing

It’s ironic that the same experts who obsess about standardized assessments and “following the data” also somehow advocate alternative programs that throw all that data and common curricula out the window and advocate evaluating students based on individu

It’s April, the time when teachers are figuring how many school days are left, and how they’ll get from Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt before students clean out their lockers.

Policymakers have loftier concerns.

High schools long ago adopted creative measures to ensure that more students graduate. Before you get the wrong idea, I’m in favor of helping students acquire sufficient knowledge and skill to warrant giving them a diploma. I also recognize that some students need more help than others.

That extra help, however, shouldn’t consist of chaperoning them from class to class, making excuses for their behavior, or expecting them to learn when they make no perceivable effort. It’s ironic that the same experts who obsess about standardized assessments and “following the data” also somehow advocate alternative programs that throw all that data and common curricula out the window and advocate evaluating students based on individualized expectations, programs, and indicators of success.

In addition to rampant grade inflation, these alternatives include a fraud known as “credit recovery,” where students somehow make up for an entire year of failure by taking quickie courses, often online, in subjects they failed. As a result, officials report higher graduation rates even as standardized assessments, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the SAT, confirm that “no true gains are being made.”

Our efforts to boost graduation rates have only “devalue[d] the high school diploma.” Less qualified graduates mean less qualified entry-level workers and higher workplace training costs. At the undergraduate level, it means entering freshmen who don’t know and can’t do what entering freshmen used to know and be able to do.

Colleges have addressed this skill and knowledge deficit by offering noncredit remedial courses which hopefully prepare freshmen for subsequent semesters of what used to be freshman coursework. It’s easy to see how this accommodation would both lengthen the time required to graduate and consequently make college education more expensive.

Recently some colleges, including the California State University system, have elected to give credit for these formerly noncredit courses. Officials call them “corequisite” classes. Now thanks to the smoke-and-mirrors approach long popular in K-12 education, you can earn college credit for what used to qualify as high school classes.

This is the reverse of offering college classes and Advanced Placement to particularly qualified high school students, a once laudable practice that allowed them to enroll in higher level college courses when they arrived on campus. Of course, it’s not a coincidence that Advanced Placement courses have become less advanced as they’ve been offered to less qualified students.

The predictable result of redesignating high school work as college work is that either college graduates will be less qualified, or it will take longer to graduate with what used to be a college education, or graduate school will become what college used to be, just as college is becoming what high school used to be.

I don’t think it’s supposed to work that way, or that most of us want it to work that way. And yet we keep doing these things.

••• On a more emotional front, according to NEAToday, experts have determined there’s a “lasting impact of mispronouncing students’ names.” First, I’ve never deliberately mispronounced anybody’s name, nor ever adopted a “who cares” attitude and said anything, including somebody’s name, the easiest way I could.

I have, however, occasionally spent years mispronouncing some of my dearest students’ names. In one case my error extended through four sisters. Of course, this was partly because they pronounced their own name in various ways. Another mother explained that it was easier to let people pronounce her family name the way it looked, to the point where she and her children had begun introducing themselves by their mispronounced name.

When I inadvertently discover my error, I usually say something like, “I’ve been teaching you since August, and you never told me I’ve been saying your name wrong?” By the way, these aren’t always exotic ethnic names. They’re short vowels instead of long vowels, and things like that.

I’m always truly sorry that I’ve been saying their names wrong. I’m also usually more sorry about it than they are. They seem to take it in stride, which is a sign of resilience. That’s one of those nonacademic skills we’re supposed to be developing in our students.

Unfortunately, education experts aren’t nearly as resilient. They regard mispronunciation as “a tiny act of bigotry” and a “microagression” that “impacts the world view and social-emotional well-being of students.”

When teachers mispronounce a student’s name, they’re allegedly “disregarding the family and culture,” depriving students of the opportunity to “learn in a safe environment,” and communicating that “your name is different” and “not worth my time to get it right.”

I’m not suggesting that teachers adopt the demeanor of nineteenth century Ellis Island immigration officers, who were not exactly famous for cultural sensitivity. And I’m not saying that children don’t deserve respect. But some names are hard to pronounce because they come from languages with other sounds. I’d expect my name to be mispronounced in some other countries, too. Hell, it gets mispronounced in this country.

Public education doesn’t need more hysteria or another crusading initiative. If we’re truly worried about aggression in our schools, safe learning environments, and our students’ social-emotional well-being, we’ve got a few other, more pressing problems to tackle.