Suit Sheds Light on School Makeup Courses Pt 2

"Makeup courses." It is in the the title folks. "Alternative" schools like ACE and others like the one where I work allow students a chance to make up the work that they would have missed if they were suspended. These schools are also sometimes known as credit recovery schools for students who have failed to earn the amount of credits to keep them on par for graduation.


My experience is that some students appreciate these schools and take advantage of what they offer and others play around and complain that "it is too much work." Either way it allows a student to maintain involvement in school and as I mentioned in the last post. However, a statement in the article was that P.E. merely consisted of filling out worksheets. We do the same thing in my school. It involves the honesty of the student and the parent or guardian. The student writes down what they did to engage in exercise. Obviously, the student and parent/guardian can fake this information. However, this is one of the problems within education; the grade, diploma, and degree are taken as synonymous with education. I try to tell tell students all of the time that intelligence is gained through knowledge and not grades.

Another statement from the article was "limited direct access to knowledgeable teachers." I know my subject which is social studies, but chemistry and algebra II are subjects that I am not capable of teaching. I believe that alternative schools should have teachers who are knowledgeable in their fields. I can understand that sometimes these schools expect their teachers to help with all subjects. This would not stand in a regular school setting nor should it at an alternative school.

The article goes on to state that students take tests over and over again without the questions changing. This can be controlled by the teacher I know I do in my classroom. Moreover, the lawsuit claimed that the program had deficits but in my experience it is usually the student who has the deficit. That is one of the main reasons that students can have some success in these programs. The students that I have encountered lack many of the skills one would assume that they should know at their particular grade level. If these classes were more difficult and asked for more in depth analyses these students would never get out of high school.

This leads us into the hot topic of the state of education. Everybody seems to have an opinion about what's wrong with education. I will weigh in on this topic in my next post.