Purple Fruit Pickers

While reading the story of the Purple Fruit Pickers, I thought of all the students who don’t learn the same way that most students learn and some who struggle to learn what we think they should to earn a diploma. Unfortunately, some students may not be the best test takers or the best artists or model builders or athletes. Our school systems are set up to compensate those students who do well on our assessments regardless of whether or not they learned anything of value. In addition to objectively score what students should know, we should be encouraging them to go beyond the textbooks, to think creatively and to find alternative ways of showing mastery. What works well for 80% of the students might not be an effective means of assessing the other 20%.

Our school is a no fail school. By that, I mean students aren’t allowed to take a failing grade, ever. If they don’t earn at least a minimum score of 80%, they are given the assignment back to correct and re-do. The same applies to tests. We also don’t worry about absences or truancy since that isn’t an option for our students. We have school year round even though our regular September to May schedule follows the public school calendars. Perhaps the failure is in the Carnegie unit of school time. If a school year is 180 days and students have to be in school, in their desk, at least 120 hours to earn a full credit in English, how can we teach for understanding? Are we simply grading them on being present and using the bell curve to pass most of our students and fail the bottom 2-4% because someone said some students will fail? My suggestion would be to adopt more non-traditional or “alternative” schools for the students who need them and encourage them to enroll before they start experiencing great amounts of failure. Until we realize that not everyone is cut from the same cloth or retains what they are taught in the same way, we will always have failure and dropouts in the public schools. My belief is that every student can learn, how much and how long it takes some of them should be negotiable.