Thursday, April 25, 2019

Time And A Half

This is not about overtime pay. It is about a method used by students and their parents to improve the chances their little snowflakes can improve their GPA. In colleges and universities across the United States there is a branch of administrative bloat known as "Learning Resource Center" or "Disability Resource Center." Sounds benign, almost warm and fuzzy. But let's look at how this operates.

What you do, as a parent, is trot your little darlin' to a pliable, buyable shrink. She will generate some official looking paperwork claiming your child needs special consideration. You take this and the "special" one to the aforementioned Resource Center and now, magically, they are accorded special treatment most commonly extra time-time and a half-for all quizzes and exams and these will be administered and proctored by the Resource Center workers (administrative bloat, remember) and NOT anyone associated with other classroom activities. Once your unique snowflake is branded special it is as if they are enrolled in a separate school within a school. That is because they are and it is a school with lesser academic rigor. Why? Because that's what your snowflake needs. Because this is an open secret it is no longer about a few snowflakes. It has become a blizzard. No one has a snowblower and no one is interested in getting one.

It is a money-making sham and every knows it. Try as you might you'll not find peer-reviewed research in any top journals suggesting that time-and-a-half is THE amount of time leveling the intellectual playing field for any and all of the various disabilities students suffer. Why? Because it just isn't so. And it really, really isn't the point. The education industry is now focused on graduation rates and growth, particularly in the administrative, non-educational functions that are not now and never will be subject to objective measures. This is merely an extension of education's war on testing. There are no scientific studies that would undermine this effort because the basic premise is silly and metastatic administrative growth will not subject itself to scrutiny.