My building principle has a policy where we need to submit a Course Failure form at the end of the year for any student that fails a course. The top of the form asks for basic information, like student name, course, teacher name and so on. All important for specifying who failed, what they failed and for filing the form itself, so no problem there. But then it starts asking for things it doesn’t need. Do they have an IEP? A 504 plan? Are they an LEP (Limited English Proficient) student?
This is where the form turns into a maybe-intentional guilt trip. By checking off any of those three options on a Course Failure form, you’re forced to ask yourself “Should this special needs student really fail for the year?” Bit late for that, isn’t it? Unless administration intends for me to fudge some numbers to push them up to a 65, the only thing this does is make the teacher feel bad. Like you failed the student, not that the student failed because they couldn’t be bothered to do the bare minimum.
The form also asks for the marking period grades and their final average. Again, useless. It’s in your database. If this form has an objective, it’s unclear. I have to imagine they only look at them if a parent questions why a student failed for the year. But they can answer that with a calculator using the numbers in the gradebook. Or maybe it’s referenced if a parent claimed no one told them their student was failing. But then, why do the grades need to be on there? It’s just more work for teachers with no explanation as to how this helps anything. I guess failures will go down since no one wants to bothered dealing with bureaucracy, so yay for that.
The last section is the real guilt trip. It lists a series of interventions like referrals to I&RS, discussions with administration, meeting with the student and various ways of communicating with parents. Then it wants dates for each of these things. It’s another insulting part of the form that makes you question things you should not question. I am not going to keep a daily log of every conversation I have about a student. Parents get report card notifications and bi-weekly emails if their kid is in danger of failing. Why is that not enough? You want a list of dates for student meetings? I saw them every day of the year. Should I just attach the school calendar?
Why this form is required really is beyond me. The student sees no benefit and the only thing I get from it is stress and misplaced guilt. I’m sure there was good intention somewhere along the line, but I suspect it was ruined when someone looked at the resulting 8 ½ x 11 piece of paper and felt the need to fill it up with useless crap. So, I guess administration is really who benefits from it. They get to feel better about themselves and now there are less failures, because it’s just easier to pass the student and not deal with the resulting headache. Task failed successfully.