University of Michigan goes all "Alice in Wonderland"

Alice: If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn't be, and what it wouldn't be, it would. You see? 

For a very brief period, sanity prevailed in the education industry. The leading thinkers claimed that test-scores were much better at measuring the teachers' performance than a measure of an individual student's ability.

The logic was that a single test score was a snap-shot of a single student at an instant of time. Did he need to visit the restroom (anxiety)? Was there a big fight with his dad the night before. Did the girl he was interested in disrespect him just before the test? Maybe he had been up all night writing plug-ins for Call-of-Duty or software that compressed video in real-time. A single test score is a single number with very little context.

However, if a teacher is teaching three sections of freshman algebra, then there are seventy-five data points. It becomes crystal clear if a teacher skipped over some material that the students were responsible for because nearly all of the students will bomb the questions that measure that skill. If the scores of the classes are segregated with the earliest (in the day) class scoring poorly and the latest class scoring best, it indicates that the teacher failed to prepare for the class the night before and was "winging it". Or, if all of the students struggled with story-problems, it indicates that the teacher needs to do more story-problems on the chalk-board in front of the class, even if she absolutely hates story problems.

As you can imagine, this insight was extremely unpopular with teachers and they quickly buried it.

Which brings us to the University of Michigan 

University of Michigan will not issue grades to some freshmen students.

This is an admission of stunning failures of multiple systems within the education industry.

It is a failure of the admissions process. If the students are not ready to start their freshmen year at U-of-M, then why were they admitted? They can enroll at a community college, beef up their skills and then transfer to U-of-M.

It is a failure of the high schools feeding U-of-M. They were giving inflated grades to students who then hit-the-wall when presented with college-level work. There are multiple examples of valedictorians with +4.0 GPAs requiring remedial math classes as freshmen.

It is a failure of the high school academic advisors who "encourage" students with puffery rather than calibrating their expectations with reality.

It is a failure of a higher education system that prints reams of 4-year diplomas with zero market value, thereby requiring students to seek Master's degrees. In turn, the need to get into a Master's program puts pressure on students to generate high GPAs during their worthless 4-year program.

It is a failure of the U-of-M College of Education which has an enrollment of over 50,000 students. They are churning out teachers and administrators who cannot produce a "product" that is acceptable to the down-line customer, be it industry or higher education. Universities are trapped in the jaws of conflicting interest. They require better incoming students even as they churn out teachers who cannot teach and administrators who cannot "improve" the inadequacies of those teachers or discipline the students with criminal behaviors.

Consequently, they must dilute the value of their primary product, diplomas. Like Rome adding lead to their silver coins, it is a one-way street.  Home schooling is looking better by the day to the normal people.

The only question is whether the education industry dies a slow, tortuous death by starvation or whether they are catastrophically defeated like the Spanish Armada which sailed top-heavy ships into the storm. 

 P.S. Parents and grandparents, self-esteem should be EARNED. Proper self-esteem is based on reality and is an unshakable foundation. It is a source of confidence and is the basis for a robust outlook on life. The false-esteem shilled by the education industry is a fragile, over-inflated balloon and grossly INCREASES the student's fragility.

Don't be scared off if you kid calls you "a dream killer". Better they should grapple with reality while they can make adjustments then to get trapped by debt for a worthless degree that they cannot repay.