School officials at a public elementary school in Chicago are ordering teachers to sign students up for “designated restroom times” when entire, overcrowded classes of little kids must use the bathroom each day.
The rationale for the draconian pee policy is to improve the school’s dreadful results on Common Core-related standardized tests.
An anonymous teacher at the unidentified pre-K-8 forwarded a memo concerning the policy to Anthony Cody of Education Week. The memo reportedly went out to all faculty members at the school last week.
“Welcome back and Happy New Year!” the memo reads. “In order to maximize student learning and reduce the loss of instructional time, we are implementing two new restroom policies.”
The memo then explains that teachers may send their kids to the bathroom “only during your allotted time so that multiple groups of students are not competing to use the facilities.”
There’s a strict five-minute time limit for each entire class.
“Use your watch or stopwatch to time the students and praise them when they meet the behavior and time expectations.”
In addition to daily five-minute breaks, students will receive exactly two — two! — bathroom passes “to use between now and the end of the quarter.” Students “can choose to hold on to them and trade them in for a reward at the end of the quarter.” Teachers must “promote the benefit of not using the passes by reminding students that rewards will be given for left over passes at the end of the quarter.”
As Education Week notes, the unidentified Chicago elementary school’s memo doesn’t affirmatively say that Common Core is to blame for the brutal bathroom regime. Education Week’s source indicated, however, that administrators put the oppressive policy in place to raise abysmal scores on standardized tests created by multinational education conglomerate Pearson and based squarely on the Common Core curriculum.
The source who sent the memo claims that the school was downgraded recently to “Level 3,” the lowest possible score for a Chicago public school. As a result of the downgrade, the school will likely be shuttered if the school’s aggregate scores on the tests don’t increase rapidly.
This new policy reminds The Daily Caller of an amazingly sad incident last December when the mother of a seven-year-old boy in Texas said her son wet his pants in class because he hadn’t accumulated enough good behavior credits to secure a trip to the bathroom. (RELATED: Second-grade teacher charges good-behavior ‘bucks’ for bathroom breaks; empty-pocketed boy wets pants)
Also, in New York, a group of eight respected principals drafted a letter expressing deep concerns about the high-stakes testing of Common Core. “We know that many children cried during or after testing, and others vomited or lost control of their bowels or bladders,” the letter stated, in part. (RELATED: Principals say Common Core tests make little kids vomit, pee their pants)
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