Yes, this has long term negative effects but I need a job and don’t need the stress of being hounded by administration. In the old days the state funded a much higher percent of a student’s higher education. In those days, society was the client. Today the student is the client and the student does not want to fail.

> Yes, this has long term negative effects but I need a job and don’t need the stress of being hounded by administration.

The way to make sure your students all pass is to do your job, those students need a teacher that cares and not one that 'needs a job', and preferably one that does not start off with the self-reinforcing viewpoint that a good fraction of them are too dumb to learn the material on offer.

Seriously, consider changing jobs to something with less of a negative effect on people's lives.

I've been on the receiving end of this attitude and it harmed me quite a bit, later on, with better teachers some of the damage got fixed but I most certainly would have traded two of my math teachers that 'needed a job' for some of the (much) better ones. Thanks to Fred Pach and one Mr. Groot I'm not a total loss at math and it ended up not being my skills but those of the teachers that were deficient.

You know nothing about my teaching or what I do for my students. Did I say a good fraction of the students can’t learn algebra? I never said or implied anything of the sort. All I said is that some people can’t learn it. I gave an extreme example of such a person. I didn’t say anything regarding how large the set of people who can’t learn algebra is other than that this set is larger than the set of intellectually disabled people.

It appears you are letting your past personal experiences distort your judgments about me. It’s ok. I understand this. It’s natural but it makes it hard to have a discussion about whether or not it’s the case that everyone can learn algebra.

You made a statement that the way to pass everyone is to do my job. Clearly you have not taught much in a classroom with a wide variety of students. Consider the possibility that you simply don’t know anything about the craft of teaching other than your very limited experience of being a student and that as such you should be wary of making negative conclusions about me.

> You know nothing about my teaching or what I do for my students.

I actually do because I read all of your comments in this thread.

Here’s one reason I know you’ve don’t have much experience teaching. You’ve mentioned that the way to pass all of my students is to do my job. No one who has extensive experience in classrooms with a wide variety of student backgrounds can possibly make such a statement. Even the most ardent, hardcore teachers at my college who advocate that everyone can learn any topic don’t think this.

When I mention that I just mostly pass my students now they understand that grades are an administrative aspect to the job and know that this is detached from my desire to get as many students as possible to learn as much as possible. People with extensive experience don’t harp on my statements about grading. At most they’ll claim they don’t lower their standards but they don’t make any wild conclusions about me like you did.

But you, you’ve made wholly unjustified conclusions about me and that says you don’t know the nuances involved. You don’t immediately understand that one can think not everyone can learn a topic and still be passionate about learning.

You don’t because I’ve never said anything about my teaching. Your conclusions are not supported by the available evidence.

You’ve obviously not taught much in the classroom. Why is it so obvious? Consider the possibility that your thinking on this issue is clouded by your past.

I have always found the university ranking game to be screwed up.

Are the best Universities good because they have the best teaching, or are they just selecting the best people, who would be successfull no matter what?

The universities are penalised in rankings when a student fails to pass, but they are not penalised if they are so selective that the student never got a chance to study in the first place. This breeds an elitist system that does not let students rise to the challenge. Thats also one of the reasons why european universities do worse in rabking than UK ones - it's common there to start with a huge class, but only small part will co plete the course. In UK its harder to get in, but vast majorty seems to pass.

If universities worked like a normal business does, you'd expect that the best universities would grow, expand, and eventually there would an Oxford in every major city, with oxford teaching methods. But that's not how it works. But people still keep trying to appply 'free market theory' to education, when it obviously works very differently.

Lastly there is perpetual conflict between research and teaching - many professors want to do research and don't like teaching, many post graduate teaching assistants are folks that, no matter how briliant, were afraid of the job market, etc.

Maybe this is a stupid question, but is there any indication that most US universities cared about their academic reputation in the first place? I don't see any.

Well in Spain everybody says to care, yet I see what I see. Not to mention that everyone complains about the low rankings of spanish unis, but I'd say that's mostly a consquence of money and some biases at play.