If You Want A School To Make An Exception, Then You Have to Give Them No Way Out

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Generally speaking, if you want a school to make an exception for your kid, then you have to give them no way out.

You want to skip out of algebra, you better get 100% on whatever algebra exam they give you.

Because if you get a 97% they may very well say “you should take algebra this year so you can fill in your missing 3% of knowledge gaps.”

Jason discusses ~1:01:46 in Math Academy Podcast 5, Part 2:

“This is a whole thing with the school system. We’ve had a lot of parents who use Math Academy, their kid gets a year or two ahead and they’re trying to negotiate with the school.

But bureaucracies really maximize bureaucratic convenience. Bureaucracies are gonna bureaucratize. And they’re just gonna do things so that things work out on their schedule, plan, or whatever.

So if you come in and you say, my fifth grader should be doing algebra or whatever, they’re going to try to come up with whatever reason they can to prevent that from happening because they don’t want to deal with the headache.

Well, can my daughter test into algebra? Sometimes that depends on the state laws that they have to allow it. But if your daughter scored like a 97%, they’re like, oh, they missed 3%. They don’t know 3%.

I’ve heard that. It’s like 93%, 95% and they would not allow them to place in.

Like 99 times out of 100 they’ll do that. Every once in a while you run into one teacher, one principal school who’s really open to it, but that’s super rare. It’s usually really frustrating.

You gotta make it so there’s no argument against you.”

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