Please clarify:  do you think that the victory lap is wrong?  My kids had to deal with strikes (the illegal one whilst in high school), lazy and lax teachers who never get through the curricula; teachers refusing to give back tests so that the children didn’t understand where they went wrong/what their marks reflect.  There are no texts; much time is wasted; dumbed down curricula; snow days which aren’t made up for.  The list goes on and on.  If these kids want a future, I think that the victory lap is for once money well spent, and I totally support children who do this.  btw both my nephew and my son did this.  My nephew is an excellent skilled tradesman who loves his job, and also teachers at night to help the kids who want to get into his trade but are lacking math skills (schools failed them); the other is an engineer who on his first job interview was competing against young men from India and South Korea.  He luckily got the job, and my son also loves his work as well.  These young adults did well thanks to the victory lap.
What we need to address is the lousy self-serving moe with its overpaid, overstaffed, poorly performing bureaucracy, and our overpaid,overstaffed, poorly performing, poorly trained teachers.  The victory lap is one of the very few things that favours the kids.

Bev, I think you have answered your own question.

But I think you have to agree that sanctioning victory laps has its costs as well: it’s hugely expensive and it allows some students to game the system at the expense of other students. It also means that many students succeed in gaining admission to university programs they have no chance to succeed at.

The authors of “Campus Confidential” list some possible solutions, and here is the one they believe to be the fairest.

“Universities should establish their own entrance exams and simply ignore or seriously discount high school grades.”

You’re right, Doretta
Malkin, your last point, I agree with completely, because there are no standardized exit exams for highschool graduates.  As much as the universities complain about students’ lack of skills, they won’t put these entrance tests into place.  In my opinion it’s because there would be glaring discrepancies amongst highschools and also public vs private schools—in other words accountability.  There must be other reasons as to why the universities refuse to have entrance exams—it would make their jobs so much easier.  Doesn’t that make sense, so what’s in it for them to accept students whose abilities are all over the map?

Students in our schools are encouraged at the grade 8 orientation to high school to consider taking a victory lap, so right from the get-go they actually plan to do exactly that.

Some stay because our small school doesn’t have the teachers to offer both science and history in Gr. 12 so the kids are forced to either take a fifth year or take the course electronically.

Some kids stay because their friends are staying, some to play sports and some because they haven’t made up their mind on what they want to do.

There was a fuss kicked up by parents about how awards at graduation are chosen. They didn’t think that a student who successfully finished in the required number of years (4) should compete for awards and scholarships with kids who chose a victory lap.

And yes, it costs money. It was even raised by the school board as a problem in the accommodation review because often the board makes room for the victory lappers who quit before the year’s done but the board still has to pay the teacher for the full year.

They get away with it because they can.

Chuck:  your last line.  Who are ‘they’ who are getting away with it?

boards and teacher unions, who have essentially by inviting students to take a 5th year have ignored the nixing of Grade 13 by the Harris gov’t years ago. It’s part of that fight continuing.

Well, don’t forget that victory laps necessitate additional teachers = more union members for the teachers’ unions and more empire building for the school board bureaucrats. You can talk about ideology all day long,, but the unions and the bureaucracies are intensely practical. They support policies that are personally beneficial. Ideology is just a means to an end.

Victory lap was done by my nephew and my son (along with numerous others) before grade 13/oac was taken out by Premier Harris, but I do see your point.

Thanks for clarifying, Chuck.

The victory lap—regardless of when children have done this, and what the ploys of the union/burearcrats really are—has benefited children in a positive way.  There are so many other problems, that quite frankly, I’d leave this at the bottom of my list—especially because some children done enormously well because of it.  I appreciate it being brought to the front, but please let some of the kids follow their dreams, who otherwise would not have had the chance. 

Malkin, please explain what you mean by ‘gaming other students’.  It went over my head, and my son and nephew were only eager to realize their dreams.  All kids can take a fifth year, can’t they, so what does ‘gaming’ entail?

Gaming a system is to exploit a system’s weaknesses for one’s personal benefit. Parents like us do it all the time. We make sure that our kids enter school with enriched vocabularies and general knowledge, help them with their too-hard homework, seek out certain teachers, switch schools if necessary, place them in gifted programs or French immersion, have them do victory laps, and so forth. And in this way our kids survive a bad education system.

The children of less educated and savvy parents, however, do not have these supports. As a result, many (most) of them struggle in school. They, for example, would be less likely to be in a position to contemplate a victory lap.

Ideally, the education system would be set up not to favour the children of educated and savvy parents. Of course, this ideal will never be achieved, but it would be nice if changes could be made in the direction of making the playing field more level.

Yes, Malkin—I agree…

I think your thinking is extremely flawed, mdare. Although john did use more public money to go back to school, we now have a better trained accountant working in (or for) the city, and that means that a company can be more profitable, and thus pay more taxes towards the country, bringing money back to everything in a roundabout way.
Myself, I am planning to go back for a victory lap to train under auto mechanics,  because I missed half a year due to family issues. I am extremely thankful I can go back to school for another year for these courses (which aren’t “just for fun”), because otherwise, I know I would most likely end up as a cashier or janitor or some other pointless, dead-end job. think of that next time you have a kid fix your car, because that could be me.
On top of that, aren’t there better, larger expenditures in the budget that you could be attacking? For example, the government will be spending 16 billion dollars (with a B) on shiny new F-35 fighter jets, which are necessary in these scary, scary times. Or Hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on golf memberships and new cars for doctors, as “incentive” to SAVE LIVES. even the penny, a common form of currency most people simply throw in the trash, cost one and a half times their own worth. Before you get on 18 and 19 year-olds cases for wanting to go back to school to do what they love, call the government to cut back on the pointless things they spend their money on.