An Educator's Dilemma:

Imagine you are an educator. Your job is to maintain a flow of educational opportunities from day to day with the same students over the course of a school year.

Imagine that 2 weeks before the end of the semester, a new student is added to your roster. Final grades are due in a little over a week and you have very little work from this student (they have good attendance and do all the assignments and all the work for 2 weeks). Keep in mind that the student will most likely shape their high school performance based on their first-year (as the research shows).

Do you:
A. Give them an F for the semester
B. Give them a D for the semester
C. Give them a P for passing the semester (which requires a C average for the semester)
D. Kick them out of your class before you have to assign them a grade
E. Give the student a massive make-up project (which they probably wouldn't finish) that amounts to the total semester's work and retroactively change their grade upon completion (approximately 300 pages of class-related reading and 75 handouts including 2-3 projects and a presentation)

Keep in mind that there are consequences for each of these decisions. To give the student a grade that represents a semester of work for the 2 weeks they were in class is unfair to the other students who were legitimately in class the whole time.

On the other hand, to give an F to this student sets them back and hurts your overall passing rate as an educator. This may compromise your standing at the school and could lead to you getting excessed by getting unsatisfactory ratings (depends on your administrators).

The unfortunate assumption here is that the educator bares the burden of responsibility for this student, regardless of the student's life circumstances that led to their late registration and entry into the class which leads to some form of failure...

So my question to you is this: When in modern day society will it ever be politically correct to say that the parents, guardians, or the primary caretakers of this child are responsible for the failures of this child? As it stands right now, the only reason why this child failed, is because the school didn't do its job.