Disappointed with the school. Putting my student's future in jeopardy

I was both stunned and concerned when my student revealed her mid year exam results to me.

Maths -- 20/100 Highest in class -- 40/100
English -- 16.5/100 Highest in class -- 34/100

The first reaction I had was to stare at the results gaping in disbelief. An EM3 student wouldnt even be getting such a result, not to even mention for an EM2 student! Then wouldnt I have done nothing in helping her to improve after 3 months of guidance and advice? Am I such a lousy tutor? No doubt disappointment with myself set in and I doubted my teaching directive time and again after knowing her results. But over the past 3 months, I truly felt that I had learnt and adopted a few new teaching techniques in which school teachers have even heaped praises on. So what truly went wrong?

I went through her papers and realised that the difficulty level of the papers is on tantamount to those of top schools: Nan Hua, ACS Primary, Nanyang. The first thing that struck my mind was that the school is trying to mimic the standards of the top schools without considering the actual standard of the students. I came across an even more absurd incident in the Eng papers. The section which usually uses a short passage as an excerpt for comprehension cloze turned out to be a poem by William Wordsworth. I could only comprehend the poem after 4 or 5 times of thorough reading and evaluating. Words like "daffodil", "glee", "gay", "vales" and "solitude" are surely not words of their level. Given their present level of cognitive ability, inferencing from a poem of such high standard is beyond them surely. No wonder no one in her class passed Eng or Maths.

Another alarming issue I found out was that her class teacher, who is in charge of the class's Eng, Maths & Science, have been frequently absent from school either due to leave or she being deployed out of school for other matters. Few or no replacement teachers were hired in place of her absence, & on those days not only did the class missed out on learning, they also missed out on practising. I really could not take it lying because Im a person who expects others to demand something from me which in the first place I had to be provided with the resources to perform. In her case, neither was she provided with the resources nor was she given the right platform to demontrate her true potential, not hidden potential by doing difficult papers.

I had written an email to the school's principal touching on these issues I have lamented so far in this blog. Im really concerned whether what the school had been doing so far is beneficial to the students afterall. Somehow on the other hand, I feel powerless to effect any change directly in the school, except to improve and gear up my guidance for my student personally.

"Reap what you sow"