The article was pretty brutal in the sense that it placed a lot of blame into different aspects of our life, but the majority of the blame was placed with teachers. As others have mentioned it is not necessarily the fault of a teacher to follow a student, especially one in an urban setting, and track their every progress. A typical teacher may only see the extreme student and focus their attention onto that student while another troubled youth goes unheard of.
After teaching in many urban settings some of the items the author mentioned does make sense but it must be taken with a grain of salt. The author mentions that just by showing up students may get by without learning; although this does occur it varies depending on a teacher. I know that when i was student teaching i made sure i had the attenion of my students and had active participation, that is, i would purposely pick on the students not paying attention, to answer questions. Some of my fellow student teachers would mention they just tried to get through the day and the subject at hand though. While I have had those days it is never the object of a teacher to just get by, we want our students to learn but too much emphasis and responsibility is always placed onto the teacher.
The author goes into several other factors and though they may be feasible they are not necessarily accurate. Each teacher will have their good and bad day, and as i mentioned earlier, we do want our students to succeed, but this does not mean giving them a passing grade. I know, again back to my student teaching semester, if a student did try and put effort into my class and still did fail a quarter then i was somewhat lenient. If they scored less that a 55 but tried i would still give them a 55 this way they were never too far behind and could still recover next semester. I also believe this way the school policy so i was merely following it but i do, whole heartedly, agree with a grading system such as this.
The author tends to make a lot of generalizations about urban schools and while some of them may apply it is not absolute truth. Each school system will vary as will each teacher so as i mentioned earlier this article should be taken with a grain of salt.
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Even though you make an effort to dispute the article, you end up verifying his claims. In particular, and probably without meaning to, your examples support his suggestion that teachers exert considerable power over urban students' futures. Whether intentional or not, the practices that he describes (and you verify) train students to not be employable.
I wondered if your example about giving a passing grade supports Haberman. The reason for leniency in grading actually could be seen as a reward for not doing well. And to claim it's school policy and that you were following it sounds like you felt as if you had to buy-in to the system. Even though it was the tradition at the school to look the other way when students don't meet the standards (which I doubt is official policy) from Haberman's view, the benefits are for the teachers by not having to deal with confrontation. The long-term impact on the students are, from Haberman's stance, quite alarming. It's hard to imagine what the "grain of salt" would be within this scenario.
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