This article in the WSJ pisses me off because the only reason public schools function at all is the integrity of teachers. Normandy and North Royalton had a few teachers who were layabouts or reprobates, but the vast majority thought that their subject was important and intended to hold their students accountable.
Teachers’ grading practices have changed and students’ grades have drifted up in recent years, a pandemic-era legacy that is being met with mixed reaction from educators across the country.
Grade inflation has been an issue for decades. Parents, students and administrators are generally in favor of grade inflation, with teachers trying to hold the line on accountability. A few teachers fold under the pressure.
For the most part, parents, students and administrators care about grades, and don’t care about learning. Teachers care about learning, but don’t care about grades. If the assessments are well designed, then the grades will accurately reflect what was learned.
Dating back to 2020, when the pandemic upended American education overnight, many schools have adopted a more lenient approach to grading.
I don’t stand behind any grades that were submitted during the Covid lock down. The principal at North Royalton had no interest in testing integrity. Remote students cheated like mad.
Some eliminated zeros or removed penalties for late work. Many teachers report “giving grace” to struggling students. Others say they have felt pressure from administrators to limit failure rates.
Teachers did not invent “giving grace”, the code phrase for relaxing standards. It wasn’t our idea to accept late work up to the last week of the quarter or making 50% the lowest score for an assignment. All of these dodgy policies were forced on teacher by administrators.
A high quality journalist would talk to the administrators who forced teachers to adopt dishonest policies. This article talks to several teachers who are cautious about discussing grading policy, but no administrators are asked to defend these low standards.
And many school systems have enacted new policies that continue to affect students’ grades.
One increasingly common approach is a minimum grade—often 50%—for each assignment, even if a student doesn’t turn it in. Some educators say that a handful of zeros can decimate students’ grades and cause them to disengage from class.
The school systems adopted these policies, forcing them upon teachers. It isn’t clear who is meant as “educators”. It may be teachers, or it may be administrators. If a student has a 60% on all tests and quizzes, and doesn’t turn in a handful of assignments, the student deserves to fail.
Here is how grading actually works.
Students that actually engage in a class and try, are usually in the game. A standard grading scale is applied. 90% for an ‘A’, 80% for a ‘B’, and so on. Some teachers round. I didn’t because there is always a line. If an 89.5% is rounded to an ‘A’, then that is the line. My line was 90% because it seemed more honest. If a student was at a 58%, I might give them a ‘D’ if they had put in a good effort.
Students who weren’t in the high 50’s, probably were in the low 20’s. Those are students who don’t come to class, don’t pay attention when in class and do no outside work. Making a 50% the lowest score is not an effort to dismiss a handful of zeros. That can be done by with an honest policy to discard each student’s three lowest scores. The policy is an effort to get no effort students to pass through the system.
Students rarely need Physics to graduate, so poorly performing students drop my class by Thanksgiving. For required classes, especially non-honors classes, teachers are frequently lectured by administration if too many students fail. For the most part, the failing students put in no effort at all.
High-school grades have been rising for at least two decades. A U.S. Department of Education study found that the typical GPA of a high-school graduate had risen from 2.7 (a C+) in 1990 to 3.1 (over a B) in 2019. Teachers cite pressure from parents and administrators, as well as the heightened competitiveness of college admissions.
As I said. I have often heard parents and students reference competitive college admissions as the argument in favor of grade inflation. Nobody ever clearly says they are in favor of grade inflation.
Here are representative quotes from two different roles in education. This quote if from an English teacher in Arlington, Virginia.
“I can’t hold students accountable,” he said. “Then they graduate high school not really having learned certain things.”
High school teachers generally value the subject we teach. We think it’s important. If students are not accountable, then our effort the entire year was a charade.
Sarah Putnam, Arlington’s executive director for curriculum and instruction, said the new approach leads to more accurate grades. “A piece of work that is penalized because of the timing of the work no longer represents what the student knows about that content,” she said.
You see where the bullshit is coming from. This is from the curriculum director in that teacher’s district. The flaw in the logic may not be obvious.
Learning is cumulative. Next chapter builds on what is learned in the current chapter. Assignments and assessments are meant to fit together to support the student’s understanding. If a student submits an assignment from two months ago, it isn’t relevant. There may have been no point in doing the assignment because the class has advance much further into the content.
Public schools are riddled with dishonesty. Test re-takes, late assignments are always accepted, 50% is the lowest score and other progressive policies are designed to allow a student to graduate and possibly have a high GPA, without learning much.
Much more dishonest, students know that credit recovery is a low-effort, low-integrity method to get the credits needed to graduate.
Teachers aren’t happy.
Early on, I expected that some students would be unmotivated, lazy, apathetic or irresponsible. They paid me to make students a little better by the end of the year. Students are getting worse with progressive policies, but students aren’t the problem. Rather, students are always a problem, but that’s what we are there to fix. Most teachers understand the situation
Administrators, for the most part, know nothing about teaching. Their interest is in looking good on paper. The graduation rate and parental complaints are about all they care about.
Most of what pisses off teachers are administration policies that lower standards, lower student accountability and require us to be complicit in the dishonesty. Vouchers may be helpful in making administrators actually support our educational mission.
Any administrator that wanted to reduce grade inflation could implement a policy requiring a bell curve in student grades. With computerized grade books, this would be easy to verify. Any teacher who hands out too many F’s or too many A’s, could be asked to explain the imbalance.