"Everybody has won and all must have prizes."
Posted on 05/18/2024 7:52:58 AM PDT by karpov
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.
Dating back to 2020, when the pandemic upended American education overnight, many schools have adopted a more lenient approach to grading. 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.
Higher grades have come even as students’ test scores and attendance rates have dropped.
A study in Washington state found that in the 2021-22 school year, high-school grades were at or above levels seen before the pandemic. A national analysis of the class of 2022 found that among students who took the ACT, high-school grades had risen, even as ACT scores had dipped.
It is a trend that has sparked a debate among educators. Some see a lowering of standards, while others see a reasonable response to postpandemic challenges. And many teachers see both sides.
“We kept letting the line go further and further, and now we’ve got to pull it back in,” said Nicholas Ferroni, a high-school history teacher in New Jersey. He has tightened his grading practices this year, “but there is that level of empathy and compassion that I definitely showed a lot more of during the pandemic, which still trickles into my teaching and my methods today.”
After school buildings shut down in March of 2020, failing grades nearly vanished. Teachers and policymakers said this was a necessary response to pandemic chaos and the struggle of some students to access online instruction.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
This will create sub par students that won’t compete well against students from other nations who haven’t dropped quality requirements
Americans will become second rate in our own country
“I got all A in doctoring!” sez the Didn’tEarnIt hire as he brings out the hacksaw for your operation.
Long-time public high school teacher here. Like most teachers, I had high standards. (And yes, there are exceptions. But it is most.)
Never once did a principal commend me for holding those high standards. But I sure did get indirect pressure loosen them. And that’s because principals and superintendents with low failure rates in their schools get promotions and bonuses.
Finally the school district decided to institute a policy: No test score can be less than 50%. So if a student puts his name on the paper then goes to sleep, presto! He has just earned 50 points.
I tried to ignore that policy, as did many of my fellow teachers. But the district was too smart for us. Any grade less than 50 entered into the school computer was automatically changed to 50.
This was all pre-Covid.
Then companies will hire those with lower GPAs.
There’s a lot of DEI in the company I work for and the difference between DEI and non DEI hires today is out of this world
I know of two kids right off top of my head lost full ride scholarships first year at school. It benefits the school to bring them in ten drop payment. It also benefits the school to have them succeed so they have to be aware their high school teacher that coddled them or didn’t want to deal with their parents who think life ends at getting that scholarship, inflated their grades
They have to show up and bring it. No partying. No long phone talks with enmeshed love interests. Good food and sleep. Sports. Sleep. And no blaming the instructor. That’s for losers
There’s non of that in a good focused masters program. Those kids have all been weeded out
It starts young. Positive guidance. No blaming. Solid math, language and literature. Without classic lit they don’t know people, pitfalls, character, whom to trust, who are the villains how do they behave not WHY (someone all of tge 7 deadly sins. Tge how they got there is sick and boring)
GPA is meaningless without a solid foundation - mind pathway building) and self knowledge in study habits
Letting middle schoolers fail is not always a bad thing. If they have any value for school they’ll figure out how to avoid failure on their own
College Participation GPAs!!! How ‘bout that! The Straw Man’s brain.
“ principals and superintendents with low failure rates in their schools get promotions and bonuses.”
Those principals are not working to educate students.
Duplicitous lying sleazeballs raising our kids. Preparing the future of this country
This is why teachers despise standardized testing.
Trump’s fault. The buck stopped with him, but he turned it over to the little snake and the scarf-lady.
"Everybody has won and all must have prizes."
So all the children were above average!
> Those principals are not working to educate students. <
100% correct! It’s really sad, but most principals I’ve seen are careerists. They see their position as just a rung on the ladder. Their primary goal is not to run a quality school, but to move up on the ladder.
By the way, that’s why there is chaos in so many public schools. Principals are evaluated on suspension rates as well as on failure rates.
So violent and disruptive students are rarely suspended.
That makes it tough for teachers. But the ones who suffer the most are the good kids, the ones who come to school to learn. And even in the worst city schools, most of the kids are good kids.
They are cheated out of an education.
I am very surprised that the tests haven’t been watered down to match the caliber of those taking it ... so it looks like the little darlins are by golly just as smart as they think they are.
“Some see a lowering of standards,”
That is how I see it. Typical of Democrats.
Ah, Lake Liberals-Be-Gone (if only!!), where all the little turds are above average.
Some universities lately have been combining their Art school with their Math or Science school so that the Art school leaders can claim that their students get good paying jobs after graduation.
I heard under Biden, Grade inflation is up 30 to 40 percent, of course the Biden administration denies it’s that high…..
The fact is, people will not test the same, and those that don’t excel will suffer low self-esteem. This has been deemed unacceptable. Those that cannot keep up will be promoted. They effectively have been denied an education and won’t realize it until they hit the employment wall.
I took a course in electronic communication. It was basically a course to prepare you to take the FCC license exam. I thought I was learning electronics. I graduated and went for a job interview. To my embarrassment, I discovered that I in fact knew nothing about electronics. I tucked my tail and went back to school. I took a proper electronics course and then proceeded to make a good living in electronics repair. It is not a good thing to discover one has been mis-educated. I feel sorry for them.
This was all pre-Covid.
For those who do not know, NCLB decreed that by a certain future date all children would be ‘proficient’ or above in reading and math. By all children, they meant all children regardless of handicap, intelligence, proficiency in English, poverty, whatever. Each year the passing requirements for schools was raised.
Since common sense tells everyone that like height, athletic ability and everything else, ability to do well in school varies from one person to the next. The only ways to achieve this impossible goal were to ‘teach to the test’, lower what was considered ‘proficient’ and to cheat. Some districts/states did all three.
NCLB was abandoned when it became clear that its goal was impossible, but the philosophy behind it remains.
The small school where I used to teach has two teachers whose only job is to hound kids into doing their work. These are not special ed teachers, they are dedicated to the kids who don’t or won’t do their assignments. Late work is given the same grade as work turned in on time and second and third chances are given on tests where kids can change their ‘wrong’ answers.
I get little comfort in knowing that current ‘graduates’ will be my attendants in the nursing home.
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