Q: Once again, my district has changed its grading policy. Apart from having to retool how I do things, for the umpteenth time, it’s now much harder to fail a student, even if they do next to no work and barely (if ever) come to class. I understand that districts don’t want to fail kids who are in bad situations and unable to complete work for reasons beyond their control, but many other students will take advantage of these lax rules — and what message are we sending when we lower standards on a whim? Do we really want to inflate students’ grades and pass them on to the next class, even if they haven’t mastered the given knowledge and skills? How on earth does that serve them? I’m sick already of being scapegoated for the failures of distance learning. This only sets me up to be blamed again when kids return next year (fingers crossed!) and struggle in my class, since they never learned the previous year’s material. It seems to me that the district is just messing around with numbers so it can pretend things are OK.
The main reason my district made this latest change, I suspect, is to avoid the negative media coverage that we’ve seen in other districts with high failure rates. But that seems disingenuous and counterproductive. Shouldn’t we just do everything on the up and up, see what we’re dealing with, and use that data to meet kids where they are, rather than give them grades they don’t deserve? What do you think?
A: I understand your frustration. It’s hard enough to learn new systems and approaches, let alone to be asked to switch gears midyear. But I also think you might be ascribing the wrong motives to the decision makers and missing some of the nuance. The recent school performance data have revealed startling inequities. In Virginia’s Fairfax County Schools, for instance, the number of middle and high school students failing two of more classes has jumped 83% overall since classes moved online. That’s a startling figure, but it looks much worse once you disaggregate the data. According to the district’s internal analysis, the rate of failing two or more classes has increased 111% among students with disabilities, 375% among economically disadvantaged students, 383% among English learners, and 400% among Latinx students. Students who were performing well before the pandemic have continued to perform well (actually, even better than expected) during distance learning, the analysis showed. But for those who were not doing well before COVID-19, performance has gotten much worse.
There are real repercussions for kids with failing grades, from the emotional to the practical. Motivated students whose grades drop precipitously, often for reasons beyond their control, might lose motivation entirely. For high school students, this could also mean losing out on life-changing opportunities. In the spring, for instance, the University of California system temporarily suspended letter grade requirements for students applying for a coveted spot at one of the UC colleges. But this year, the system has gone back to requiring a minimum GPA, and it will no longer accept pass/fail or credit/no credit grades. For the countless students whose GPA is taking a hit this year (again, through no fault of their own), this could kill their chance for college admission, or for scholarship support. That’s why some districts in the state have adapted new grading policies they hope will minimize the impact on students who ought to be strong candidates for the UC system.
It’s a tough balance. How do you keep to the same academic standards while at the same time trying not to penalize students who are failing for reasons such as homelessness or a lack of consistent WiFi access? And while teachers, understandably, want to maintain grading integrity, to what extent is it reasonable to expect them, given all of the instructional challenges they face, to teach the same material, and teach it as effectively, as before?
Keep in mind that students perform better when they feel competent and believe that their teachers believe in them. As Lucy Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, recently told The New York Times, children “need people to see what they are doing, to cheer them on, to rally them to care and respond. None of us likes to do something we think we’re failing at . . . hope is really important.”
To answer your question, then, it’s hard enough to instill hope from a distance, so I think educators should do everything possible to avoid failing students. Some kids may take advantage of relaxed deadlines or opportunities for retakes, but the vast majority of children want to do the work, learn, and do well. Yes, we’ll need to make up for lost ground when these kids are back in school, but that’s going to be far more difficult to pull off if our students no longer want to be at school — or aren’t there at all.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phyllis L. Fagell
Phyllis L. Fagell is the school counselor at Landon School in Washington, D.C., a therapist at the Chrysalis Group in Bethesda, Md., and the author of the Career Confidential blog. She is also the author of Middle School Matters and Middle School Superpowers, available at https://amzn.to/3Pw0pcu.
