Is it too easy for students to get by at your school?
Do you think your school does enough to hold all students accountable academically and behaviorally?
For example, what happens if you miss several days of school? Are you required to make them up somehow? Are your grades affected? Do you risk being held back if you are absent too many times?
What about if you don’t turn in an assignment? Do you get a zero? Are you expected to redo the work? Or can you still easily pass without completing all of your tasks? In the Opinion essay “Teachers Can’t Hold Students Accountable. It’s Making the Job Miserable,” Jessica Grose writes about responses to a questionnaire in which she asked teachers and parents what they thought had changed about teaching. She writes:
I mostly heard back from teachers, and one of their consistent themes was that they felt they could no longer hold students accountable academically or behaviorally because of pressure from snowplow parents and bad district policies.
Ms. Grose continues: A typical response came from Russell, a public high school teacher on the East Coast. He said that when a big chunk of the graduating class “has a 4.0, grades are meaningless,” adding: Failure is such a bad and degrading word — and the kids know it. It takes way more work to hold a student accountable than to simply pass him/her. Even if a kid does nothing all year, we are encouraged to find a way to pass him/her. And then, of course, when a student does not perform, parents often want to know what we are going to do about it — not what their child can do.
Part of the issue is grade inflation. As Chalkbeat reported last year, “Even as students have taken higher-level courses, their G.P.A.s have steadily risen — from an average of 2.68 in 1990 to 2.94 in 2000, 3.0 in 2009 and 3.11 in 2019.” At the same time, test scores on national exams have dropped or remained unchanged, which suggests that students aren’t actually better prepared in math, English or science than they were 20 years ago. The lack of basic skills has been evident for a while: Many two- and four-year colleges devote significant resources to remedial education.
This overall state of play has become more alarming since 2020, given how far behind schoolchildren are now. What’s not helping? The policies many school districts are adopting that make it nearly impossible for low-performing students to fail — they have a grading floor under them, they know it, and that allows them to game the system. Several teachers whom I spoke with or who responded to my questionnaire mentioned policies stating that students cannot get lower than a 50 percent on any assignment, even if the work was never done, in some cases. A teacher from Chapel Hill, N.C., who filled in the questionnaire’s “name” field with “No, no, no,” said the 50 percent floor and “NO attendance enforcement” leads to a scenario where “we get students who skip over 100 days, have a 50 percent, complete a couple of assignments to tip over into 59.5 percent and then pass.”
It’s hard to find national data about how widespread this kind of 50 percent rule is (and the experts I spoke with said they didn’t know of anyone who was systematically collecting this information). But policies like this have been adopted by districts from Washington, D.C., to Boise, Idaho. Jay Matthews, The Washington Post’s education columnist, has written about the trend toward easing grading and assignments, calling it “the most divisive educational issue in the country” that we’re not hearing enough about. When I followed up with Russell, the high school teacher, over the phone, he said of his students, “Even if they plagiarize or cheat on something, well, it’s a 50 percent.” If they get two out of 10 on a quiz, he said, that’s automatically bumped up to a five out of 10. He said grades are no longer tied to attendance, and that grading quarters are merged, so some students “quickly found that if they could have a passing grade in the first one or two quarters, they could just stop coming to school.”
Laura Warren is a middle-school reading specialist who taught in rural Virginia and suburban Massachusetts before she retired in June. In Massachusetts, she said, her school had adopted a 50 percent policy. Over the phone she told me, “I see the good in it because you want a kid to be able to dig themself out of a hole, but then again, you didn’t do an assignment. You didn’t do a whole assignment. And should you be getting a 50 for that?” Warren also told me that in her relatively affluent Massachusetts district, parents were hyper-focused on grades and frequently pushed back when they weren’t happy, which led to many teachers playing it safe because they didn’t want the agita, including possible escalation to the principal. “Tests could be retaken and assignments perfected. No failing grades. If teachers are conscientious, this creates an enormous amount of work. If teachers are not conscientious, kids are just sliding by,” she wrote in the questionnaire. “Teachers know it and kids know it.”
My students, read the entire essay and then tell me: How does your school experience compare with what you read about in the essay in terms of issues like grade inflation, policies that require all students to pass a class regardless of missing assignments, parents questioning teachers and absences not counting against students? Laura Warren, a retired reading specialist, describes her mixed feelings about the 50 percent policy. Does anything that she says resonate with you? Do you think this requirement is fair? In what ways does it have the potential to help? In what ways could it hurt? Later on in the essay, Ms. Grose presents evidence that shows that even as chronic absentee rates are rising, high school graduation rates are increasing. Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, says that one explanation could be “shifting, post-pandemic norms around grade inflation, classroom discipline and academic standards.” Do you think this is a plausible explanation? Does your classroom experience today feel different than it did before the coronavirus pandemic? If so, how? What ideas do you have for why school might feel different post-Covid?
Do you think schools need to do more to hold students accountable behaviorally and academically? If so, why, and what changes do you think need to be made? If not, why not? Many teachers say policies like the 50 percent requirement have made their jobs miserable. Do you think your teachers would agree? Would you consider teaching as a career? Why or why not? If not, what could make it more appealing to you?
Here goes my personal opinion: Thinking of schools holding kid more accountable can go many ways. But in my opinion I think in some situations they should. Kid go to school to learn not having drama and fights in school. An if the school held those students more accountable maybe less of it will happen. An show other people not to do it.
Teachers work on shaping their students into being a better student but there inst that much a teacher can do. Its not just about pushing the students to a certain degree but students need to work on responsibility's and behaviors. If I student is trying their hardest to be successful then the teacher should help build them up. Teachers are trying the best they can allowing students to receive extra credit or help if needed. If parents get upset at teachers for their child doing poorly, I dont think its the teachers fault if they are trying to help and push the student.
The thought of whether or not our schools are holding kids accountable academically and behaviorally has a big impact on our youth of the country. Accountability is a very important factor and is a trait that is vital to success in business or any kind of job. It’s important that kids are being properly taught the Importance of time management and responsibility. I agree that accountability is a very crucial trait to have because my experience at my school really teaches accountability a being responsible for yourself.
I agree with Lauren Warren when she describes that the 50 percent policy has good and bad aspects to it. Yes, as a parent and a teacher, you want to give the student opportunities to “dig themself out of a hole.” Yes, as a parent and a teacher, you want to do everything you can to prevent the student from failing. But at the end of the day, it is the student who is trying to achieve good grades in order to become successful in later life—therefore it should be the student who puts in the work. The teacher constructs the stairs ascending towards the future, and the student climbs them. Yet, some readers may challenge my view by insisting that this policy is fair; they suggest that it is fair that students get credit for, quite frankly, doing nothing. There certainly are valid reasons that these policies help when it comes to mental health, absences due to sickness or vacation, and the inability to complete homework because of sports. Yet, this policy provides convenience for students, allowing them to take advantage of this free credit. Parents often blame the teachers for their students' bad grades, but in reality, teachers are doing everything they can and more [than they should] for the students. I feel that schools don’t need to do more to hold students accountable. I think this because going to school is already half of our day gone, with homework too. Also most students are involved in sports or clubs- schoolwork isn’t always on their minds. Schools holding students more accountable than they do right now would cause students to be way more stressed out than they should be. Being stressed out is not what parents or the students want. Students want to live their life and want to be free, schools holding students more accountable would take away that freedom and lock the students up in a cage.
In my opinion schools don’t need to do more to hold students accountable. For instance, schools already put a lot of pressure on students. For example most students have after school sports and activities meaning they don’t have a lot of time to do homework. What teachers have to understand is every kid doesn’t want to go home after school and do more schoolwork, after they just got home from a long day of doing so. To sum it up teachers and schools shouldn’t expect more out of students when they come to school everyday for 7 hours to learn. After school should be the time for students to relax. The problem with modern day education is that people don’t see problems with their children when they’re not doing well, they see problems in how they learn that don’t exist. This has caused educators to make the rules around parents so that while their kid fails to learn and grasp concepts, they can still pass and make things up with little to no effort. Like it said in the article, G.P.A. doesn’t matter anymore. People can get their A’s and B’s without doing assignments. While there are some positives to these rule changes, like being able to catch up easier and having more resources to help understand concepts, for the people who do work hard for their grades, it just ruins them because the people who took regular Physics got a 89.5% without doing any work and they cheated on tests, while people who took AP Physics got a 79.44%, one because they couldn’t cheat, two because the honors teachers, for the most part, are much harder graders. This brings me to the point that there is an opportunity to be pushed in a harder class. Honors teachers often have honors students, whose parents don’t blame teachers. They blame their kids, but the problem with honors students being pushed is that they still need to have the same rules as the regular students, which limits them. It’s hard to create leaders who exceed and knowledgeable people when you put the same ceiling on everyone, regardless of how high it was before.
According to the text, a teacher from North Carolina Chapel Hill, believes that “no attendance enforcement leads to a scenario where we get students who skip over 100 days.” Teachers and schools believe they should hold students more accountable or else they will slack off and skip school. Teachers are also struggling with kids who don’t do any work and are failing but then want and expect their teacher to bump them up so you pass. I believe that the student’s should keep themselves accountable and it is the students responsibility to not skip and keep their grades up. If a student wants to skip, I believe they are accepting that there will be some consequences to that. Like being behind on the class and not having the best grade. All in all, the schools believe they should hold students more accountable while I have the opinion that it us up to the student to hold themselves responsible for keeping their grades up and attending class.
The 50% policy seems to be a helpful policy for students and I think it should stay that way. The policy allows people to succeed even if they missed a couple of assignments, but it still reflects negatively on their grade and holds dedicated students accountable. Some may suggest that this policy makes school ridiculously easy to cheat for some unmotivated students, and yet the real problem of attendance is not addressed here. The 50% policy encourages and assists students, where this lack of attendance is the real issue. This policy may cause harm by encouraging students to ignore school as it comes easy, but this is not the case. I think the 50% policy has the potential to enable struggling students to succeed. This policy is not something that should be removed, however, something needs to be done about attendance issues. I believe that skipping school is the real issue and a requirement should be implemented where you can’t skip a certain number of days or you will fail the grade. This will help ensure no one can cheat the system easily, and the 50% policy can stay in action.
The question of whether schools should take on a more proactive role in holding students accountable is a topic that certainly sparks important discussions. It's not just about pushing students to meet their academic responsibilities, but also about preparing them for the real world, where accountability is a vital skill. In an age where distractions are plentiful and responsibilities can sometimes be neglected, schools can play a crucial part in teaching students the importance of responsibility, time management, and the consequences of their actions. By fostering a culture of accountability, we're not only shaping better students but also future citizens who understand the value of taking ownership of their actions and their impact on the world.
For example, what happens if you miss several days of school? Are you required to make them up somehow? Are your grades affected? Do you risk being held back if you are absent too many times?
What about if you don’t turn in an assignment? Do you get a zero? Are you expected to redo the work? Or can you still easily pass without completing all of your tasks? In the Opinion essay “Teachers Can’t Hold Students Accountable. It’s Making the Job Miserable,” Jessica Grose writes about responses to a questionnaire in which she asked teachers and parents what they thought had changed about teaching. She writes:
I mostly heard back from teachers, and one of their consistent themes was that they felt they could no longer hold students accountable academically or behaviorally because of pressure from snowplow parents and bad district policies.
Ms. Grose continues: A typical response came from Russell, a public high school teacher on the East Coast. He said that when a big chunk of the graduating class “has a 4.0, grades are meaningless,” adding: Failure is such a bad and degrading word — and the kids know it. It takes way more work to hold a student accountable than to simply pass him/her. Even if a kid does nothing all year, we are encouraged to find a way to pass him/her. And then, of course, when a student does not perform, parents often want to know what we are going to do about it — not what their child can do.
Part of the issue is grade inflation. As Chalkbeat reported last year, “Even as students have taken higher-level courses, their G.P.A.s have steadily risen — from an average of 2.68 in 1990 to 2.94 in 2000, 3.0 in 2009 and 3.11 in 2019.” At the same time, test scores on national exams have dropped or remained unchanged, which suggests that students aren’t actually better prepared in math, English or science than they were 20 years ago. The lack of basic skills has been evident for a while: Many two- and four-year colleges devote significant resources to remedial education.
This overall state of play has become more alarming since 2020, given how far behind schoolchildren are now. What’s not helping? The policies many school districts are adopting that make it nearly impossible for low-performing students to fail — they have a grading floor under them, they know it, and that allows them to game the system. Several teachers whom I spoke with or who responded to my questionnaire mentioned policies stating that students cannot get lower than a 50 percent on any assignment, even if the work was never done, in some cases. A teacher from Chapel Hill, N.C., who filled in the questionnaire’s “name” field with “No, no, no,” said the 50 percent floor and “NO attendance enforcement” leads to a scenario where “we get students who skip over 100 days, have a 50 percent, complete a couple of assignments to tip over into 59.5 percent and then pass.”
It’s hard to find national data about how widespread this kind of 50 percent rule is (and the experts I spoke with said they didn’t know of anyone who was systematically collecting this information). But policies like this have been adopted by districts from Washington, D.C., to Boise, Idaho. Jay Matthews, The Washington Post’s education columnist, has written about the trend toward easing grading and assignments, calling it “the most divisive educational issue in the country” that we’re not hearing enough about. When I followed up with Russell, the high school teacher, over the phone, he said of his students, “Even if they plagiarize or cheat on something, well, it’s a 50 percent.” If they get two out of 10 on a quiz, he said, that’s automatically bumped up to a five out of 10. He said grades are no longer tied to attendance, and that grading quarters are merged, so some students “quickly found that if they could have a passing grade in the first one or two quarters, they could just stop coming to school.”
Laura Warren is a middle-school reading specialist who taught in rural Virginia and suburban Massachusetts before she retired in June. In Massachusetts, she said, her school had adopted a 50 percent policy. Over the phone she told me, “I see the good in it because you want a kid to be able to dig themself out of a hole, but then again, you didn’t do an assignment. You didn’t do a whole assignment. And should you be getting a 50 for that?” Warren also told me that in her relatively affluent Massachusetts district, parents were hyper-focused on grades and frequently pushed back when they weren’t happy, which led to many teachers playing it safe because they didn’t want the agita, including possible escalation to the principal. “Tests could be retaken and assignments perfected. No failing grades. If teachers are conscientious, this creates an enormous amount of work. If teachers are not conscientious, kids are just sliding by,” she wrote in the questionnaire. “Teachers know it and kids know it.”
My students, read the entire essay and then tell me: How does your school experience compare with what you read about in the essay in terms of issues like grade inflation, policies that require all students to pass a class regardless of missing assignments, parents questioning teachers and absences not counting against students? Laura Warren, a retired reading specialist, describes her mixed feelings about the 50 percent policy. Does anything that she says resonate with you? Do you think this requirement is fair? In what ways does it have the potential to help? In what ways could it hurt? Later on in the essay, Ms. Grose presents evidence that shows that even as chronic absentee rates are rising, high school graduation rates are increasing. Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, says that one explanation could be “shifting, post-pandemic norms around grade inflation, classroom discipline and academic standards.” Do you think this is a plausible explanation? Does your classroom experience today feel different than it did before the coronavirus pandemic? If so, how? What ideas do you have for why school might feel different post-Covid?
Do you think schools need to do more to hold students accountable behaviorally and academically? If so, why, and what changes do you think need to be made? If not, why not? Many teachers say policies like the 50 percent requirement have made their jobs miserable. Do you think your teachers would agree? Would you consider teaching as a career? Why or why not? If not, what could make it more appealing to you?
Here goes my personal opinion: Thinking of schools holding kid more accountable can go many ways. But in my opinion I think in some situations they should. Kid go to school to learn not having drama and fights in school. An if the school held those students more accountable maybe less of it will happen. An show other people not to do it.
Teachers work on shaping their students into being a better student but there inst that much a teacher can do. Its not just about pushing the students to a certain degree but students need to work on responsibility's and behaviors. If I student is trying their hardest to be successful then the teacher should help build them up. Teachers are trying the best they can allowing students to receive extra credit or help if needed. If parents get upset at teachers for their child doing poorly, I dont think its the teachers fault if they are trying to help and push the student.
The thought of whether or not our schools are holding kids accountable academically and behaviorally has a big impact on our youth of the country. Accountability is a very important factor and is a trait that is vital to success in business or any kind of job. It’s important that kids are being properly taught the Importance of time management and responsibility. I agree that accountability is a very crucial trait to have because my experience at my school really teaches accountability a being responsible for yourself.
I agree with Lauren Warren when she describes that the 50 percent policy has good and bad aspects to it. Yes, as a parent and a teacher, you want to give the student opportunities to “dig themself out of a hole.” Yes, as a parent and a teacher, you want to do everything you can to prevent the student from failing. But at the end of the day, it is the student who is trying to achieve good grades in order to become successful in later life—therefore it should be the student who puts in the work. The teacher constructs the stairs ascending towards the future, and the student climbs them. Yet, some readers may challenge my view by insisting that this policy is fair; they suggest that it is fair that students get credit for, quite frankly, doing nothing. There certainly are valid reasons that these policies help when it comes to mental health, absences due to sickness or vacation, and the inability to complete homework because of sports. Yet, this policy provides convenience for students, allowing them to take advantage of this free credit. Parents often blame the teachers for their students' bad grades, but in reality, teachers are doing everything they can and more [than they should] for the students. I feel that schools don’t need to do more to hold students accountable. I think this because going to school is already half of our day gone, with homework too. Also most students are involved in sports or clubs- schoolwork isn’t always on their minds. Schools holding students more accountable than they do right now would cause students to be way more stressed out than they should be. Being stressed out is not what parents or the students want. Students want to live their life and want to be free, schools holding students more accountable would take away that freedom and lock the students up in a cage.
In my opinion schools don’t need to do more to hold students accountable. For instance, schools already put a lot of pressure on students. For example most students have after school sports and activities meaning they don’t have a lot of time to do homework. What teachers have to understand is every kid doesn’t want to go home after school and do more schoolwork, after they just got home from a long day of doing so. To sum it up teachers and schools shouldn’t expect more out of students when they come to school everyday for 7 hours to learn. After school should be the time for students to relax. The problem with modern day education is that people don’t see problems with their children when they’re not doing well, they see problems in how they learn that don’t exist. This has caused educators to make the rules around parents so that while their kid fails to learn and grasp concepts, they can still pass and make things up with little to no effort. Like it said in the article, G.P.A. doesn’t matter anymore. People can get their A’s and B’s without doing assignments. While there are some positives to these rule changes, like being able to catch up easier and having more resources to help understand concepts, for the people who do work hard for their grades, it just ruins them because the people who took regular Physics got a 89.5% without doing any work and they cheated on tests, while people who took AP Physics got a 79.44%, one because they couldn’t cheat, two because the honors teachers, for the most part, are much harder graders. This brings me to the point that there is an opportunity to be pushed in a harder class. Honors teachers often have honors students, whose parents don’t blame teachers. They blame their kids, but the problem with honors students being pushed is that they still need to have the same rules as the regular students, which limits them. It’s hard to create leaders who exceed and knowledgeable people when you put the same ceiling on everyone, regardless of how high it was before.
According to the text, a teacher from North Carolina Chapel Hill, believes that “no attendance enforcement leads to a scenario where we get students who skip over 100 days.” Teachers and schools believe they should hold students more accountable or else they will slack off and skip school. Teachers are also struggling with kids who don’t do any work and are failing but then want and expect their teacher to bump them up so you pass. I believe that the student’s should keep themselves accountable and it is the students responsibility to not skip and keep their grades up. If a student wants to skip, I believe they are accepting that there will be some consequences to that. Like being behind on the class and not having the best grade. All in all, the schools believe they should hold students more accountable while I have the opinion that it us up to the student to hold themselves responsible for keeping their grades up and attending class.
The 50% policy seems to be a helpful policy for students and I think it should stay that way. The policy allows people to succeed even if they missed a couple of assignments, but it still reflects negatively on their grade and holds dedicated students accountable. Some may suggest that this policy makes school ridiculously easy to cheat for some unmotivated students, and yet the real problem of attendance is not addressed here. The 50% policy encourages and assists students, where this lack of attendance is the real issue. This policy may cause harm by encouraging students to ignore school as it comes easy, but this is not the case. I think the 50% policy has the potential to enable struggling students to succeed. This policy is not something that should be removed, however, something needs to be done about attendance issues. I believe that skipping school is the real issue and a requirement should be implemented where you can’t skip a certain number of days or you will fail the grade. This will help ensure no one can cheat the system easily, and the 50% policy can stay in action.
The question of whether schools should take on a more proactive role in holding students accountable is a topic that certainly sparks important discussions. It's not just about pushing students to meet their academic responsibilities, but also about preparing them for the real world, where accountability is a vital skill. In an age where distractions are plentiful and responsibilities can sometimes be neglected, schools can play a crucial part in teaching students the importance of responsibility, time management, and the consequences of their actions. By fostering a culture of accountability, we're not only shaping better students but also future citizens who understand the value of taking ownership of their actions and their impact on the world.
