I can’t speak to it - but I see what the kids are doing in school today far exceeds what was offered many years ago.
That said, it seems impossible to get a B - I kid - but in some places, not really. I come from a well off county.
I’m guessing the schools going from TO to test required is - deep down inside - because of what you bring up.
You can compare people with a test equally.
Thanks for sharing this article. Very interesting discussion. I was a bit puzzled by the following:
“Lowering standards, it is thought, can help narrow such achievement gaps.”
How does this line of reasoning work? Is it only about narrowing the graduation rates between advantaged and disadvantaged students?
For decades, the emphasis has been on improving graduation rates, so that may be it. Perhaps persistence is greater with positive reinforcement.
It’s hard then to know when “test scores go down” if the same population of students is being tested. I’d like to see scores by quartiles of the class rather than in aggregate. Is the top 25% doing as well?
Few schools serve all students equally well, nor do all policies.
There has been much in the news in my area about proficiency gaps in Math and English. There has been some rebound seen since Covid in English scores, but not in math. Our district is revamping the curriculum, adding help rooms, shrinking class sizes, and implementing new teaching strategies starting as early as Kindergarten. Educators felt that waiting until middle school was too late.
They are also changing the way they accelerate students. It’s entirely stats based now on their internal placement tests (which was how my D’s old district did it too). The data found that grades and teacher recommendations weren’t predictive enough of future math success.
Interestingly the university in our community also does placement testing for their incoming freshmen instead of relying on AP/SAT/ACT/IB scores.
I wish more people realized and did something about this. No one is going to fix the inequalities of education with adjusting college standards for different populations. What they need to do is invest in elementary education.
I can’t read the article beyond the first paragraph so it is hard to comment. That being said, in many respects my children’s HS education (we live in a UMC town in MA) has been more rigorous than my own (and I got a very good education). Despite that, our school (like most others - including private schools) suffers from grade inflation. Many kids see very few “B” grades in their HS career. HW and other “extra credit” assignments (from some, not all, teachers) bolster the grades of kids whose test scores are in the “B” range.
Our school has a new second chance learning policy. Goal is to make sure the students are learning the material - great. But it does make it so that grades are a measure of if the student learned the material eventually rather than will they succeed in a college that is faster paced and doesn’t have the same supports.
There is also talk about shoring up our pre-Ks and doing some free kindergarten readiness courses in the summer leading up to kindergarten and addressing the social issues (poverty, food insecurity, etc…) that contribute to students not being prepared.
What I thought was interesting was a conversation about “productive struggling” and striking the balance in the classroom where young students feel challenged in a way that they feel like they can succeed and not doomed to fail.
I think there is merit to that but you have to be able to recognize and accept that it will look different for every kid. IMO the public school system can generally address the top or the bottom but really struggles with taking care middle.
I agree. My kids were both very good students and I feel their needs were mostly met by the public school system. There were plenty of rigorous courses available, teachers were generally very good etc. There are also lots of supports in place for kids who struggle (I’ve been very lucky not to need that). Kids in the middle, however, are often overlooked.
Our district didn’t teach anything new March 2020 until end of year. My son was never taught certain math concepts in Algebra 2. He only found out when he was given tests that had “review” questions on them of stuff he never learned. So I am really not surprised that Math scores have not recovered yet. I was thinking it was just our Math teachers were just unkind and rigid when they told kids - you should know this you learned it last year. Is it that English has fewer concepts that are such critical building blocks that can be missing without someone knowing? It seems more universal than just my son’s school.
I agree with you that college admissions is not the place to look for fixing some educational inequalities. At the same time, I think conversations on CC tend to conflate the sort of college admissions policies, which impact students applying to selective schools with the sorts of K-12 inequalities that primarily impact students coming from impoverished communities. These are two different populations and as far as I can tell, very few students from high poverty schools are even considering applying to 4 year residential colleges let alone be admitted into them.
This topic seems timely given the profile of Jonathan Kozol in today’s NY Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/us/jonathan-kozol-school-inequality.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ck0.Mkw-.HQQrHYnHienA&smid=url-share
I have not read Kozol work in many years, but he is/was a remarkable ethnographer and I am glad that he continues to call out the retrenchment of racial and socioeconomic segregation in American schools, which has only gotten worse in recent decades after some progress in the eighties.
I can’t read the article past the first paragraph either, but I am very familiar with some of the issues at play. Of course, this being CC, many of the topics are As vs. Bs, but I tend to see the bigger issue with respect to passing students on to the next grade who are nowhere close to being prepared.
If a student earns a D or F from a teacher, principals are requiring teachers to provide documentation of all of the interventions they have provided (including outside of the regular class time), parent contacts they have made (calls, letters home, and conferences), etc. There is a substantial burden of proof placed on the teachers, no matter that the kid hasn’t turned in any homework, rarely turns in classwork, doesn’t submit any projects, and usually has low or failing test grades. And when the teachers do have extensive documentation, that still doesn’t mean that the administration won’t decide to promote the student to the next grade anyway (which is usually what happens in my experience). Students realize that they don’t have to do the work and they’ll be promoted anyway.
So why are these students being promoted? Because much of the research, especially between 1990-2010, indicated that retention wasn’t benefiting students and that it increased the chances of students dropping out, and a number of other ill-effects like schools only focusing on tested subjects, or moving less effective teachers to grades that aren’t high-stakes, etc. But some recent studies show that it’s a more nuanced situation than that.
For years I’ve thought that “high-stakes” requirements should be done every year. So many schools would pass unprepared students on in grades K-3 or grades 5-7 and then the 4th and 8th grade teachers (which were the high-stakes grades in my state) would end up having students with skills across an array of grade bands (with very few who actually had mastered the skills of the previous grade). It’s a lot easier for teachers to teach effectively when they have students who are within a grade level of each other rather than teaching one class with students of 4 different grade levels in it. And since those high-stakes years have gone away, we have 8th grade and high school teachers who have students whose skills are at the 3rd grade level or similar. The students are no longer with the teachers who have the expertise to help catch them up on the skills they never learned and the current work is so far above their heads. And if a teacher was actually wanting to teach grade level work and grade on the standard of the actual grade level, then many of the students would fail, bringing us back to the point in my 2nd paragraph.
For now, I’m trying to advocate within my school district to start requiring that students need to be at grade level to be promoted, or to be approaching grade level and then get a plan for remediation if they are to be promoted. And students who aren’t close to the grade level should be retained. Because when I see the ACT scores or AP results at the schools in our district, or see how many students are unable to graduate from high school because they can’t get a high enough grade on the graduation subject tests (and the state doesn’t even require scores on those tests to show grade level mastery), it’s extraordinarily depressing. A high school diploma from most of the schools in my district doesn’t mean very much, and that’s a travesty. And then people complain about crime rates, and it’s because the students who are leaving our school system haven’t been provided the skills that they need to be successful.
I’ll get off my soapbox now. /Rant momentarily over
For people interested in reading more about some of the retention studies, this is a quick article:
This is sad. But, people will respond to incentives and, in particular, they will tend to optimize against whatever metrics are set up to measure success. If school systems are judged on graduation rate or the gap in graduation rates between whites and blacks, they can improve education (hard) or lower graduation standards (much easier).
If schools in poorer districts don’t have the resources (money, parents, culture) and the students in these districts don’t get the resources (food in some cases, parental involvement, culture of education in some cases), it is not unlikely that such schools would get weaker performance from their students. That needs to be addressed as early as possible. Waiting to address this with college admissions makes no sense. I’m no expert, but my understanding is that the data show that attending a Head Start program really makes a difference. So the first place to invest is very early.
We had the Metco program (mentioned in the Kozol article) in our school and would often be a host family for a Metco kid. Those kids had to get up incredibly early and take more than one bus to get to school (for a 7:30 AM start or something like that). And, if they played sports, the late bus out got them home quite a ways later than our kids. We sometimes heard about the difficult times the kids had, not feeling that they did not fit in at our almost totally white school but also no longer fitting in in their own neighborhoods. But, as the article mentions, I believe that HS graduation and college attendance rates were significantly higher.
ShawSon attended our town high school, which is typically rated in the top 10 in Massachusetts, which I described at the time as a cathedral to grade-giving and grade-getting. The teachers were focused on the metrics or assumed the parents were (and the teachers were going to get hammered by parents if their kids got Bs or Cs). On parents night, each teacher went over the grading criteria (and various other bureaucratic rules). In contrast, ShawD was at what I think was at an outstanding private school for middle school. On parents night (that same year), her French teacher described what she was trying to accomplish, how she would do it, what kind of work the parents should expect the kid to be doing, etc. It was about education, not grading – and those two are different. The difference was striking.
An aside: What was also striking was ShawD’s experience. She took three years of French at that middle school. The kids she went to elementary school and who continued in our town’s middle school also took French for three years. She and some of her elementary school friends applied and were admitted to a private high school in the same town. The students from the public middle school were assigned to first year French. ShawD was assigned to fourth year French and had no difficulty.
There was a charter school a few towns away that was called an Essential School. In each subject area, students were required to achieve mastery before moving on. So no grades, IIRC, just evidence of mastering the material of a course or unit (not sure what words they used). So, if you were really strong in say math, you might achieve mastery of a unit in three weeks while other kids might need six months. You wouldn’t have to wait to move to the next unit and others would not be promoted until they had mastered the material.
It struck me that this is how education should be organized. We applied for both of our kids, but ShawSon wasn’t admitted in the lottery until sophomore or probably junior year in HS and the HS was working well for him giving his combo of learning disabilities and giftedness. So we did not switch. I do wish he had been able to attend. More importantly, I wonder if that approach could be transferred to schools more generally so we would not have to deal with the issue of whether or not to promote kids who are not proficient in the material.
Wow! Is that a district specific thing? Students get Ds and Fs all the time in our school district, including in high school. I remember that S23 was nervous about taking AP Physics C because so many students had received D or F grades in that class the previous year. (Our AP classes seem to be graded pretty strictly.)
Heterogeneous learning in classrooms is the latest hot issue at our high school which is pitting parents against administration. Perception is that lower level students will struggle and higher level students will not be challenged enough. Seems to be the latest trend in education to address equity.
Pop culture has references to this. The story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut comes to mind. Probably more near the mark is the Disney/Pixar film The Incredibles, where the envious and vindictive villain, Syndrome, remarks, “When everyone is super, then no one will be.” Or something along those lines.
Ours get graded per the rubric but the questions are often written by the teacher, or hand picked from the harder ones, from older tests. And they do not get the AP curve.
As an elementary school teacher, I believe the kids today are amazing, just as bright, well behaved, and hardworking as 20 years ago. What we expect students to be “taught” is much more challenging, however, the expectation that students will be meet those challenges is horrifically nonexistent. Much of these low expectations are from my school district, school admin, parents, and most certainly the community. It is discouraging, the kids are so capable, but their is no need for them to reach their potential.