SCHOOLS EXCEL AT MEDIOCRITY
The good news: Georgia’s high school graduation rate this year increased (ever so slightly) to 84.4%. That’s a “historic” high and marks a consistent increase from 2011 when the rate was 67%.
The not-so-good news: Those graduation rates paper over the fact that many of those “grads” have not absorbed classroom material.
My AJC colleague, education columnist Maureen Downey, tossed a little ice water on the graduation party with a story headlined, “Let’s pause before cheering Georgia’s high school graduation rate.” She noted that the rates are accompanied by chronic absenteeism, flagging test scores and grade inflation.
She wrote that teachers are passing out A’s and B’s like Halloween candy but standardized test scores do not mirror any such improvement. And teachers increasingly must give students second, third or however many chances they need to boost dismal grades.
Last week, Fox 5 aired a story saying Atlanta Public Schools issued a memo telling teachers not to give students a zero for missing an assignment. Nope, they should be afforded a score of 50.
Verdaillia Turner, president of the Georgia Federation of Teachers and a former Atlanta school teacher, told me such a policy affects all students, not just the laggards.
“It discourages top students; they get lazy, too. They can say, ‘I’ll just let this one fly,’” she said. Later, she added, “We are dumbing down our society. We have to escalate and elevate our conversations.”
“Academic rigor should exist; I don’t want a surgeon who got a C, or a pilot,” Turner said. “We start celebrating children early. We celebrate mediocrity.”
For a generation, kids have been taught that everyone is special.
But if everyone is special, then no one is.
An APS spokesman told me the directive has been around since around 2015. He said getting a zero “makes it almost impossible to come back from” and pass a class. “This at least gives them some chance for success.”
We all know that COVID hollowed out at least a year of learning, putting many students at a marked disadvantage. And now they’ve moved up to a higher grade, or year of college, but are lagging in the skills they should have at that level.
A veteran elementary teacher I know said holding back students, as has been suggested, is no panacea. That leads to other conundrums, she said, like junior high students who can drive to school or a 5th grader who must go to the principal’s office to breast feed.
It has long been documented that students from poor families, or who are African American, score lower on standardized tests. It’s an achingly difficult problem tied up in systemic forces, whether they be social, economic, racial, cultural or political.
Increasingly, colleges are not factoring in ACT or SAT scores for admission and are instead leaning more on grade point averages. You know, the grades that are often fluffed up.
I spoke with a longtime college professor who teaches science at a Georgia institution. I’m not using his name because I’d like him to continue being a college professor.
The prof stressed a couple times that the intelligence of students has not waned. It’s just their brains are fighting the constant shiny objects thrown at them by tech.
“I have freshmen and sophomores who missed a lot of socialization and the basic work” because of the pandemic, the prof told me. “They’re like eighth graders in college. I quit giving out writing assignments because the quality of writing was so appalling. I threw my hands up, I just couldn’t grade them.”
And don’t get him started on math skills.
Absenteeism has become a problem ranging from kindergarten to college. “Students just don’t show up,” he said. “They get a zero on the test and then ask, ‘Can I just make it up?’ I tell them, ‘No.’”
Ouch! Tough love is just so Last Century.