by James A. Bacon

Fairfax County Public Schools, the largest school system in Virginia, has updated its grading standards in an effort to make them fairer and more consistent, reports The Washington Post. Among the more prominent features of the new system, students will be allowed to retake tests for full credit.

In theory, the new system will base grades on what a student has learned rather than “behavioral metrics,” a term the Post leaves un-defined but apparently refers to how students behave in class.

Let us postulate up front that there is no “perfect” grading system. Creating uniform criteria makes it difficult for teachers to exercise judgment based upon their personal knowledge of the student. On the other hand, a system that allows teachers to inject personal judgments in their grades opens itself to charges of bias, in particular racial/ethnic bias.

As educators have wrestled with grading practices over the years, the overall trajectory in Virginia public schools has been to lower expectations, relax standards, and promote students to the next grade on the pretext that they have mastered the material. Grade inflation is the result. If grade inflation were a country, U.S. schools would be Venezuela.

The primary goal, never explicitly stated, is not to ensure that students are learning but to reduce racial/ethnic disparities. WaPo reporter Karina Elwood back-handedly acknowledges this reality. “The move away from traditional grading picked up steam during the pandemic,” she writes, “as educators looked critically at student performance and sought ways to close performance gaps along racial and socioeconomic lines.”

Ironically, lowering expectations and making it easier to get passing grades, coincided with a widening of the learning gap between racial groups, as measured by Standards of Learning (SOL) test results, in recent years. We’ll find out if the trend continues when the Virginia Department of Education releases SOL results for the 2023-24 school year sometime this fall.

The new grading policies allegedly focus on what a student learns rather than his or her diligence in meeting teacher-imposed deadlines. “The grade is supposed to reflect what I learned, where I ended up, even if it took me an extra step to get there,” Susan Brookhart, an education professor emerita at Duquesne University, tells the Post.

One obvious flaw in this reasoning is that students master more in school than their A-B-Cs. Deadlines associated with test and homework assignments instill future orientation and self-discipline, virtues that are critical for academic achievement in later years, including college. Allowing students to redo homework assignments and retake tests whenever it suits them teaches them the wrong lessons.

Eric Wolf Welch, a social studies teacher at Justice High School quoted in the article, states what every teacher in a classroom knows: Some students will “game the system” if you let them. He worries that the new grading system — particularly letting students redo assignments for up to 100 percent credit — won’t prepare them for later life.

Another issue not directly addressed in the article is this: When students are retaking a test, are they retaking the same test that they flunked previously or a different version of the test? If they are retaking the identical test — if they already know the questions and can look up the answers — the re-do is a travesty and the supposition that they have mastered the material is a joke. The details here are important.

The first step in reversing the learning decline in public schools is restoring order in classrooms and hallways, which should start by banning cell phone use in schools. The next step is raising expectations and holding students to a higher standard as reflected in the grading system.

If enforcing order and standards temporarily worsens outcome disparities between Whites, Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics, that’s a price that must be paid. Telling students (of whatever race) that they are learning what they need to when in fact they are not, is not compassion but cruelty. Failure to instill the habits needed to succeed in life does not empower students, it cripples them. The outcomes that matter most — skills learned and knowledge gained — are the disparities we need to address. Grades are symptoms of a deeper failure.