Speaking as a public school educator, I really appreciate how your analysis digs into how this grade inflation is failing the kids (who are often blamed for it). I also want to make sure we are not blaming the high school teachers here- which I don’t think you do - but it’s worth spelling out the various forces driving this phenomena outside a teachers’ control:
1) Rigid and punitive school evaluation systems at the district level incentivize schools to juke their stats (accountability is good, but may district admins are mini-tyrants)
2) The huge and well funded expansion of AP-for-All, which pushes more kids into ‘college level’ classes sooner (I now routinely see kids from charters who are taking AP classes in 7th grade - huh???)
3) College admissions becoming more cutthroat and time intensive each year, driving student and parent intolerance for low grades
4) The youth mental health crisis, which has left many young people fragile and makes schools warier of giving low grades
It’s sad because AP for All is really a response to the long, sad history of how tracking has failed students. But rather than fix the root problem - that schools often had low or no expectations for students in low tracked classes - we’ve instead just fixed the optics and are serving all student less well.
I’m not sure how we get out of this given how deeply entangled all these factors are.
I think the impetus for change will likely come from the university level. They will realize they are getting unprepared students who aren't able to actually succeed at the professional level that universities rely on (for prestige, for rankings, for donations) and they'll change how they evaluate students which will cascade down to shifts in K-12 behavior, and student/parent incentives.
In blue states like New York the teachers' union wields vast power at the state and local levels. Their support can make or break a candidate (almost always a Democrat). If the union, as the collective voice of teachers, took a stand, it could not be ignored.
I would argue that unions are generally not the collective voices of who they represent but rather the most politically inclined segment of that population.
Got to remember most people are just trying to get by in the world and support their families.
Unfortunately, if a student comes into a class lacking the foundational skills (for whatever reason including moving from out of state), they usually won't get moved back to a level where they belong and the teacher will get blamed for their lack of progress. Ditto for students who need to be evaluated for learning disabilities but whose parents won't grant permission. The teacher is stuck teaching everyone the material that will be on the state test at the end of the year, even if some of the students would be better served by going back and learning the basics.
Yes, teachers are a part of the broken system - can’t disagree.
I certainly don’t see it that way as regards to unions. In my mind a huge root cause of the issue is that education as a sector lacks talent, which is because it is not possible to make a living wage as an educator in many states. Entrenched unions can create a different set of issues for sure, but a huge plus is that they ensure salary, benefits, and workers right protections that make it more possible for talented workers to choose the sector.
I don’t really see how unions contribute to grade inflation - if anything a strong union protects the right of a demanding teacher to hold a hard line on grades if they want to.
Teachers' unions wield vast political power in blue states like New York and California. If the unions took a stand against grade inflation in those states, they could not be ignored.
Pay in education is fine - the problem is that it’s almost all in extremely valuable benefits (large pensions and retirement at 55) and very little of it comes in salary, which is the absolute worst way to attract talented kids in their 20s into a field since no normal 18 year old chooses their college major based on retirement benefits. There is a reason no normal jobs pay like this.
Anecdotally too, it seems like working conditions for teachers have gotten worse, especially at public schools. Teachers feel like they’re increasingly pressured by both parents and administrators and have little recourse to push back against even the last reasonable members of those groups. I have multiple ex-teacher friends who have talked about this.
Having been out of school for a while, I'm surprised to learn of this "AP-for-All" thing.
I actually took two AP tests while I was a HS junior, without taking AP classes first. I just paid for the tests and took them. I got a 4 on one test, and a 3 on the other. I mean — I studied, of course…
District admin were shocked… although I have no idea why. There were only something like 5 kids from our 2000+ student high school who passed AP tests as juniors, and each of the others were considered prodigies. I was the oddball, but I can't emphasize how easy it was to just cut a check for the test fee, and sit down for a few hours to write in a blue book. There were literally no obstacles at all.
Without the SAT or ACT, the failure of UCSD to flag unprepared students at the point of college admission makes sense. But how are these students and districts going unnoticed on statewide standardized testing? Does CA not do any statewide testing anymore?
I live in Singapore and am an unusual American who sends their kids to public school where they practice grade deflation so that kids study harder for their leaving exams (O Levels and A Levels) which are the only grades that matter for the next level of education. To get an A on an exam you require 70%. A C is 55%. A is considered above and beyond. B is very, very good. C is average. Even the smartest kids are meant to feel stupid. Math and science is easily two years ahead of the equivalent in the US. Is this a better system? Not completely sure. The pressure on kids is immense and many of my expat friends leave the system because their kids can’t cope. Local kids can’t leave and there is a huge stigma about the intense streaming starting in 3rd grade. (There is a popular movie series called “I not Stupid.”). There must be a happy medium somewhere. Meanwhile my US kids are applying to US universities and admission counselors don’t understand that Bs and Cs are considered normal here. I’d be shocked if more than 5% of a class gets straight A’s.
I speculate (without hard data) at how much of this is also driven by parents. Many parents bully the schools who try and fail - or even mark down - their children, and teachers don’t have the support of their administrations. Why stick your neck out to fight parents AND your own principal? Furthermore, (here’s my pet cause), with the phones and video games and entertainment options we have available, students simply don’t work as hard or practice math, music or reading to anywhere near the same extent they used to. Teachers can’t even assign full books anymore, as kids won’t read them! That was absolutely not the case 25 years ago!
So beyond grade inflation and passing-by-default, we may have to admit that many parents are failing to get their kids to work, and are bullying schools and teachers instead.
As always, the most advantaged kids aren’t the ones who’ll pay the price for this. Their parents will step in, hire tutors, or put them in a private school.
So I feel like I’ve heard two narratives about education trends that feel in tension. One is what you say about students lacking an attention span and being passed through with grade inflation in classes with lower standards. But the other narrative I’ve heard is almost the opposite: that schools are assigning more homework than ever, college admissions to even public schools are more competitive than ever, and children are overscheduled and overworked.
I supposed the answer is possibly that the latter describes the experience of the top 10%-20% of students (in socioeconomic status) while the grade inflation and lower standards affect the bottom third or half.
Why are variables always called "X", anyway — I mean, in equations with only a single unknown? Ever wonder why this is?
Sure, other letters which are used to represent constants are off-limits — but who said variables need to be letters, at all? They could be punctuation, or a special characters… or a bespoke, funky designs of some kind. Like that symbol Prince used for a while during the 1990s, when he was called "The artist formerly known as…"
The SAT would (at least used to, I don't know the current version) use crazy symbols to represent functions. Like it would say
"smiley-face x = x+3, so what is smiley-face 5?"
I loved these questions as a high schooler because once you understood how they worked they were often the easiest ones on the test. The "difficulty" of them came from the fact that they were exotic and not typically seen in class, so once you understood them they were basically freebies.
If the problem, or part of the problem, is grade inflation and dropping the SATs, and prior to those developments, students admitted were prepared, doesn't that also mean that there is some group of students who would have been prepared, and otherwise would have gotten in, but didn't get in because the UC system has denied them the ability to show they deserve it?
Yes, that’s an argument against dropping standardized testing, you won’t identify students who do well on standardized testing but work at a restaurant or something instead of being able to do extracurricular and get recommendations and may be missed because everyone’s GPA is high and they are undifferentiated.
You’ll also miss kids who figure something out in high school, might not have perfect grades but do well on standardized testing.
The issue is that for much of students’ primary educations they were just passed forward without concern over whether they showed comprehension or competency with course materials.
If every student gets an A then there is no signal as to where to allocate efforts or where knowledge deficiencies lie.
The school systems that enabled this committed fraud and should be cleaned out. Every math teacher, every administrator up to and including the district superintendent should be fired. It’s not to punish them per se; it’s to send the message and establish the policy that this will not be tolerated.
I don’t understand why the article repeatedly suggests this is a problem only/primarily in public schools. When I taught college, I didn’t see a difference between public school graduates and others, nor does there appear to be any difference across my kids’ friends.
There has never been a time when anything like a majority of America's students were performing well in abstract mathematics. There's no falling off because that's not something we ever accomplished. We used to accept that the college track was for a small minority of the most talented students. Now we force everyone into that pipeline. And you're surprised when a lot of those who were forced in are failing?
I don’t think you should have to be taught how to “round something to the nearest hundreds.” That feels like something you should be able to pick up as needed without effort past first grade. Scary.
My kid learned this in third grade. You have to learn (a) find the place-value they’re asking about; (b) look at the next place-value over; (c) is that value >4; (d) conditional on (c), what is the transformation performed? Then you have to practice it to learn the edge cases, like what happens when the value is 9. It’s not something you would “pick up” by osmosis.
"You shouldn't have to be taught (insert whatever skill here)" is the root of a huge number of problems in education. Students who already know something (most likely due to exposure at home) get rewarded and ones who don't never learn, feel stupid, and conclude "I'm not a math person" or "I'm not a music person" or "I'm just not a good reader." Everything needs to be taught. The students who already know can move on or tune out. People who don't want to actually explain things shouldn't get anywhere near a classroom.
You aren’t blaming the teachers…but what are they teaching? The teacher who has the AP Calculus class: calculus is HARD. Any kid in that class will know that they can’t do calculus, whether or not they get an A.
So if the kids you described are then surprised when they get to college that actually they do math at a seventh grade level…something is missing here. Are the calculus classes actually trying to teach basic algebra and fractions and grading them on that? Or are they teaching calculus, and the kids are getting 0% on the tests and getting A’s?
My last ever math class was Honors Algebra II my junior year of high school. I could not understand sine cosine and tangent. I got straight D’s. If my teacher had given me A’s I would have been happy with that, but I certainly would not have been deluded that I did, in fact, understand them and was ready for precalc.
Perhaps I need to read the report myself because everything I’ve read about it is terrifying.
The grade inflation is mind boggling. I can’t imagine teaching in an environment in which it’s mostly a farce.
The number of students and parents who settle for not understanding and not being able to do is disheartening and frankly infuriating.
I can’t imagine a student “working hard” in math class for so many years and not understanding and being able to do primary and middle school math without a severe learning disability.
If students aren't being graded based on their knowledge, than what are they being graded on?
One teacher you quoted said the students cared about their class rank, so they are clearly differentiating the students on some level. But how are they doing that if they aren't grading based on their knowledge?
Although I'm not sure how much has changed at the high-school level. I remember being baffled that so many people took AP exams and got 1s and 2s. At my school this wasn't the norm, it was rare for a student to get a 3. I remember being by far the worst student in my AP English class, I think I eked out B-, and I got a 4 on the AP exam. So clearly there were many schools where the standards for AP English were vastly lower if 40% of students were getting 1s or 2s on the AP exams.
I've taught high school math in low income inner city schools for six years. In most schools, about 2/3s of all students cannot solve -5+2 without the help of a calculator. Most of these students are getting Bs and some As. I've taught a lot of the same students computer science, and they seem to pick up the material reasonably well. These students aren't stupid by any stretch, and most are capable of doing much higher level of math.
However, even the smart kids are never held to a remotely high academic standard. Unfortunately, there's no way to teach an Algebra II class without failing overwhelming majority of students if they were held to the same standards as upper middle class kids. It's unfortunately a lot easier just a lot easier to pass kids along to higher math classes where the teacher might as well be talking in Tagalog given how many prequisites they are missing.
1) I currently teach at a school that teaches the same group of students but holds kids to real standards. The majority of freshman have at least one D or F. If a school is willing to fail huge number of students, you can hold kids to a higher standards.
2) The first school I taught at was always at risk of having enrollment numbers fall below the minumum threshold. They were afraid to expel dangerous students, or fail kids who clearly could not read or write so we were basically not allowed to fail kids.
3) The second school I taught at truly believed in a lot of progressive mythologizing. We were not allowed to give less than a 50 on any assignments and had a mandate for at least 80% of my students to have As and Bs.
4) More generally, if too many students have Fs that they have no means of raising to a passing grade, classroom management becomes a nightmare. As a teacher, I can't hold kids to standards that are impossible for them to meet. If a kid gets to precalc and can't solve (1/2)+(1/3) (the majority of kids at the highest scoring majority black high school in the state of Indiana), I can't give them an F if they are clearly trying the best,
My kids start each new year with weeks of review of more basic concepts before they learn anything new.
Is that not the case at your school? For example, in your pre-Calc class what would stop you from spending the first semester on foundational skills rather than jumping into the pre-Calc concepts?
What does the US have in terms of national (or even statewide) standardised tests in say, middle school? I think if schools aren't willing to tell parents where students are at there needs to be someone else willing to step in.
Speaking as a public school educator, I really appreciate how your analysis digs into how this grade inflation is failing the kids (who are often blamed for it). I also want to make sure we are not blaming the high school teachers here- which I don’t think you do - but it’s worth spelling out the various forces driving this phenomena outside a teachers’ control:
1) Rigid and punitive school evaluation systems at the district level incentivize schools to juke their stats (accountability is good, but may district admins are mini-tyrants)
2) The huge and well funded expansion of AP-for-All, which pushes more kids into ‘college level’ classes sooner (I now routinely see kids from charters who are taking AP classes in 7th grade - huh???)
3) College admissions becoming more cutthroat and time intensive each year, driving student and parent intolerance for low grades
4) The youth mental health crisis, which has left many young people fragile and makes schools warier of giving low grades
It’s sad because AP for All is really a response to the long, sad history of how tracking has failed students. But rather than fix the root problem - that schools often had low or no expectations for students in low tracked classes - we’ve instead just fixed the optics and are serving all student less well.
I’m not sure how we get out of this given how deeply entangled all these factors are.
I think the impetus for change will likely come from the university level. They will realize they are getting unprepared students who aren't able to actually succeed at the professional level that universities rely on (for prestige, for rankings, for donations) and they'll change how they evaluate students which will cascade down to shifts in K-12 behavior, and student/parent incentives.
I find it hard not to include teachers in the blame. They are participants in the ruination of a generation.
Teachers are often following incentives and have had their agency to access students undercut by administrators.
This is happening in colleges and is driving professors insane with the rampant cheating and grade appeals.
In blue states like New York the teachers' union wields vast power at the state and local levels. Their support can make or break a candidate (almost always a Democrat). If the union, as the collective voice of teachers, took a stand, it could not be ignored.
I would argue that unions are generally not the collective voices of who they represent but rather the most politically inclined segment of that population.
Got to remember most people are just trying to get by in the world and support their families.
In reality that is true, but union officers are elected by teachers. As in many things with politics, people who stay home relinquish their voices.
New York has statewide standards and tests and teachers are under the gun to produce good results. These results by district are reported online https://c2dcd148.caspio.com/dp/f233b00064d44eb48c544a3cbd17
Unfortunately, if a student comes into a class lacking the foundational skills (for whatever reason including moving from out of state), they usually won't get moved back to a level where they belong and the teacher will get blamed for their lack of progress. Ditto for students who need to be evaluated for learning disabilities but whose parents won't grant permission. The teacher is stuck teaching everyone the material that will be on the state test at the end of the year, even if some of the students would be better served by going back and learning the basics.
Let’s not forget the culpability teachers’ unions in states with strong unions.
Yes, teachers are a part of the broken system - can’t disagree.
I certainly don’t see it that way as regards to unions. In my mind a huge root cause of the issue is that education as a sector lacks talent, which is because it is not possible to make a living wage as an educator in many states. Entrenched unions can create a different set of issues for sure, but a huge plus is that they ensure salary, benefits, and workers right protections that make it more possible for talented workers to choose the sector.
I don’t really see how unions contribute to grade inflation - if anything a strong union protects the right of a demanding teacher to hold a hard line on grades if they want to.
Teachers' unions wield vast political power in blue states like New York and California. If the unions took a stand against grade inflation in those states, they could not be ignored.
Pay in education is fine - the problem is that it’s almost all in extremely valuable benefits (large pensions and retirement at 55) and very little of it comes in salary, which is the absolute worst way to attract talented kids in their 20s into a field since no normal 18 year old chooses their college major based on retirement benefits. There is a reason no normal jobs pay like this.
Anecdotally too, it seems like working conditions for teachers have gotten worse, especially at public schools. Teachers feel like they’re increasingly pressured by both parents and administrators and have little recourse to push back against even the last reasonable members of those groups. I have multiple ex-teacher friends who have talked about this.
Having been out of school for a while, I'm surprised to learn of this "AP-for-All" thing.
I actually took two AP tests while I was a HS junior, without taking AP classes first. I just paid for the tests and took them. I got a 4 on one test, and a 3 on the other. I mean — I studied, of course…
District admin were shocked… although I have no idea why. There were only something like 5 kids from our 2000+ student high school who passed AP tests as juniors, and each of the others were considered prodigies. I was the oddball, but I can't emphasize how easy it was to just cut a check for the test fee, and sit down for a few hours to write in a blue book. There were literally no obstacles at all.
Without the SAT or ACT, the failure of UCSD to flag unprepared students at the point of college admission makes sense. But how are these students and districts going unnoticed on statewide standardized testing? Does CA not do any statewide testing anymore?
I live in Singapore and am an unusual American who sends their kids to public school where they practice grade deflation so that kids study harder for their leaving exams (O Levels and A Levels) which are the only grades that matter for the next level of education. To get an A on an exam you require 70%. A C is 55%. A is considered above and beyond. B is very, very good. C is average. Even the smartest kids are meant to feel stupid. Math and science is easily two years ahead of the equivalent in the US. Is this a better system? Not completely sure. The pressure on kids is immense and many of my expat friends leave the system because their kids can’t cope. Local kids can’t leave and there is a huge stigma about the intense streaming starting in 3rd grade. (There is a popular movie series called “I not Stupid.”). There must be a happy medium somewhere. Meanwhile my US kids are applying to US universities and admission counselors don’t understand that Bs and Cs are considered normal here. I’d be shocked if more than 5% of a class gets straight A’s.
Anyway, just another perspective.
I speculate (without hard data) at how much of this is also driven by parents. Many parents bully the schools who try and fail - or even mark down - their children, and teachers don’t have the support of their administrations. Why stick your neck out to fight parents AND your own principal? Furthermore, (here’s my pet cause), with the phones and video games and entertainment options we have available, students simply don’t work as hard or practice math, music or reading to anywhere near the same extent they used to. Teachers can’t even assign full books anymore, as kids won’t read them! That was absolutely not the case 25 years ago!
So beyond grade inflation and passing-by-default, we may have to admit that many parents are failing to get their kids to work, and are bullying schools and teachers instead.
As always, the most advantaged kids aren’t the ones who’ll pay the price for this. Their parents will step in, hire tutors, or put them in a private school.
So I feel like I’ve heard two narratives about education trends that feel in tension. One is what you say about students lacking an attention span and being passed through with grade inflation in classes with lower standards. But the other narrative I’ve heard is almost the opposite: that schools are assigning more homework than ever, college admissions to even public schools are more competitive than ever, and children are overscheduled and overworked.
I supposed the answer is possibly that the latter describes the experience of the top 10%-20% of students (in socioeconomic status) while the grade inflation and lower standards affect the bottom third or half.
More homework?? Who says?
[_] got my brain to freeze for a second before I realized it was just a blank and identical to using X.
Coffee coffee coffee.
Why are variables always called "X", anyway — I mean, in equations with only a single unknown? Ever wonder why this is?
Sure, other letters which are used to represent constants are off-limits — but who said variables need to be letters, at all? They could be punctuation, or a special characters… or a bespoke, funky designs of some kind. Like that symbol Prince used for a while during the 1990s, when he was called "The artist formerly known as…"
That would be fun!
The SAT would (at least used to, I don't know the current version) use crazy symbols to represent functions. Like it would say
"smiley-face x = x+3, so what is smiley-face 5?"
I loved these questions as a high schooler because once you understood how they worked they were often the easiest ones on the test. The "difficulty" of them came from the fact that they were exotic and not typically seen in class, so once you understood them they were basically freebies.
If the problem, or part of the problem, is grade inflation and dropping the SATs, and prior to those developments, students admitted were prepared, doesn't that also mean that there is some group of students who would have been prepared, and otherwise would have gotten in, but didn't get in because the UC system has denied them the ability to show they deserve it?
Yes, that’s an argument against dropping standardized testing, you won’t identify students who do well on standardized testing but work at a restaurant or something instead of being able to do extracurricular and get recommendations and may be missed because everyone’s GPA is high and they are undifferentiated.
You’ll also miss kids who figure something out in high school, might not have perfect grades but do well on standardized testing.
The issue is that for much of students’ primary educations they were just passed forward without concern over whether they showed comprehension or competency with course materials.
If every student gets an A then there is no signal as to where to allocate efforts or where knowledge deficiencies lie.
The school systems that enabled this committed fraud and should be cleaned out. Every math teacher, every administrator up to and including the district superintendent should be fired. It’s not to punish them per se; it’s to send the message and establish the policy that this will not be tolerated.
I don’t understand why the article repeatedly suggests this is a problem only/primarily in public schools. When I taught college, I didn’t see a difference between public school graduates and others, nor does there appear to be any difference across my kids’ friends.
There has never been a time when anything like a majority of America's students were performing well in abstract mathematics. There's no falling off because that's not something we ever accomplished. We used to accept that the college track was for a small minority of the most talented students. Now we force everyone into that pipeline. And you're surprised when a lot of those who were forced in are failing?
I don’t think you should have to be taught how to “round something to the nearest hundreds.” That feels like something you should be able to pick up as needed without effort past first grade. Scary.
My kid learned this in third grade. You have to learn (a) find the place-value they’re asking about; (b) look at the next place-value over; (c) is that value >4; (d) conditional on (c), what is the transformation performed? Then you have to practice it to learn the edge cases, like what happens when the value is 9. It’s not something you would “pick up” by osmosis.
The given example involves none of the edge cases…
"You shouldn't have to be taught (insert whatever skill here)" is the root of a huge number of problems in education. Students who already know something (most likely due to exposure at home) get rewarded and ones who don't never learn, feel stupid, and conclude "I'm not a math person" or "I'm not a music person" or "I'm just not a good reader." Everything needs to be taught. The students who already know can move on or tune out. People who don't want to actually explain things shouldn't get anywhere near a classroom.
You aren’t blaming the teachers…but what are they teaching? The teacher who has the AP Calculus class: calculus is HARD. Any kid in that class will know that they can’t do calculus, whether or not they get an A.
So if the kids you described are then surprised when they get to college that actually they do math at a seventh grade level…something is missing here. Are the calculus classes actually trying to teach basic algebra and fractions and grading them on that? Or are they teaching calculus, and the kids are getting 0% on the tests and getting A’s?
My last ever math class was Honors Algebra II my junior year of high school. I could not understand sine cosine and tangent. I got straight D’s. If my teacher had given me A’s I would have been happy with that, but I certainly would not have been deluded that I did, in fact, understand them and was ready for precalc.
Perhaps I need to read the report myself because everything I’ve read about it is terrifying.
The grade inflation is mind boggling. I can’t imagine teaching in an environment in which it’s mostly a farce.
The number of students and parents who settle for not understanding and not being able to do is disheartening and frankly infuriating.
I can’t imagine a student “working hard” in math class for so many years and not understanding and being able to do primary and middle school math without a severe learning disability.
If students aren't being graded based on their knowledge, than what are they being graded on?
One teacher you quoted said the students cared about their class rank, so they are clearly differentiating the students on some level. But how are they doing that if they aren't grading based on their knowledge?
Although I'm not sure how much has changed at the high-school level. I remember being baffled that so many people took AP exams and got 1s and 2s. At my school this wasn't the norm, it was rare for a student to get a 3. I remember being by far the worst student in my AP English class, I think I eked out B-, and I got a 4 on the AP exam. So clearly there were many schools where the standards for AP English were vastly lower if 40% of students were getting 1s or 2s on the AP exams.
My state is not allowing stand-alone remedial classes now at community colleges. The mess grows ever deeper.
I've taught high school math in low income inner city schools for six years. In most schools, about 2/3s of all students cannot solve -5+2 without the help of a calculator. Most of these students are getting Bs and some As. I've taught a lot of the same students computer science, and they seem to pick up the material reasonably well. These students aren't stupid by any stretch, and most are capable of doing much higher level of math.
However, even the smart kids are never held to a remotely high academic standard. Unfortunately, there's no way to teach an Algebra II class without failing overwhelming majority of students if they were held to the same standards as upper middle class kids. It's unfortunately a lot easier just a lot easier to pass kids along to higher math classes where the teacher might as well be talking in Tagalog given how many prequisites they are missing.
where does the pressure to not hold kids to a high standard come from in your experience?
1) I currently teach at a school that teaches the same group of students but holds kids to real standards. The majority of freshman have at least one D or F. If a school is willing to fail huge number of students, you can hold kids to a higher standards.
2) The first school I taught at was always at risk of having enrollment numbers fall below the minumum threshold. They were afraid to expel dangerous students, or fail kids who clearly could not read or write so we were basically not allowed to fail kids.
3) The second school I taught at truly believed in a lot of progressive mythologizing. We were not allowed to give less than a 50 on any assignments and had a mandate for at least 80% of my students to have As and Bs.
4) More generally, if too many students have Fs that they have no means of raising to a passing grade, classroom management becomes a nightmare. As a teacher, I can't hold kids to standards that are impossible for them to meet. If a kid gets to precalc and can't solve (1/2)+(1/3) (the majority of kids at the highest scoring majority black high school in the state of Indiana), I can't give them an F if they are clearly trying the best,
My kids start each new year with weeks of review of more basic concepts before they learn anything new.
Is that not the case at your school? For example, in your pre-Calc class what would stop you from spending the first semester on foundational skills rather than jumping into the pre-Calc concepts?
What does the US have in terms of national (or even statewide) standardised tests in say, middle school? I think if schools aren't willing to tell parents where students are at there needs to be someone else willing to step in.
OK it's supposed to be statewide, I'm not sure what's going wrong here...