The Today Show aired another story on teenager stress this week. While I agree that social media, college applications, and parent expectations have made this era particularly difficult for teens to navigate, I also believe that our secondary schools sometimes fail to expect enough of our kids, especially in the classroom. I find that our schools are so focused on ensuring our students not fail that the adage “failure is not an option” has become universally true.
Just as we all know parents who fail to enforce their own family rules, who fail to punish their children for missing curfew or for otherwise violating household expectations, many of our children’s classroom environments are similarly submissive, and, sadly, our children pay the price for these extremely low expectations.
In today’s schools, locally and elsewhere, grade inflation is rampant. When unused bathroom passes convert to test points, we can agree we have a problem. When students retake failed tests, in whole or in part, without penalty, we are not holding our children accountable. When extra credit points are awarded for donated tissues and other school supplies, we are allowing students to buy grades. When essays that do not reflect deep thought merit an A, we atrophy writing skill development. When students can delay tests by complaining that they are not ready for them, we undermine student preparation. When school projects completed in just an hour bring up quarterly averages, and when students earn an A or B for the quarter without ever scoring above a D on a test, grade point averages become specious. When high school students can submit work late and still receive most of the possible points, we promote procrastination. When students can successfully plead their case to teachers to raise their quarterly or even semester grades arbitrarily because they missed an A by a full point (or more), we ensure inequity.
You might believe that I am over-generalizing, and I am, but the observations are worth noting because these practices occur often in local classrooms. This problem is not isolated to our part of the world; it has been documented in high schools and colleges across the nation. By refusing to fail students, or even to give them an honest grade, we have failed our children.
How can our students go out into the “real” world without knowing how to respect a deadline and without knowing how to push themselves to do more than the minimum required? The minimum required by many classrooms, from my observation, can be quite a low bar. We should and can expect more from our children.