Young boy sitting at desk with globe and textbooks, 1950s. (Photo by Camerique/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Despite record spending, U.S. schools are getting worse. The Nation’s Report Card, also called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), conducts periodic tests to assess how much students are actually learning and mastering in math, reading, writing, science, U.S. history and civics.
Its latest assessment shows dreadful results for our high school seniors: One third lack basic reading skills, and 45% can’t even do rudimentary math. Scores have been declining for years. (Notably, that isn’t true of charter schools.)
The Nation’s Report Card confirms how awful things are. The fact that a record number of eighth graders can’t read and only one-third of high school seniors are prepared for college in either reading or math is a disgrace.
It’s stunning that the education establishment for K-12 has let this happen. Unions fiercely resist any accountability for performance. Instead of improving classroom instruction, education pooh-bahs try to hide their failures by dumbing down standards.
One manifestation of this moral sickness is equity grading. It’s hard to believe that under its provisions students get credit for work they’ve never performed, are allowed unlimited test retakes, are given no penalties for not meeting homework deadlines or for skipping class and are awarded a minimum grade of 50 for missed assignments or failed tests. Equity grading has gained ground as student performance has declined. That’s not a coincidence.
It’s no wonder that while high school graduation rates have climbed in the past 30 years, student results have gone south.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a think tank focused on traditional educational principles, in partnership with the RAND Corp. conducted a nationally representative survey of nearly 1,000 K-12 teachers. About half of the teachers said their school or district had adopted one or more equity-grading practices, and most teachers said these were harmful. But the survey found that although most teachers said they want high standards for their pupils, many felt pressured to inflate grades.
By emasculating standards for performance, equity grading has both encouraged and hidden academic dysfunction. Whether a student has learned anything is irrelevant. Talk about what former President George W. Bush labeled “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
It should be no surprise that homeschooling is growing, as is the astonishing movement for education savings accounts, whereby parents, not school bureaucrats, control the money being used for their children’s education.
The equity-grading scandal underscores a destructive phenomenon, which since the 1960s has increasingly stifled America’s can-do spirit with countless rules and regulations.
The perverse idea is that voluminous, intrusive rules and laws can replace human judgment. Increasingly, the result is that personal responsibility has been curtailed, especially in government. Noted legal reformer Philip Howard, author of such best-sellers as The Death of Common Sense and the recent Saving Can-do: How to Revive the Spirit of America, points out why nothing seems to get done anymore, including the education of our children.
Equity grading, which curtails teacher discretion, should be junked. Most of the obscenely immense rules governing eduction should also be given the heave-ho. We should restore teachers’ power to control their classrooms without fear of intimidating lawsuits. We should also hold administrators personally responsible for how well their schools perform. If they succeed, they get rewarded; if they don’t, out they go.