Part of the new grading scale at District 150 this year includes this directive:

If a student puts forth the effort and completes an assignment but receives less than 50%, the grade shall be recorded as 50%.

This means that when a student earns a low score, he receives a higher score. It means that if a student takes a quiz with ten questions on it, and he only gets two questions right, he’ll essentially be credited with getting five questions right. He didn’t really get five questions right, but we’re going to put it on the books that he did. We’re going to lie about his achievement. Call it what you want, justify it as you will, the bottom line is the district has now made it a policy that teachers must lie about their students’ achievement if that student earns a grade less than 50%.

It’s hard to fathom how a group of educational experts could come up with such a system — a system that gives credit where credit isn’t due — and defend it. The justifications I’ve heard for this policy seem to indicate that the most important thing in education is not actually learning (or, God-forbid, mastering) the material. Instead, the most important thing is to maintain a child’s self-esteem and motivation to learn. Getting low scores reduces the child’s self-esteem and lessens their motivation to learn. Hence, the solution is to artificially eliminate the lowest scores.

Did you see that? The blame is placed on the scoring, not on the performance. If we can just fix the scores, then we’ve solved the problem! That’s like seeing the check engine light go on in your car, taking the bulb out so it doesn’t light up anymore, and thinking you’ve fixed your engine.

One of the things that lowers a student’s motivation, they say, is if he somehow misses a big assignment (earning a “0”) or really blows it on a test (earning a very low score), and discovers that it will be mathematically challenging to bring his semester average up as a result. Now, back in the educational dark ages when I was a child, that student could dig himself out of that hole by doing extra-credit assignments to bring up his overall grade. That is, he could do extra work to earn that higher grade. But in our more enlightened era, educational experts have determined that it’s better to just give the student credit he didn’t earn instead — and you’re just an old fuddy-duddy who probably favors nuns rapping students’ knuckles with a ruler if you believe in those old, hackneyed values of earning the grade.

I’m surprised the district didn’t just decide that 60% would be the lowest grade attainable — 60 being the new passing-grade cutoff. After all, under the new grading system, it’s still possible (albeit difficult) for a child to fail. Why not remove the possibility completely? Instead of giving out failing grades for failing work (and risk demotivating the students), why not just declare that all work (or even no work) is passable? Imagine how happy (and presumably motivated) our school kids will be then!

I probably shouldn’t have suggested it. The district just might do it.