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11/12/2024 9:19:12 AM
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EDITORIAL: ‘Too dumb to fail’ grading policies aren’t working


EDITORIAL: ‘Too dumb to fail’ grading policies aren’t working

Clark County School District Superintendent Jesus Jara during a board of trustees fulfilling at the Edward A. Greer Education Center on Thursday, Sept. 22, 2022, in Las Vegas. (Ellen Schmidt/Las Vegas Review-Journal) @ellenschmidttt
The Clark County School District's grading policy is so bad that it's ended up being national news.

Late last month, The Wall Street Journal reported on the growing number of school districts accepting "fair grading." The Clark County School District was plainly featured.

The specifics of "fair grading" vary, however it's an overarching term for lowering standards. Grading research is de-emphasized. Trainees are offered multiple possibilities to take examinations. Bad behavior, even cheating, doesn't affect grades. Trainees receive a minimum mark of around 50 percent whether they turn in assignments or not. The theory is that the focus should be on mastery, that students shouldn't be penalized if they discover a week 3 principle in week 10. The important thing, followers maintain, is that they learn it.

Truth has a way of frustrating progressive nostrums. Such a system might work if every kid were fundamentally encouraged. However as instructors, parents and everybody beyond school administrators seem to recognize, such trainees are the exception, especially when you're handling teenagers.

In the real life, grades and high standards motivate students to strive. Lots of will excitedly take it if you give kids a simple method out. Lower expectations become self-fulfilling.

Laura Jeanne Penrod, a regional high school English teacher, saw this firsthand. She informed the Journal that her honors trainees began doing less homework once they realized how little homework counted towards their last grades. Some do not kip down their assignments on time, understanding it won't count against them.

This should have been completely predictable.

" If you go to a job in real life, you can't select and pick what jobs you wish to do and only do the, quote, huge ones," Alyson Henderson, another local high school English teacher, told the Journal. She included, "We're actually setting students up for a false sense of truth."

Perhaps that's the point. Superintendent Jesus Jara and the Board of Trustees want moms and dads and the public to believe students are doing fine due to the fact that it obscures the district's many glaring problems. District officials even boasted that student grades increased after they reduced grading requirements.

The numbers the district can't control tell a various story. In eighth grade math, efficiency is at 21 percent.

Rather than repair its failures, the district wishes to conceal them. It's yet another factor for lawmakers to support Gov. Joe Lombardo's school choice plan.

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Elwood Hill
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Elwood Hill

Elwood Hill is an award-winning journalist with more than 18 years' of experience in the industry. Throughout his career, John has worked on a variety of different stories and assignments including national politics, local sports, and international business news. Elwood graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in journalism and immediately began working for Breaking Now News as lead journalist.

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