Teacher Mike Dowd writes for the New York Post about the decay of public education in the nation’s largest city.
Officials love to brag about the 84% graduation rate for New York City public-school students.
But if you thought that was an honest measure of how many kids are passing, I have bad news. High-school grading policies have become so corrupt, class credits have become almost meaningless.
In recent years, the Department of Education and many individual schools, have adopted “equity grading” practices intended to benefit disadvantaged students.
But by making it almost impossible for such students to fail, even when they don’t show up to class, our school system harms the less privileged by discouraging hard work and reliability.
Despite the demoralizing effect these policies have on teachers, the United Federation of Teachers, under the out-of-touch leadership of Michael Mulgrew, has failed to make this a public issue.
New Yorkers would be shocked to see how far school standards have dropped.
Although many of us who taught under Mayor Bloomberg remember the pressure to increase passing rates or face retaliation, there was an important check on this practice — the longstanding notion that attendance was a basic requirement for passing.
But this constraint disappeared under Mayor De Blasio, whose pursuit of equity involved eliminating “seat time” as a requirement to pass.
Thereafter, schools could award passing grades to chronically absent students who didn’t deserve them alongside students who worked hard.
Then, Mayor Adams made attendance completely optional by continuing remote-learning policies that forbade any lowering of a student’s grade due to absence.
Nowadays, if teachers want to penalize students for cutting, they must give a makeup assignment for each missed day and inevitably accept work — even if it appears to be AI-generated.
Meanwhile, many individual schools have incentivized absenteeism through another equity policy — minimum grades.
In these schools, a missing assignment or test with no correct answers receives a grade as high as 55 — just 10 points below passing — instead of a zero.
