Grade Inflation and "No Child Left Behind"

This week I am off from student teaching for Thanksgiving break. I spent yesterday grading some papers. Heaven save me from the very sad state of their writing ability. I have been reading 11th graders' vocabulary essays. They are just depressing. Many of the students do not have the ability to write in subject/verb agreement, and most of them misuse nouns as verbs and visa versa. Don’t even get me started on the spelling. These kids are not stupid, they have just been allowed to get away with doing nothing for the previous 11 years of their education. Listen, I'm not faulting the students so much as I am the system that got them so dysfunctionally screwed-up in the first place.

The problem is that teachers have been trained to pass students along so that they (the teachers) won’t look bad, and that is the fault of “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB), which was instituted by the egregiously misguided George W. Bush. When NCLB was introduced, the focus was no longer about whether students perform well, it became more about how well teachers can get the students to perform. If students are not achieving, then it is the teacher’s problem. If students are not passing classes, well, that means that the teacher must be doing something wrong. By the time students get to high school these days, they have been trained that they are not responsible for their education—the teachers are.

I will admit that there have been (and still are) some pretty bad teachers out there. I’ve even had a few in my day. However, I fail to see the merit in having teachers be disproportionately responsible for motivating students. What about the parents? What about the students goals for themselves? I think that there is this attitude that has developed in the last twenty years or so that you don’t have to work hard in America to be perceived as successful. That fallacious notion starts with the message that students are given in school, and then it continues with the availability of easy credit and the ability to live beyond one’s means without taking responsibility for poorly considered decisions. That attitude is what has gotten our country in the dire economic straights we are facing today in America. Students have no idea how to make crucial decisions because they are being force-fed a bunch of horse puckey in order to pass some arbitrary standardized test, and they have no idea how to think for themselves.

In my role as a student teacher, my mentor teacher told me that I must adopt this philosophy: teachers mustn't discourage students by giving them bad grades for poor work; we must boost their egos by giving them credit for things like putting their names on the top of their paper. I feel that giving students this false sense of so-called accomplishment just reinforces the whole idea that they don’t have to work hard in order to get by. Maybe I’m too “old school.” I can’t decide if I’m being unrealistic about what students are capable of doing or not. One thing that I do know, however, is that I don’t think teachers challenge students to extend themselves. If this lackadaisical attitude continues in our schools, it will be, in my opinion, the ultimate downfall of American society. I know that sounds melodramatic, and maybe it is, but I just can’t see how a society can remain sustainable if it doesn’t continuously strive to improve itself.