Failure to Fail

I was taken aback by a recent column in WaPo on education. Here's a quote:

"The pressure to give grades instead of actually teaching increased. A colleague told me that he had no problem. If students showed up, they got a C. If they did some work, they got a B. If they did fair or better on tests, they got an A. No one ever complained, and his paycheck was the same. He was teacher of the year, and a finalist for a principal's job."

It is no secret that the American Education system is failing, and perhaps worse, the failure to grade at a reasonable level is covering up those failures. As a relatively high achieving high school student, I think I have a bias towards hard grading - I take AP classes because I know that I will be challenged, and who doesn't like a good cry in the corner after failing an AP Physics final? Just kidding, the answer is no one, but failure is oftentimes good, certainly a better alternative to always passing.

The teacher mentioned in the article, who failed 55% of his regular biology class the year before he retired, offered a few solutions to the slippery slope. Many of those solutions make sense. They include more funding for education, a set of national standards that states can raise, but not lower (especially in the wake of various states lowering the difficulties of their standardized tests so that the appropriate number of students test "proficient"), and more parental involvement and training in motivating their children to work harder at school. However, what interests me as a high school student who isn't used to the bottom of the curve is the driving forces of "passing" and to a greater extent "A passing" at the top of the curve. Surely, people who work hard and are incredibly smart deserve As. Some, perhaps, even deserve A plusses, but the balancing that has occurred in the past ten, twenty, thirty years suggest that the Bell curve has been replaced with an up ramp in many classes, and I think this needs to stop. We need to get more serious about education as a country and less with achieving "advanced" or "proficient", "A", "A+", "B", or "C".

Perhaps, then, a more prescient solution is the elimination of a ranking and letter grade system altogether. Many small private schools already make teachers write comments instead of allocate often arbitrary grades. (What's the difference between an A and an A and an A to good institutions of higher learning anyway?) If there was some way to motivate more intrisically, other than a focus on placing meaningless, extrinsic value to doing well in school, I think that our country would take a big step in the right direction to returning to a land of innovation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/30/AR2009013000817.html