Shelly Hickman

As I wrap up 20+ years in the classroom and enter retirement, I have a burning need to address societal concerns about our education system – concerns I also share – and explain to those who aren’t in education some of the reasons many students are graduating without the skills needed to succeed as adults.

It’s been five years since I’ve written a blog post and when I looked through some of my previous content, I was reminded I wrote on this topic back in 2019. Sadly, many of the same problems I addressed then are still in existence today, and new problems have only worsened the state of education.

This is a bit of a long read, but if you aren’t a teacher, you wouldn’t be expected to know any of this, and therefore may have a distorted view as to the reasons young people are unprepared after graduation.

Despite the word “rigor” being a buzzword in education in recent years, there is a lowering of student expectations and standards that’s been taking place in education beginning around ten years ago. Below are some common practices of which you may not be aware.

Overly Generous Due Dates

Students are given a generous grace period in which they can submit their work and it still be accepted without penalty. For instance, in my district, students have an additional five school days past an assignment’s due date to submit it – basically a calendar week. If they were absent, another three days per absence are to be provided on top of the usual grace period.

The extra time given due to absence would be entirely reasonable if the grace period weren’t already in place, but the current policy results in many students regularly waiting until the eleventh hour to complete their assignments, creating an environment in which they are constantly behind in their studies. And because students are so accustomed to the excessive amount of time they receive to submit their assignments, they frequently try to persuade teachers to extend grace periods further when even those are missed.

Due to these lenient deadlines, young people are not motivated to develop time management skills that are necessary in the workplace. Even students in my Advanced Placement classes have developed the bad habit of viewing due dates as suggestions rather than requirements, submitting work at the last possible minute.

Where in the workplace are employees given such allowances? When a nurse has orders to administer medication to a patient, are they given an additional five days before they may do so?  If a customer schedules an urgent plumbing repair because a leaky pipe is damaging their drywall, does the plumber have a five-day grace period to arrive for the service call? For the life of me, I can’t understand how or why this has become commonplace in education.

Minimum Fs and Retakes

Back in the day, if you didn’t turn in an assignment, you received a zero. Makes total sense because why would you get something for nothing? If you dropped the ball and didn’t study for an upcoming test and scored 32%, that’s what went into the gradebook. On rare occasions, your teacher might allow you a retake, but that was only after you sought help after school if your poor test score was because you were truly struggling, and not due to lack of preparation or effort. It was most certainly never an expectation that you would get two attempts for every test.

That’s where extra credit came in. If a student was sincerely trying, or even if they recognized they screwed up but wanted to correct their mistake, the teacher would at times offer them redemption by allowing the student to complete extra credit.

I can’t tell you how many times students have asked me at the end of the quarter if they can do extra credit to bring up their grade. My response has always been that I don’t give extra credit because if they had completed the assigned work, they wouldn’t need it. Extra credit implies that one has already completed the minimum required. They just look at me like I’m from another planet. They honestly don’t seem to understand this argument because they have been conditioned to think the current dysfunctional system is normal.

It’s now required that students be given the opportunity to retake tests. Not only does this create more work for the teacher because now they need to create two versions of every test, but it has also trained students to roll the dice with their first attempt. Many won’t prepare for a test before taking it the first time, but if they do horribly they now have a sense of how the retake will look and will study only then. The argument for this policy is that student learning shouldn’t be locked to a timeline within the term, and that if a student eventually learns the concept, they should be allowed to demonstrate that learning. But is this gaming the system really learning?

These days, minimum F’s and retakes are baked into the system. Even if a student ends the quarter with 0% (and yes, I’ve had plenty of students who fell into that category because they didn’t submit a single assignment), we are required to give them 50% as their quarter grade. For doing nothing. Same thing for their semester exam. As long as a student takes their semester exam, they will receive nothing lower than 50% even if they score half that.

Some of you may be thinking, “Well 50% is still an F, after all. So what’s the big deal?” I’m glad you asked!

Grade Weights

I don’t remember how classwork vs. tests were weighed when I was in school, but my guess is they were somewhat balanced. When I started teaching, I believe classwork or practice (formative) was worth 40% of the overall grade and tests and projects (summative) were worth 60%.

Over the past decade, summative assignments have been given more and more weight. In my world, formative work is worth only 20% while summative is worth 80%. The result has been that many students view formative assignments (the bulk of their assignments, mind you) as completely optional. They refuse to do any assignment that isn’t summative.

Do you see how this is a problem when paired with retake policies? Granted, most teachers deny a retake until the student completes the formative assignments that were given in preparation for that test, but this isn’t enough deterrence to keep many students from repeating this pattern. As a result, if by some miracle any learning is taking place, it’s disjointed because the student is forever playing catch up and the end game is to simply do the bare minimum.

Because the grading weights are wildly imbalanced and minimum F’s are common practice, we have a system in which students can get away with shocking levels of disengagement and still “pass” the semester with 60%. I have had students earn a B or C for the first quarter of a semester then do absolutely nothing in the second quarter (because they know they will still receive 50% for second quarter), and if the stars align and they do marginally decent on the semester exam, they can still pass the semester with a D. Does that sound like rigor to you?

Some may argue that if a student is able to pass the end of term exam, they must have learned something. Maybe. Maybe not. The scourge of phone use in the classroom also means cheating is much more prevalent and difficult to manage. And I would argue that young people’s lack of skills after graduation demonstrates that many are not learning much.

Lack of Parental Involvement

I do acknowledge that there are plenty of parents who still hold their children accountable for their academics and behavior and have high expectations for them, but sadly those parents seem to be in the minority in today’s world. I don’t have actual stats to back that up; I can only say as a teacher, this feels largely accurate.

The number of students I’ve had who refuse to engage in most of their assignments, if not all, is staggering. Oftentimes when I check a student’s grades in other classes, this is the case for one or more of their other subjects as well. Mind you, I’m not referring to students who are attempting the work and struggling. These are students who straight up refuse to do any schoolwork simply because they don’t want to.

When reaching out to many of these parents, they will politely thank you for letting them know and say they will take care of it. Then… crickets. Nothing ever changes. How do you have a child you can see is flunking out in one or more of their classes due to unwillingness to engage, and just do nothing?

I’ve had parents tell me they were unaware their child was failing and ask what they can do to help them. First, I don’t understand how in today’s digital world, parents can claim they had no idea their child was not turning in their work or failing. Grades are accessible online for students and parents 24/7. This has been the case for over a decade!

Second, if your child is failing because they are not doing their work, your job as their parent is to create some consequences because the student is not doing their job, simple as that. We as teachers cannot make your child do anything they don’t want to. On the rare occasion that I do see improvement in student performance after contacting home, it can only mean one thing: the parent has implemented some sort of consequence that their child doesn’t want to experience.

I don’t know how we got to this place where so many parents are unwilling or unable to parent their children. Or worse, defend their children when they are not meeting basic expectations of behavior and effort. It’s not your job to be your child’s friend or worry about them liking you. Parenting is one of the hardest and most important jobs a person can do in this life, and if you’re doing it right, there will be plenty of times your child thinks you’re mean, unfair, stupid, out of touch, or all of the above.

It goes without saying we’ll get plenty of stuff wrong along the way, but at the very least we should be aiming to raise capable humans who know how to deal with disappointment, boredom, failure, and can persevere through undesirable but necessary tasks. Far too many young people are not being raised in this way. Between the all-too-common lack of parental involvement and the lack of structure and accountability in the school system, the largest blame for student apathy and poor academic performance should be placed on adults.

Young people will continue to behave in ways they have learned to get away with. That’s just human nature. If there are no consequences for students not meeting expectations, why would they care about meeting them?

This piece doesn’t even touch on the massive problem of smart phones and other devices in the classroom or the disrespectful and disruptive student behaviors that regularly interfere with instruction and learning. I’m not going to delve into those topics here because it would require a much lengthier post, and I believe those problems are now being brought to light more often. (I can’t be sure of this, since the algorithms regularly feed me topics in education due to my profession.)

The decreasing proficiency and lack of life skills we’re seeing each year have multiple causes; no single change is going to fix it. But these causes have one thing in common – they are all in the hands of adults, adults who should be parenting responsibly and enacting policies that require much more from our students. There must be buy-in from everyone for meaningful change, especially parents. Until that time, I fear student competency will continue to degrade, and society as a whole will suffer for it.