During the lockdowns, teachers were asked to transition to remote learning on very short notice. For the most part it was a mess. Early on especially, what I saw was that some teachers made a genuine effort to adjust quickly, some struggled because their own kids were now at home with them instead of at school, and some teachers appeared incapable of doing much of anything.

This put school districts in a spot because some students were suddenly being given almost nothing from their teachers and yet this was a year whose grades would matter when they applied for college. So the word came down from above that teachers should be as lenient as possible with grading. And, again, in some cases this may have made sense because there really were some teachers who just weren’t up to the job.

But there was a flip side of this coin. Some students made a real effort to adjust to the changes forced upon them and still get their work done on time as they would in a normal class. And other students simply stopped showing up and did nothing or next to nothing. They treated it like summer vacation.

Eventually where I live administrators put a rule in place that student grades could go up post-lockdown but they could not go down. And that meant that even if some students stopped coming to class entirely (online) they could still get a B in the class. Other students quickly realized there was no point in doing the work.

This very permissive attitude and the extremely relaxed grading standards that came with it have apparently continued to some degree post-pandemic. Now everyone just expects a good grade even if they do the bare minimum. The floor for failing students has been raised in many school districts to the point where they can get passed along having done almost no work at all. A teacher on the East Coast described the current situation this way:

Failure is a bad word — and the kids know it. It takes way more work to hold a student accountable than to simply pass him/her. Even if a kid does nothing all year, we are encouraged to find a way to pass him/her. And then, of course, when a student does not perform, parents often want to know what we are going to do about it — not what their child can do.

The same teacher added that if a student takes a quiz and get 2 out of 10 correct, that is rounded up to 50%. “Even if they plagiarize or cheat on something, well, it’s a 50 percent,” he said. And because attendance is not longer considered, some students realized they could get a passing grade for one quarter and then just stop coming to school. Author Jessica Grose writes:

The policies many school districts are adopting that make it nearly impossible for low-performing students to fail — they have a grading floor under them, they know it, and that allows them to game the system.

Several teachers whom I spoke with or who responded to my questionnaire mentioned policies stating that students cannot get lower than a 50 percent on any assignment, even if the work was never done, in some cases. A teacher from Chapel Hill, N.C., who filled in the questionnaire’s “name” field with “No, no, no,” said the 50 percent floor and “NO attendance enforcement” leads to a scenario where “we get students who skip over 100 days, have a 50 percent, complete a couple of assignments to tip over into 59.5 percent and then pass.”

We’ve gone from participation trophies for kids who showed up to passing grades for kids who didn’t.

It’s not clear how widespread these 50% policies are but Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford’s graduate school of education, pointed out there is data supporting the idea that a lot more kids are just being passed along year after year even as absenteeism has climbed.

I am struck by the seeming contradiction between multiple measures of academic engagement and learning (e.g., sharply increased absenteeism, declining achievement) and the increases in high-school graduation we are seeing in some places. For example, the four-year high-school graduation rate in California increased from 84.5 percent in 2018-19 to 87.0 percent in 2021-22. That’s a large increase, and a surprising one given that the state’s chronic-absenteeism rate more than doubled over the same period. On a more granular level, I also note that Los Angeles Unified recently celebrated its “record-setting” graduation rate. Over the same period, its chronic absenteeism rate increased.

Sorry to be a cynic here but I don’t think it’s too hard to understand why graduation rates are up even as absenteeism is also up. Teachers, unions and administrators are all aware that pandemic learning loss looks very bad and that good news is in short supply. Announcing record-setting graduation rates is one way to pretend all is well when in fact kids are just being passed along whether or not they learn anything.

A Georgia middle-school teacher recently went viral on TikTok for discussing the stakes of this lack of accountability for kids. “I teach seventh grade. They are still performing on the fourth-grade level,” he says in the video. “I can probably count on one hand how many kids are actually performing on their grade level.” He feels that no one is talking about it and that parents lack awareness, and says no matter how many zeros he puts in the grade book, the children will be passed along to eighth grade.

Another point that teacher makes in the video is that no one seems to be talking about this even though it’s obviously a very bad situation for a lot of kids. Gee, I wonder why teachers, unions and administrators don’t talk about this? The real question is why the media isn’t making this national issue a more high-profile topic of discussion. One opinion piece from the NY Times is something but you have to wonder if this would be getting a lot more attention if it could be blamed on the right people by which I mean, people on the right.