More Evidence That Lower Standards Are Bad for Kids
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses additional research showing that lowering academic standards hurts students, especially those who are already struggling.
Key Takeaways
- Lower standards hurt the students they're meant to help - Students who are already behind fall further behind when expectations drop
- The evidence keeps mounting - Study after study shows that maintaining high standards produces better outcomes for all students
- Equity requires high expectations - True equity means providing the support students need to meet rigorous standards, not eliminating the standards
Transcript
Lowering academic standards does not help low-achieving students, and I think that should be self-evident, but The Economist has a nice detailed and well-researched article out on this now, and it goes into some recent research that found that when schools lower their grading standards, lower their academic standards, lower their graduation requirements, low achieving students work less hard.
They show up less often.
And as a result, they get less out of their education.
We've seen this trend for several years now of test scores going down and graduation rates going up.
And of course that doesn't make sense, right?
Of course something is off.
and graduation rates are going up, grades are going up, students are getting graded more leniently, and yet they're learning less.
The most objective measure we have of learning is test scores, right?
And test scores aren't perfect, and test scores aren't completely unbiased.
Like, there are problems with test scores, but they show which direction things are going in, right?
If you make a change and test scores go down, you know that was probably not a good change.
If you make a change and test scores go up, that was probably a good change, even if test scores are not perfect.
But what's very, very imperfect is grading and graduation requirements, right?
Like, those are almost completely subjective.
And a lot of educators now are being pressured to give higher and higher grades and to graduate more and more students.
And we know students need a diploma in life.
Like, it is terrible to not get a high school diploma.
And, you know, like, I'm sympathetic to the argument that we should let more kids graduate.
Like, I don't like the requirement that you have to pass a state test to graduate.
I think if you're trying, if you're doing your best, if you're showing up to school, you should probably graduate unless...
you know, something is very off.
But this idea that we should just give all kids A's and give kids credit for work they didn't do and give kids credit for classes they've skipped, like, the research is in now.
If you look at the end of this Economist article, there is evidence now, according to a new working paper, that students at the bottom end of the achievement spectrum do not do as well when we lower standards.
Higher standards are better.
And we've known this forever, right?
We've always known high expectations are better.
No one has ever seriously argued, you know what's good for kids is to have lower expectations.
Nobody really believes that.
And yet we've allowed that thinking to creep in and we've allowed it to justify grade inflation and we've allowed it to justify lower standards and higher graduation rates that don't mean anything positive because we're chasing numbers, right?
We've got to stop chasing numbers that make us look good.
And we've got to start keeping the bottom line the bottom line.
And the bottom line is student learning.
And if we want to have more student learning, we need to have higher academic standards.
Let me know what you think.