Q: How does a student fail in Philly? A: He doesn’t

A few days ago the Inquirer published a shocking but not surprising story saying it is an “open secret” that many Philadelphia public school teachers simply will not fail a student, no matter his or her ability, performance, comprehension, or even attendance. 

“There’s a bunch of kids that have Fs in reading, and I’m probably going to pass them — I’ll bump it up to a D and call it a day,” said one dispirited middle school teacher.

That’s the way the Philadelphia School District wants it, perhaps dating back to the early 2000s, to the era of No Child Left Behind, says the story by staff writer Kristen A. Graham, who interviewed some two dozen teachers.

In my experience, it goes back much farther than that.

And it ain’t just a Philly thing.

I’m sure this goes on across America, and not just in public schools.

In May, Harvard University announced a crackdown on grade inflation, limiting the number of A grades teachers would be permitted to hand out.

“The move comes after top grades became so common that some Harvard faculty argued they no longer reliably distinguished exceptional work. More than 60% of all grades awarded to undergraduates in recent years were in the A range, according to university data cited by faculty members who supported the measure,” the AP reported.

The whole thing brings echoes of participation trophies, dished out to students not for merit, but merely for showing up.

It is wrong-headed social rot, perpetrated by the notion that enforcing enduring standards might affect a student’s erroneous perception of self-worth. 

Building a student’s confidence is a  worthy goal, but if that structure is built of toothpicks  it will go down in a stiff wind. It lacks a sturdy foundation. It is a mirage.

Worse — really the worst thing — it sets up the student for failure.

Teachers “fear for the long-term implications for students who are passed along without the skills they need to advance,” reported the Inquirer.

Let me give you an example from my own experience, as an adjunct journalism teacher at Temple University from the mid ‘70s to mid ‘80s.

In my second year teaching I received a memo from the head of the department written in academicese. I did not keep it for posterity, alas, but it had something to do with grade inflation.

I took the letter to a deputy of the department, a friend of mine who was an Inquirer editor, for translation into English.

What it means, she told me, is that students have to earn the grade they receive.

What’s the alternative? I naively asked.

“Social promotion,” she said.

When I was hired for this part-time gig, no one said anything about how to do the job.

I mean, really. It was just show up and teach newswriting.

I think there was a mandatory text and I was free to require others, but not a word about grades. No suggestion of passing students, or giving them a better grade, because of their self esteem. Or because of their race. 

I pictured grades as a bell-shaped curve with a few As and a few Fs at the ends, with the majority in the middle getting a C, which is an “average” grade.

I regarded an A to be a reward for truly outstanding work. I averaged less than one in each of my classes of 15 students. Even fewer Fs, because you’d have to be really hopeless not to be able to write a short news story.

I want to make two points here, one about the student, one about the institution.

I’ll start with the institution and I will omit a detail or two about the person involved.

He was a Temple trustee and also the CEO of a major Philadelphia employer. The story I heard, and that I believed, was that at a meeting of the trustees, the CEO laid a serious problem on the table. Many Temple graduates applying for a job, he said, were unable to complete the employment questionnaire. They were functionally illiterate Temple graduates.

“Think of what this does to the reputation of the university,” he said. 

So the whispered, but real, social promotion policy got dropped. It was hurting the institution. Fifty years later, Harvard learned the same lesson.

My observation about the student is painful, and ties in with what some teachers fear about the long-term implications of passing students who had not actually learned anything.

When I was teaching newswriting, the first thing I asked students, mostly freshmen, to do was write a mini bio of themselves.

My motive was to run a quick check on their writing ability, and also learn about their background, which would help me shape my teaching to their needs. Most of the bios were fine, but a small number were not. They was worse than terrible, and the student was always a Black graduate of an inner city Philadelphia high school. Often a graduate with high grades.

I repeat, it was a small number, but they could not write a simple declarative sentence, and had no idea of punctuation. Don’t even ask about spelling. (This was before computers, remember. Each desk had a typewriter.)

It became my awful task to tell the student that he — always male — was so deficient there was no way he could pass my course. I could not take time away from the rest of the class to try to teach grammar, punctuation, and simple composition.

I suggested they drop my class — without a negative mark — and switch to another class. I even suggested English for beginners, which was actually a course intended for foreign students.

I looked into the hurting and confused eyes of the student.

“It is not your fault,” I would say. “You were cheated by your teachers and your school. They did not do the job they should have done to prepare you. 

“But that is history. This is the present. Go take a class that teaches the fundamentals and come back to me next term.”

The students always took the advice in the spirit it was intended. They were more hurt than angry.

I was more angry than hurt. These were good kids, they wanted to be good students, they thought they were good students, but they were cheated. The system intended to help them, hurt them.

What could be more mean than that?