Since the return to in-person learning, schools have seen a surge in student misbehavior of many kinds, ranging from minor classroom disruptions to serious physical violence. Experts cite a host of causes, including stunted socioemotional development, mental health struggles, shifted norms around screen time, TikTok challenges, parent pushback, and changes to disciplinary policies.
I don’t doubt that some or all of these factors have contributed to the crisis. As a high school English teacher, however, I found that something else most impacted my students’ (mis)behavior and my ability to manage it: recent changes to grading policies that have the effect of lowering expectations.
While important debates rage over reactive discipline—that is, what schools do in response to student misbehavior—practicing teachers know that the most effective classroom management is proactive, since it discourages negative behaviors from happening in the first place. “An ounce of prevention,” Benjamin Franklin famously observed, “is worth a pound of cure.” And essential to proactive classroom management is the ability to establish high expectations. Strong student-teacher relationships are important, but grades remain a key motivator. The understanding that an assignment must be submitted within a set timeframe helps keep students on task.
After proactive classroom management, the next best thing is to nip off-task behavior in the bud. My go-to “teacher move” in these cases was always to redirect students to the current academic activity. If I heard a group of students debating the merits of their favorite rappers instead of the assigned discussion prompt, for example, I’d ask them how Playboi Carti served to advance the plot in The Crucible (corny, sure, but generally effective once the eye-rolls ceased).
Keeping my corrective focused on schoolwork rather than behavior meant that I could avoid putting teenagers on the defensive, and it served as a purposeful reminder for why we were together. Of course, this strategy didn’t work every time for every disruption, but it worked often enough and for the most common forms of misbehavior—as well as in the very different school settings in which I taught.
But what if students lack any sense of urgency over the task at hand? What if any assignment can be turned in at a later date, or perhaps not at all?
Take, for instance, the 50 percent rule, an increasingly trendy grading policy that assigns students a minimum grade of 50 percent for any assignment, usually even if it was not attempted. Proponents hold that such policies will increase student motivation by enabling averages to “bounce back” from a poor performance, and that a 50 is still low enough to avoid inflating grades.
I’m all for motivating students, but that math just doesn’t add up. Imagine a class in a school with the 50 percent rule and a typical letter grade system. Say a student earns an 85 average (mid-range B) in the first quarter and then decides to forgo all assignments in the second quarter. Averaging 85 and 50, the teacher would be compelled to award a passing score of 67.5 (D+) for the semester without the student having done a thing for weeks.
Kids get the message, loud and clear: they can pick and choose which homework assignments to complete, which classroom activities to join, and whether they’ll take the unit test. When I taught in a district mandating the 50 percent rule, here’s what I learned:
1. Some students are absolutely going to do the bare minimum to pass. It’s not malicious; it’s tactical. I had students who very politely informed me that they hoped I didn’t take it personally, but they had done enough work earlier in the year to coast, and they didn’t care for writing essays, so they wouldn’t be bothering with the final paper.
2. Struggling students who don’t expect to excel can suffer the worst effects. In a scenario where they would have to attempt an assignment to get at least partial credit, they typically would. But in one with the 50 percent rule, why would they give it their best shot if they thought that the grade they’d earn wouldn’t be much different from the one they’d get for doing nothing?
3. Highly motivated students will strive to earn that A, no matter what, and they know they can’t get there by skipping assignments. But they also aren’t the ones most likely to alter their behavior in response to grading policies.
It doesn’t take a lot of students losing focus for the situation to snowball. First, the lack of meaningful grades means that teachers are less equipped to redirect students in response to everyday misbehavior, which can then escalate. Second, when students don’t keep up with classwork, they are likely to get confused as the class moves forward with new content. And confused or frustrated kids are more likely to act out. Finally, misbehavior is contagious: When even a few students are off task, others often follow suit. Frequent disruptions interfere further with learning, perpetuating the cycle of misbehavior.
To improve student outcomes and decrease the need for reactive disciplinary intervention, schools and districts must revisit lax grading policies.
Instead of across-the-board changes to grading, allow and encourage teachers to be flexible on a case-by-case basis. Those concerned about equity should keep in mind that equity is about giving individual students what they need, rather than giving every student the same thing. Granting an extension or a retake to a student who has been ill or has lost a family member is fair and conscionable. Allowing unlimited flexibility for all students, on the other hand, doesn’t do much for equity.
And if teachers are responsive to individual students’ circumstances, there isn’t any reason to keep the 50 percent rule. The occasional “catastrophic failure” can be rectified without chucking expectations out the window for all other students.
In the face of a deadly pandemic and widespread societal disruption, more generous grading policies had their place. But three years later, with schools back to operating in-person and the national emergency coming to a close, it’s high time to reestablish meaningful expectations that help restore normalcy to classrooms.
