FCPS’ Response to Startling Increase in Failing Grades is to…Manage the Optics?
Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) gained national attention a few weeks back for the dramatic increase in failing grades. Hispanic students and students with disabilities were hit hardest, but students in every demo were doing worse. We talked about it here.
WTOP reports that FCPS has proposed a plan to address the problem. Highlights include:
The lowest score a student can now get is 50 out of 100.
Lowering penalties for submitting work late.
No single assignment will be worth more than 20% of a student’s final grade.
Reducing the number of assignments per quarter from nine to six.
“Flexibility” with final exams.
Changing how final marks are done.
Possibly doing away with hard grades all together and move to a pass, no-pass (i.e. fail) or incomplete system.
Offer summer school programs to help struggling students.
Host parent teacher conferences with parents of at risk students.
The problem with this plan is it does nothing to improve actual academic achievement. Instead, it focuses on managing the optics of a massive under-performance in academic achievement. Maybe reducing the number of assignments or lowering penalties for late work will allow struggling students to focus more on less work, thereby increasing overall performance. If so, we’d love to see the data to support such a move. And receive assurances the less work will be made up somehow.
Yet the absence of any concrete proposals in the plan to improve academic achievement is a tell. If FCPS was serious about helping these students immediately, something like targeted tutoring would be a better solution. The summer school concept is a half-baked attempt - that’s too far off to help these students.
More likely, this plan is an effort by FCPS leadership to minimize yet another embarrassment on their watch. Once these actions are implemented, it’s all but guaranteed the failure rate will stabilize or even decline. Come March or end of the school year, suddenly the narrative is now the dropping failure rate. On the surface, that will make it look like FCPS fixed the problem. In reality, the struggling students are pushed ahead to the next level, unprepared. FCPS will get to issue a glowing press release while the students they abandoned struggle in practice, even if on paper, FCPS can claim everything is great.
This situation demonstrates something we’ve noted before - that FCPS isn’t the exceptional public school system that we all thought. It was in the past, but it hasn’t been a great system for a while. Large number of students throughout the county struggle, which is masked by high achieving populations in a few schools. FCPS leadership is determined to keep up appearances and hide the decline to avoid Rome falling on their watch. They’re desperate to avoid the blame and push it off on someone else down the road. At some point, this game will end, if it hasn’t already. The fails are piling up and the rot is festering. It’s past time for leaders to step up and implement real solutions to fix our once great public school system.