An epidemic of plummeting school standards is spreading throughout the nation in the name of “helping” kids. Alas, it’ll do anything but.
Portland schools are mulling the idea of letting kids get away with cheating and not doing homework under new “equitable grading practices.”
Other districts are dropping passing requirements for exams.
New York’s been lowering the bar in schools for years. Recently, abysmal math-test results prompted the Brooklyn Math & Science Exploratory School to drop “Math & Science” from its name, rather than address the problem.
Such measures are poisonous “fixes” when kids fail.
“Not giving a student a zero when his or her work earned such a low mark actually harms that child,” says Heritage Foundation education expert Jonathan Butcher.
Indeed: Papering over failure only leads kids down an inescapable dark hole.
The consequences could plague them their whole life, especially when they find themselves unable to function well in the real world.
The better idea: Let. Them. Fail.
And teach them to work through it.
I know firsthand this works, because I myself failed every day growing up, as I fought to overcome dyslexia.
And I’ve now graduated college, completed an internship at The Post and accepted a promising job.
How’d I do it?
It wasn’t easy: In first grade, every spelling test was covered in red ink.
The words I’d tried to spell wound up chock full of errors.
I was failing. Monumentally.
Yet my parents didn’t question my teachers; they questioned me.
We spent months searching to learn I was dyslexic.
Easy-sailing valedictorians, my folks had never faced such a dilemma, but they weren’t about to say I didn’t need to learn English or pretend my performance was good when it wasn’t.
During the following 11 years, I became painfully acquainted with failure, experiencing it daily.
Mom found new reading and spelling programs without end, each yielding only small progress — though progress nonetheless.
It didn’t help (or maybe it did?) that my best friend was the fastest reader and best speller I knew.
I shed my share of tears and suffered more embarrassments than I care to remember, but through it all, my parents praised the process rather than my results.
And it paid off: Eventually, I came to love reading and writing. And constant exposure to written words helped me improve my spelling and literacy skills.
I wound up becoming senior editor of my university newspaper and this summer held my own as a Post editorial-page intern.
I’d faced failure and pushed through it.
But parents — and, increasingly, school staff — are ignoring this vital lesson.
Rather than instilling grit, grown-ups effectively tell kids not to worry: They won’t be failed no matter how little effort they exert or poorly they perform.
The result: Kids come away thinking they’ve accomplished what they need to excel, only to painfully find out later they haven’t.
All the praise and participation trophies badly skew their self-impressions, depriving them of the motivation to improve and setting them up for disaster.
Indeed, the upsurge in depression among teens and young adults may well be linked to their jarring confrontation with reality after years of delusions by their schools and parents.
So: What to do about struggling kids?
Well, start by teaching grit, persistence and hard work.
Bad grade? Study more. Rejected application? Keep working and apply elsewhere. Dyslexia? Push through. Figure out workarounds.
And learn humility.
Youths must learn to fail; it’s the only way to deal with the real world.
So, grown-ups: Whip out a red pen, and be honest with kids. Criticism isn’t a bad thing; it’s constructive.
Lowering standards, on the other hand, is cruel deception, doomed to blow up in a kid’s face sooner or later.
By teaching kids to work through roadblocks, rather than pretending they don’t exist, they’ll figure out how to transition from childhood “failures” to successes.
I know for a fact that’s true: My own experience proves it.
Source link: https://nypost.com/2023/09/15/let-struggling-students-fail-and-teach-them-to-persevere/