Let each high school decide how to motivate students

Two demographically similar and academically impressive local high schools - Northwood in Montgomery County and West Potomac in Fairfax County - have been debating grades. Both schools have been accused of letting too many students pass their courses without learning the material.

This is in line with what millions of Americans say about schools in general. But they disagree over whom to blame. Unmotivated students? Lazy teachers? Cowardly administrators? Short-sighted parents?

I wonder if there isn't a way for all of these people to resolve the dispute by offering school choices that would approach grading and teaching in different ways. I know it sounds chaotic, but bear with me.

Last week in this column, Northwood math teacher Dan Stephens said he can't motivate his students if his school district lets them pass his course even when they flunk the final exam, written by the county to set a standard for all schools. Contradictory county rules say the test may count as only 25 percent of the final grade.

West Potomac became an issue when my Post colleague Donna St. George revealed it was giving students an I for incomplete, rather than the traditional F, if they were flunking a course. For a while, the school gave the kids extra time to turn in missing assignments and master the material. But late last week, the school said it was going back to the traditional F because of widespread criticism.

On a national scale, these are both successful schools, with relatively high test scores and college-going rates. About one-third of their students are low income, but their percentages of graduating seniors who passed Advanced Placement courses last year were more than twice the national average.

Nonetheless, like most schools, they have plenty of failing students. Lots of readers chimed in about that last week in e-mails and comment posts. Some demanded that the elementary and middle schools feeding into them get tough so all students are ready for high school. Some said parents should stop coddling kids. Many recommended that students be required to retake courses they did not master, even if that delays their graduation.

(Montgomery officials didn't know what percentage of students flunk countywide final exams yet still pass the courses. But they said the number is likely to be small because passing rates on those finals are 67 percent or higher.)

Creative educators also have ideas. Stephens wants to deny students a passing grade if they don't get at least 50 percent on the final exam (still 10 percentage points below the passing mark). West Potomac Principal Cliff Hardison wants to give struggling students many chances to save themselves, even if caught cheating. Montgomery school experts told me that the solution is great teachers who present content in an engaging and relevant way.

They're right. A parent said on my blog that her son hated math until he got a math teacher "who encourages the kids to call her at home with questions, prepares great reviews of the material and communicates with parents."

I predict neither school will stray far from the standard American approach: Let slackers slide through. Many will eventually grow up and realize they must apply themselves in college or job training if they want a decent life. But there is another way to deal with them.

Some schools - usually with many more low-performing kids than Northwood or West Potomac - are letting their teachers band together to experiment with required after-school tutoring, regular teacher visits to homes, more imaginative teaching, longer school days and whatever else works for their communities. Would the Washington suburbs ever tolerate a system in which families could choose schools with radical approaches, such as insisting students pass the final exam or retake the course? Would any parents expose their child to such experiments?

I think yes. Parents are demanding more choices as they worry about our economic future. Their children might also do better if we gave them fewer choices than we do now.

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What happens at school stays at school: When students can't bring old tests home

Besides this Monday Metro column, I write my Class Struggle column every Thursday for the Local Living section. It focuses on parents. When I move to California next year, I hope to rename it "The School Parent" and compare the adventures of families here to parent-school encounters elsewhere. Such stories are full of surprises.

For instance, a McLean High School father complained to me recently about teachers not letting his children take their graded exams home so they could get a better sense of their errors. It was an anti-cheating measure that seemed to frustrate learning. Assuming it was an isolated phenomenon, I did a Local Living column about it.

Wrong again. The online version of the column about it got 68 comments, three times as many as I usually get. E-mails poured in. Hiding exams was more common than I realized. A frustrated tutor in California said that "it's not only absurd, but unethical, for a teacher to withhold the results of tests when they are a major component of the grade."

Phyllis Payne, a Fairfax County parent, said one teacher told her that "she uses the same tests every year, so she can't let the children keep the test questions. As a former teacher, I'm mystified by this approach." A top student at West Potomac High School in Fairfax County was ignored when she asked to see a test to determine why she got a D.

Teachers said parents and students missed the point. Anne Cullen, who teaches honors-level journalism at Montgomery Blair High School in Montgomery County, said that "creating a quality test (e.g. one without ambiguous or misleading answers) takes considerable time and effort, and so it is simply not reasonable to expect teachers to design new sets of tests for each unit taught." Teachers usually let students review their results in class, but parents and students say that isn't enough time.

The exchanges on my blog got ugly. Parents accused teachers of being lazy. Teachers said parents were enabling cheaters who would share old tests, maybe for a fee.

Some readers asked me to check with test preparation experts, or psychometricians, before I waded into this swamp. I have talked to them for decades. They patiently explain the long hours and many dollars needed to create tests that are fair to all students and align with learning standards they must assess.

One problem is that many local school districts are going to great lengths to standardize their own tests - making sure, for instance, that all U.S. history classes have the same final - to prepare their students for the standardized state tests used to judge schools under federal and state laws. Having done all that work, they want to reuse at least some questions, so they can't send them home. But do we really need such well-polished exams at every level?

The SAT and ACT college entrance tests, the AP, IB and Cambridge college-level tests, and the state achievement tests are worth the time and expense. They don't need to be returned to students (although in some cases they can be, for a fee). Why can't school districts let teachers write their own tests and let kids go home with them, as happened when their parents were in school?

Districts say they standardize their tests to protect students from unsettling differences between, say, the way Ms. Gonzalez in Room 313 and the way Mr. Wu in Room 315 grade their junior English students. I don't see the need. Students have survived erratic grading for several decades without much harm. It helps prepare them for dating.

Making every test so gold-plated it can't be taken home to learn from mistakes does hurt the learning process, and needlessly frustrates parents. Some college professors used to hand out many possible exam questions and say that only two or three would be used. That produced careful study, and some learning. Isn't that the point of tests?

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For gifted students, skipping a grade is a smart move

As the second month of the school year nears, some parents wonder whether their children are getting all they need. The lessons might seem too simple. Their kids are bored. If their children have been designated gifted, there might be occasional pullout lessons to enrich what they are learning, but that might not be enough.

I have seen no data to confirm this, but it seems to me that schools rarely consider skipping those students ahead anymore. I have talked to area administrators about this. They are uncomfortable with the approach. They think students who are above their grade level learn better, with some extras thrown in, if they stick with kids their age.

A generation or two ago, the attitude was different. I run into far more people who are my age and skipped a grade than friends of my children who did the same thing. My wife skipped second grade in the early 1950s. Her parents had nothing to do with it. Six weeks into the school year in California, after attending a hard-charging school in Kansas, she heard her teacher say, "You can already do this stuff. This is a waste." She was sent immediately to the third grade.

Parents these days appear reluctant to sanction such a jump. If anything, the fashionable move is to make sure your child is a bit old for her grade. People put their children in kindergarten a year late so their chances of academic and social success are enhanced. That is fine for kids who are late developers. But in the long-running debate over what to do with students ready for more, acceleration deserves another look.

In my experience, students are more ready to adjust to age differences in their classes than we give them credit for. A 2004 study by the Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development at the University of Iowa found that "an overwhelming majority" of students who skipped a grade endorsed the move when surveyed years later. They said they had been both academically challenged and socially accepted.

It can be cheaper and more effective to move a child into a higher grade, compared to hiring an extra teacher to enrich his lessons where he is. Many parents have told me they can't count on public schools to do a very good job with gifted education. School administrators have difficulty finding well-trained teachers with that specialty. The gifted-ed teacher slot may be the first to go in a budget crunch. Acceleration might ease the problem.

Last year Laura Vanderkam, who runs the Gifted Exchange blog, and education author Richard Whitmire of Whyboysfail.com wrote about this topic in Education Week and tried to find school districts that embraced grade-skipping. There were very few, but the ones that did had good ideas. At Zumi Elementary School in Scottsdale, Ariz., all the math classes met in first period. Students went to whatever class they were ready for regardless of their age. In Lebanon, Pa., all children were screened for subject competency and offered a chance to take a higher-grade version of that class, even if it meant a bus ride to another school.

My mother would never have allowed that. She was concerned about my social backwardness, and she had a point. But most children are not as immature as I was. We have fine schools in the Washington area. Why can't they open the door to higher grades for kids ready for more than just an abridged version of the next logical step in their educations?

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