EDITORIAL: No longer holding students accountable

There have been plenty of destructive education fads over the decades — abandoning phonics, for instance — but recent years have seen two particularly disastrous policies gain a foothold within the public school establishment. And Jesus Jara, superintendent of the Clark County School District, has been a staunch advocate for both.

In a newsletter last week on the teacher shortage, Jessica Grose of The New York Times notes how minimum F grading and restorative discipline have become more prevalent in districts across the country. The former mandates that students can’t receive less than 50 percent for assignments even if they don’t do any work; the latter eschews suspensions and more severe consequences for disruptive students in favor or a less punitive approach.

Ms. Grose could have been writing about Las Vegas.

One of the “consistent themes” from teachers who responded “was that they felt they could no longer hold students accountable academically or behaviorally because of pressure from snowplow parents and bad district policies.”

One public school teacher from North Carolina, Ms. Grose writes, “said the 50 percent floor and ‘NO attendance enforcement’ leads to a scenario where ‘we get students who skip over 100 days, have a 50 percent, complete a couple of assignments to tip over into 59.5 percent and then pass.’ ”

This is not uncommon in Clark County, where Mr. Jara, with the help of the School Board, imposed both the minimum F and more lax disciplinary procedures. Students are allowed to retake tests and have no deadlines to complete homework. Attendance is irrelevant. Like the North Carolina educator, some teachers in Las Vegas complain that students learn how to game this new system while doing as little work as possible.

Meanwhile, children get automatically promoted to the next level, and high schools hand out diplomas indifferent to whether students have mastered basic skills.

“I am struck by the seeming contradiction between multiple measures of academic engagement and learning (e.g., sharply increased absenteeism, declining achievement),” Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford’s graduate school of education, wrote to Ms. Grose, “and the increases in high school graduation we are seeing in some places.”

Again, Mr. Dee isn’t talking specifically about Clark County, but he could be. Graduate rates have risen here recently even as test scores stagnate and chronic absenteeism — a whopping 36 percent in the 2022-23 school year — explodes.

Mr. Jara and the teachers union remain locked in a contentious salary dispute. Unfortunately for Las Vegas taxpayers there’s no indication that, once the spat is settled, the district will turn its attention to setting high expectations and standards for those in its charge.