Teachers at a Clark County school have received a directive from the administration to inflate any final grades below 50 to that mark, thus setting a so-called "minimum 'F' policy".
The Lawrence Junior High School memo, which I have posted at right, instructs teachers that they must weight the semester final as 20 percent of the final grade while not allowing any student to get below a 50 percent.
I checked with the district, which confirmed this is not coming from above but that some area superintendents have embraced it. The rationale, as it was described to me, is: "If a kid got a 28% the first semester, he’d have to get a 92% the second semester in order to average 60% and get a passing grade. If a student had a bad semester for some reason (whether because he messed up or because his parents were going through a divorce or he had a prolonged illness, etc.) the outcome often is that the student can’t recover and loses a full year, in spite of better grades in the subsequent semester."
But as one teacher put it to me, "I believe the community should be aware of this because it is wrong. Grades are being falsified & inflated and the standards are being lowered in a community where the standards need to be higher and the systems in the schools need to be changed to help the students, not lie to them and lead them to believe that they will get 50% when they did not earn it."
My guess is this one will catch the eye of Superintendent Dwight Jones and, perhaps, even reform-minded Gov. Brian Sandoval.
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