It’s a relatively rare occurrence that we lavish praise on local school leaders. But fair is fair, and when they do something right, it’s worth pointing out.
It went down thusly:
At the start of the 2023-24 school year, Arlington Public Schools ramped up a new initiative to help students at the secondary level who did poorly on a particular test or project. Under the new arrangement, those students could re-do the work and, if they showed improvement, the higher grade would be substituted for the initial one.
In theory, this was designed to aid students on the cusp of knowing the material, allowing them to apply themselves a little more and improve, say, a D to a C or a C to a B.
But in a real-world environment, what happened was that academically motivated students gamed the system to keep pushing for better grades – make that B-plus an A, that kind of thing – and in the process were wearing out teachers.
We admire the moxie of students who found a loophole big enough to drive a Mack truck through, and proceeded to do so. But we also are glad that Arlington Superintendent Francisco Durán (prodded by angry educators) made a mid-year course correction, enacting changes that in effect closed the major loopholes and made it more likely the opportunity would work as intended – to the benefit of students who put in extra work to master content, not those who are simply trying to inflate grade-point averages.
