You probably know or have heard of the film Idiocracy where American society got so stupid, that an average guy placed in hibernation wakes up after 500 years to find he’s the smartest person in the world.
Impossible? Probably. But rather than wonder if it could really happen, I’ve always been fascinated with how it might happen. Devolution is a real threat, especially because it has become standard procedure in schools today to make outcomes more important than achievement.
Case in point: the Washington, D.C., school system.
According to a recent report from the D.C. Policy Center, graduation rates at Washington public schools and public charter schools have been steadily rising since the 2018–19 school year. That’s a good thing.
But at the same time, test scores for students have been plummeting. And absentee rates have been rising.
In 2022, 75 percent of all students graduated high school in four years, up seven percentage points from 2019. However, this progress is not reflected in measurements tracking students’ academic achievement. On state assessments, the percentage of high school students that “met” or “exceeded” expectations in the math test declined from 18.4 percent in 2019 to just 11 percent in 2022. English scores stayed the same. Absenteeism is also up, with the percentage of students absent for more than 10 percent of the school year reaching a staggering 48 percent in the 2021–22 academic year, increasing from 29 percent three years prior.
Based on academic achievement and attendance data, fewer students should be graduating. So what’s the answer?
One possible reason is increasing grade inflation, meaning that students who haven’t actually learned course material are getting passing grades anyway. There’s an “increase in policy that we’re seeing to not fail students,” Max Eden, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, tells Reason. “You know, 50 percent as the lowest grade kind of policy, which is being picked up in more and more especially urban schools across the country,”
Recommended: Chicago School of Law: EXPOSED
With actual measurements of school achievement being closely watched by politicians and parents, the best way to avoid trouble — and possible loss of a job for senior administrators in a school system — is by cooking the books. Simply ushering kids on to the next grade or out of school altogether becomes an attractive option.
Eden also suggests that D.C. could also be failing to follow its own policies around attendance requirements for graduation. It wouldn’t be the first time District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) have made this blunder. In 2018, an audit of DCPS found that, despite the district’s sharp rise in graduation rates, the increase “was entirely attributable to schools systematically not enforcing their own policies,” says Eden. “And it’s not as though in the wake of these revelations … D.C. really clamped down and you saw the graduation rates plummet. They kind of didn’t do anything to change their policy because they could not stand to have their graduation rates decrease further.”
It gets worse. While high school graduation rates have been rising, “the rate of those who actually graduate college is declining dramatically, from 37 percent to 22 percent of those who enroll in postsecondary education,” according to that DC Policy Center report.
Giving kids a pass in the name of “equity” is one easy way to turn the United States of America into an Idiocracy. Teachers don’t want to teach and kids don’t want to learn. It’s a recipe for disaster if the arc of decline continues without interruption.
