In Baltimore, one high school is in the spotlight for having one of the highest graduation rates in the city while having no students proficient in math (Papst, 2017). This discovery was made by Project Baltimore and reveals information indicating that schools are changing the grades of students to enable them to graduate. The article by Papst (2017) describes how some teachers in the high school are shocked by the revelation while others are not surprised. One of the educators interviewed for the article identified “grade changing” as the reason for the high graduation rate in spite of zero proficiency in math scores.
Changing the grades of students is an unethical exercise that should not be promoted or allowed—yet in the current educational environment, schools are rewarded with federal funding for having good test records and/or graduation rates. The actual level of education that students are achieving is incidental and gets lost in such a climate. While this article surprised me, I always understood how the environment could come about. Schools are incentivized to boost their numbers to make themselves look better. That is a big problem, because it means educators and administrators are tempted to act unethically in order to obtain funding from the state and/or federal government.
They are setting students up for future failure instead of helping them achieve knowledge there and then. They are passing the buck, so to speak, and that is a violation of a core ethical tenant in education. Teachers are responsible for fairly assessing student achievement—not for altering that output when it doesn’t match the desired outcome of the administration.
2
The article by Kauffman and Khadaroo (2017) focuses on the role of educators in addressing issues that are divisive in the classroom. The central issue identified in the article were the recent events in Charlottesville, where protestors clashed over ideological reasons. Some educators felt that the reaction from the White House was inadequate in framing the events appropriately, so they felt a moral responsibility to address the issues in their own classroom with students.
From a Biblical perspective, Jesus teaches everyone to love his neighbor, and that is a value that educators should strive to stress in their classes. This is really the essence of the Golden Rule, and even if one does not identify as Christian, Our Lord promotes a value that everyone can recognize as morally good and just…
