Ethics in Education: Grades, Values, and Charter Schools
This paper examines three contemporary ethical issues in American education through the lens of academic integrity, moral responsibility, and administrative accountability. Drawing on news articles from 2017, the paper analyzes a Baltimore high school's practice of changing student grades to inflate graduation rates, considers whether teachers have a moral and Biblical imperative to address divisive social events in the classroom, and evaluates the ethical concerns surrounding charter school funding and regulatory oversight in Charlotte, North Carolina. Together, these cases illustrate how financial incentives, ideological pressures, and profit-driven motives can compromise the core mission of education.
- Introduction: Grade Manipulation in Baltimore: Baltimore school inflates graduation rates by falsifying grades
- Ethical Implications of Falsifying Student Performance: Grade changing violates teachers' core ethical obligations
- Educators and Divisive Issues in the Classroom: Teachers weigh moral duty to address Charlottesville events
- Charter School Funding and Administrative Accountability: Charlotte charter schools mismanage funds amid weak oversight
- Conclusion: Institutional incentives undermine education's ethical mission
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds each ethical argument in a specific, concrete news story, making abstract claims about integrity and accountability immediately tangible.
- It applies a consistent ethical framework — the tension between institutional incentives and genuine student welfare — across all three cases, giving the essay structural coherence.
- The Biblical perspective on the Golden Rule is introduced naturally and connected directly to the classroom context, rather than appearing as an afterthought.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates source-driven ethical analysis: each section begins by summarizing a news article, then shifts to applying a normative ethical lens. This move from description to evaluation is a foundational skill in applied ethics writing and helps the reader follow the author's reasoning clearly.
Structure breakdown
The paper is organized into three parallel units, each built around one news article. The first addresses grade falsification in Baltimore; the second considers teachers' moral duty to address divisive events; the third examines charter school mismanagement. Each unit follows the same pattern — summarize, analyze, apply ethical judgment — before a brief reference list closes the paper.
Introduction: Grade Manipulation in Baltimore
In Baltimore, one high school has been placed 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 student grades to enable them to graduate. The article by Papst (2017) describes how some teachers at the high school were shocked by the revelation while others were not surprised. One educator interviewed for the article identified "grade changing" as the reason for the high graduation rate, despite a zero-proficiency rate in math scores.
Changing student grades is an unethical practice that should not be promoted or permitted — yet in the current educational environment, schools are rewarded with federal funding for strong test records and high graduation rates. The actual level of education that students are achieving is incidental and gets lost in such a climate. While this article was surprising, it is not difficult to understand how such an environment could develop. Schools are incentivized to boost their numbers to appear more successful. That is a serious problem, because it means educators and administrators are tempted to act unethically in order to secure funding from state and federal government.
Ethical Implications of Falsifying Student Performance
The core ethical issue here is that teachers are misrepresenting student performance. In doing so, they are setting students up for future failure rather than helping them acquire knowledge in the present. They are passing the buck, and that constitutes a violation of a fundamental ethical principle in education. Teachers are responsible for fairly assessing student achievement — not for altering that assessment when the results do not match the administration's desired outcome.
Conclusion
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