In 1984, the Texas Legislature enacted House Bill 72, the landmark school-reform law whose provisions are largely still in place today.
The most controversial element of this law was the policy known as “No Pass, No Play,” which attempted to curb the trend of athletics superseding academics as a priority in Texas schools. Less controversial but perhaps more significant was the establishing of 70 rather than 60 as the new minimum passing grade in all K-12 classes.
This latter policy was included in an effort to combat another trend: “social promotion,” or the alleged tendency of schools to promote students from one grade level to the next without assurance that students had mastered essential academic content before moving on to more advanced coursework.
To address this same problem, HB 72 also established the first statewide system requiring students to pass a standardized test before receiving a high-school diploma.
But these and other standards-based reforms have sometimes had the unfortunate effect of maintaining only the appearance of high standards, not necessarily the reality.
Thirty years later, little research exists on whether “No Pass, No Play” laws have any meaningful effect on learning.
The Texas law has since been amended to exclude certain advanced courses; there is evidence that the policy unfairly penalizes students at large high schools as well as those belonging to certain minority groups; and anecdotal evidence abounds of teachers being pressured to stretch grade averages to 70 around the time of crucial eligibility reports.
And the STAAR test, now in its fourth year of implementation, establishes surprisingly mediocre standards of “success.” The recommended cutoff score for the English II exam is only 59 out of a total possible raw score of 92, or 64 percent. For Algebra I, it’s 34 out of 54, or 63 percent.
Most colleges still award passing credit for a grade of D, and a college D usually denotes a numerical average of 60 to 69. So why do Texas K-12 schools persist in inflating the value of a D to 70-74?
Whatever the ultimate merits of HB 72 and its successors, there is no evidence that the grade-inflation element has done anything to improve real student achievement.
Despite teachers’ best efforts, the tendency of some students to do minimal work no matter what the minimal standard might be is one of the few constants in education.
Where teachers were once pressured by such students, their parents, and administrators to award a 60 for the sake of the student passing, now they are pressured to award a 70.
Which is more preferable: an accurate 60 reflecting meager but minimally acceptable work, or an inflated 70 reflecting precisely the same level of achievement? The former option may result in social promotion, but the latter results in the same, plus an exaggerated record of student accomplishment.
The traditional A-F grading system, first put into practice by Harvard University in the 19th century and later copied by the public schools, is far from perfect. But Texas’s ill-advised attempt to reform it hasn’t worked.
It’s time for Texas to admit its error.
James O’Keeffe teaches English at Northwest Early College High School and El Paso Community College.
