There’s a movement afoot in American education to eliminate the letter F from students’ report cards, and that spells big trouble for America’s kids and, ultimately, for America.
In Grand Rapids, Mich., students no longer receive F’s when their work is insufficient to pass courses. Instead, they receive the placeholder grade of H, which stands for “Held” and gives them 12 weeks to go back and redo coursework or supplement failing coursework with alternative work done online. But it’s not just Michigan; this sort of thing is happening elsewhere around the country. Some genius school administrator in Boston has “zapped” kids’ chances to learn personal responsibility and accountability with his “Zeros Aren’t Permitted” policy, whereby students are given time during the school day to go back and complete work that they hadn’t completed satisfactorily when it was due.
In Dallas, students now are allowed to take every test multiple times, and only their best scores count. And homework deadlines? What homework deadlines? Teachers are required to give students credit for homework turned in whenever the students want! But what if the students don’t like the scores that they receive on their late homework assignments? No problem there, either – teachers are required to drop their students’ worst homework scores! This isn’t “No Child Left Behind”; this is “No Child Left Accountable,” and it’s leaving this psychologist wondering how any sane educator or parent could support it.
Proponents say these “no failure” measures will encourage fewer dropouts, but in reality, they’re just new and particularly blatant examples of “eliminating” deviancy by simply defining it away – taking a problem that they’ve been unsuccessful at solving and making it “disappear” by ceasing to define it as a problem. There may be a student or two here and there who will make productive use of these opportunities, but it’s likely that far more will see such measures as a “license to fail,” which will do nothing but reinforce their underachievement and send them into the adult world unprepared, set up to fail and demanding to be rescued.
There’s already a “Golden Rule,” and I wouldn’t even attempt to improve on that, so here’s Dr. Brian’s “Silver Rule”: You don’t encourage people to do the right thing by making it easier for them to do the wrong thing. That holds true in school, in life and in economics. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently stepped onto my turf, offering this behavioral analysis to explain the collapse of the mortgage lending industry:
“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.”
Greenspan needs to stick to number-crunching. Self-interest works just fine when there’s risk to be avoided. The problem in the mortgage lending industry began when the government got involved and tried to eliminate much of the risk involved in lending to unqualified borrowers as a means of socially engineering the American Dream for people who hadn’t earned it. Thanks to misguided governmental measures, sadly, it was in many lenders’ self-interests to make risky loans, leaving taxpayers ultimately holding the seemingly bottomless bag. The success of any enterprise and of any nation requires the majority of the people in it to be doing the right things. Reducing the risk associated with doing the wrong things – in school, in the housing market, or anywhere else – inevitably, over time, results in fewer people doing the right things.
In these tough economic times, you’d hope that we’d learn our lesson, start thinking long-term again, and go back to letting life (and school) be tough for people who don’t do the right things, but it’s not looking that way. While we’re eliminating F’s from kids’ lives, we’re doing everything we can to eliminate F’s like “firings” and “foreclosures” from adults lives’, “bailing out” this industry, then that industry, this home buyer, that lender. Just yesterday, I heard a radio commercial for a debt counseling organization that said of bankruptcy, “It can happen to anyone, at any time, and it’s probably not your fault.” The school administrators with the “no failure” policies couldn’t have said it better themselves, and as usual, it’s wrong. Bankruptcy can’t happen to anyone at any time – it rarely happens to people who’ve behaved 100 percent responsibly – and when it does happen, it’s probably the bankrupt person’s fault. Unfortunately, I fear that many Americans are embracing messages like the one in that ad, as if any moral obligation to repay debts has been thrown completely out the windows of people’s upside-down houses. One thing kids, even F students, are good at spotting is hypocrisy, and it’s tough to get them to understand why they should be allowed to fail when that same philosophy doesn’t seem to apply to adults.
By attempting to eliminate failure in our schools and in our economy, we’re producing the next generation of irresponsible borrowers, lenders and enterprises and setting ourselves up for our next major financial crisis. The survival of capitalism requires the survival of risk, and meaningful success requires the real possibility of failure. So I say, let ’em fail, let ’em learn, let ’em go back to square one and start over, responsibly. Those F’s – whether they stand for “Failing,” “Foreclosure,” or “Fired” – may not be good for GPAs and GDPs in the short run, but in the long run, psychologically and economically, they’ll serve kids, adults and the country much better than H’s, handouts and bailouts.
