Every teacher is saying, 'How did he graduate? He didn't do anything'

In 2025, South Carolina’s high school graduation rate hit a high of 87 percent, reports Hechinger's Ariel Gilreath. But only a third of seniors were college ready by graduation, based on their test scores and classwork. "More than 1 in 5 students in the state were chronically absent from school — nearly double the rate of chronic absenteeism in the state prior to the pandemic."

South Carolina is trying to raise expectations. A new state law bans schools from setting "grade floors," which set a minimum of 40 or 50 out of 100 instead of zero, even if no work is turned in. The idea is to persuade students who get a slow start not to give up on a passing grade.

But students have figured out they can pass with very little work, says Patrick Kelly, director of governmental affairs with the Palmetto State Teachers Association and a high school history teacher.

“At any high school graduation, I promise you, there will be a child who walks across the stage where every teacher in the room is going to go, ‘Wait, how did they graduate? They didn’t do anything,’” said Kelly.

Texas passed a similar law in 2009, writes Gilreath.

The South Carolina law also states that students must turn in missing assignments before they become eligible for credit-recovery programs, which let them make up classes they failed, often via online worksheets.

That could raise dropout rates says, Susan Stevens, assistant superintendent for school leadership in Greenville County, which set a grade floor more than a decade ago. The district will rethink how to support students at risk of failure.

“South Carolina teachers would tell you that policies like grade floors, credit recovery and content recovery — in the way that they’ve been implemented — are leading to students getting diplomas that have no value beyond the paper they’re printed on,” says Kelly.

Nationwide, grades "have been rising for decades, while scores on standardized tests have stagnated or fallen," reports Gilreath.

The average high school GPA is 3.36, says ACT. Those not-so-prepared "B" students are pushing grade inflation at the college level, says Fordham's David Griffith. “It’s hard to hold the line at the higher ed level if you have kids coming into higher ed who are less prepared than they used to be.”

For younger students, minimum grades mislead parents into thinking their children are doing well, says Dena Crews, president of the state teachers' union. Students don't get extra help to fill in learning gaps in the early grades, then struggle in middle and high school.

More than one-quarter of teachers work in a school with a “no zeros” grading policy, according to a recent survey. It's part of a movement known as "equitable grading," which also includes flexible deadlines and retakes of tests.

 Remote schooling "supercharged" the idea, says Fordham's Griffith. "Frankly, teachers didn’t have much choice. What were they going to do, flunk every kid in America?”

There are incentives for schools to go along. Schools look better on their state report cards, if the failure rate is low, said Derek Lewis, a former school board member of Greenville County Schools and father of a high school student in the district. But reducing F grades may not "necessarily equate to better learning,” Lewis said. “We focus on what we measure.”

San Francisco schools dropped a “Grading for Equity" plan last year after public outcry, reports Han Li in the San Francisco Standard. It included "allowing students to retake tests; excluding factors like lateness, effort, and participation from final grades; omitting classwork and homework from grading; and basing 100% of the grade on 'summative' testing."

The idea has popped up in the East Bay's high-performing Tri-Valley districts, reports Sarah Ravani in the San Francisco Chronicle. But education officials have rebranded rebranded by removing the word "equity."

The grading approach "allows students multiple retakes, reduces how often zeros are given on tests and eliminates extra credit, among other changes — while scrubbing any mention of the word that has made the movement politically radioactive," Ravani writes. The approved terms are “standards-based grading,” “mastery-based assessment” or “grade reform.”

 However, even under new names, Dublin Unified has decided not to test eliminating zeroes and starting passing grades at 50%, she writes. There was too much parent opposition.