Parents demand perfect report cards

Parents are lawyering up to challenge a bad grade -- or a teacher's unflattering comment -- on their child's report card, reports Zusha Elinson in the Wall Street Journal.

In affluent Palo Alto, my daughter's old district, one mother is suing because her third-grader's report card said he needs to work on “cooperating with others.”

A Palo Alto father filed suit after AI-detection software flagged his 10th-grade son's essay on The Crucible as “76% AI,” writes Elinson. The teacher "gave him a D on the retake, bringing his final grade down to a C."

Takashi Kato, a Silicon Valley CEO, submitted a 1,162-page packet showing the sophomore’s “drafting and revision process,” and claimed detection software can be biased against non-native English writers. "He offered to accept a B to resolve the dispute," writes Elinson. He dropped the suit in September. The district says there was no settlement.

Many Silicon Valley parents are competitive overachievers who want their children to get into very selective universities. They think that takes a perfect report card. And they all have lawyers.

When I was a Palo Alto parent, my daughter got a C in Geometry as a ninth-grader. Days before the final, she was briefly knocked down and out by a senior streaking through campus. (She gawked, rather than jumping out of his way, and hit her head on concrete.) The concussion made it hard to study for the test, but it's not as though she was acing the course before she was -- as her classmates put it -- run over by the naked guy. I let it go.

Four in 10 teachers report parental pressure to raise grades in a 2024 EdWeek survey, Elinson writes. "Affluent parents, teachers noted, were more likely to complain."

Samira Hardcastle, named teacher of the year at her Nashville middle school, quit in protest when district officials raised a student's grade to “appease an irate parent,” she writes. The student had failed to turn in a major art project or to complete it when given a second chance. Hardcastle refused to reconsider. The principal let the student finish the assignment at home, and gave it a high-enough score to raise the course grade from a "C" to a "B."

“There’s no accountability, so they learn that it doesn’t matter what their work ethic is,” Hardcastle told The Wall Street Journal. “That’s going to be a tough lesson when they get into the real world and realize it doesn’t work that way.”