Rochester schools to allow students to fail classes again

ROCHESTER - Underperforming secondary students in Rochester will once again be at risk of getting a dreaded “F” on their report cards, with the school district announcing the end to a pandemic-era policy that had replaced failing marks with “no credit” grades.

The no credit, or “NC,” grading guidelines dated to 2020 as a way to soften the blow for students who were struggling to meet the demands of virtual learning. District officials felt it was unfair to give kids failing marks when teachers were developing forms of at-home academic curriculum on the fly.

Since then, however, the drawbacks from the policy have become “increasingly clear,” Rochester Public Schools Superintendent Kent Pekel said in an email to parents this month.

For one, the NCs did not provide students or parents with a clear assessment of how the student is performing in class. For high schoolers, the NCs also did not count toward a student’s overall grade-point average, improving college-readiness opportunities, such as enrollment in the district’s postsecondary educational program.

Pekel, who took the job as superintendent in 2021, said the lack of accountability sent “the wrong message about the student’s overall performance in school.”

“Deciding that basic levels of effort were not necessary — because it wasn’t going to show up in their GPA and they never got the very recognizable symbol of an ‘F’— there was a subset of kids who were seeing that possibility as a reason not to meet some level of basic requirements,” Pekel said in an interview Monday.

In a recent survey, RPS educators mostly agreed with the policy change, which takes effect this coming school year. According to the district, 65% of secondary teachers and 70% of secondary administrators supported reinstating Fs for failing students.

The grading change is the latest in a series of moves Pekel has taken to repeal policies put into place by former Superintendent Michael Muñoz, some of which predated the pandemic. Under the previous administration, the district had implemented the so-called Grading for Learning plan, which prohibited homework and classroom participation from factoring into grading. The approach also allowed for students to take unlimited retakes for most quizzes.

For the 2023-24 school year, RPS leaders changed course — allowing teachers to base up to 30% of a student’s final grade on learning behaviors, like pop-up quizzes and homework. Pekel said part of the district’s rationale was based on lessons learned from the pandemic about the need for regular academic engagement from students.

“If you give kids no credit for being ready for a test, and instead they take a test and then study it because they can take any number of retakes; or you never give points for class participation or homework — especially in a pandemic when kids were disconnected from school and a lot of social norms broke down — you had a disincentive to engage in the practice side of learning.”

Pekel said even with the new grading requirements, the district is not trying to signal a readiness to let students fail. The goal, he emphasized, is for students to take greater responsibility for how their participation and grades may affect opportunities after high school.

“As the school year gets underway, we will take steps to ensure that all students understand this change and the implications that it has for their coursework next year.”