Falling grades require action, not overeaction

The school district's success stories are well-catalogued and easy to enumerate. Year after year, the achievements of the Valley's best and brightest students are rewarded with local, state and, sometimes, national honors.

Mat-Su students routinely get accepted into the best colleges and universities in the country and often go on to productive and noteworthy careers as adults. But as we celebrate such successes, it is easy to lose sight of what is going on at the other end of the academic spectrum.

In a report to the school board last week, it was noted that nearly one-quarter of the district's high-schoolers had grade point averages lower than 2.0 after the first semester of the school year. That's less than a D on the standard letter-grading scale.

As alarming as that may seem by itself, it gets worse when compared with grades a year ago. After one semester in the 2004-05 school year, 9 percent of area high-schoolers fell into the sub-2.0 category.

It would be wrong to categorize this as a trend or to forecast future academic doom and gloom for Mat-Su students. But it's certainly not something to disregard either.

School board members asked a lot of questions and heard a litany of reasons last week that may contribute to the dismal figures, but so far, meaningful answers - and tangible solutions - have been elusive. District officials point to nonuniform grading policies, inconsistent attention to homework on behalf of students, and changing student demographics from year to year. Students moving from grade to grade without having proven mastery of the year's studies also plays a part in academic difficulties in the higher grades.

All of these things will no doubt be seized on by public-school critics as proof of the system's failure. Yet such sweeping judgments are dangerous, at best.

Before fingers are pointed and blame is assigned, it would behoove critics to remember that the same teachers they want to castigate, the same standards they want to denounce, and the same process they want to apply a fix to cannot be shown to be completely broken. It is difficult to indict an entire system when the system has so clearly not failed everyone.

Good, solid education that prepares young people to be productive, responsible adults can never be just the task of a teacher in front of a class. It takes the support and active interest of families and community.

But good grades are also not the sole criterion for good citizenship. And all the current emphasis on standardized testing to meet federal mandates makes it easy to wonder if something more meaningful is being disregarded in pursuit of measurable &#8220progress.”

So where do we go from here? It's a good question. But no one with a stake in public education should sit idly by and let someone else come up with the answer.