Public-education reformers have long argued that schools underperform because it’s hard to hold teachers accountable. Districts generally pay teachers based on their education level and years of service rather than performance. Thanks to tenure and union protections, no guarantee exists that poor-performing teachers will face consequences. While schools have historically struggled to hold teachers to account, they have traditionally done a decent job of holding students responsible for their behavior, attendance, and academic performance. Now that’s changing. Schools are denying students the structure, incentives, and responsibility they need to learn and grow.
Consider student behavior. Teachers, principals, and superintendents have expressed alarm at the rising number of students acting in disruptive and even violent ways. “Students throw furniture, overturn desks, shout insults, threaten violence, and curse out teachers, support staff, and classmates,” reports Cindy Long, senior writer for NEA Today. This permissive school climate has been facilitated by major federal- and state-led efforts to reduce suspensions and expulsions, out of concern that minority and disabled students get disciplined at disproportionately high rates.
In lieu of traditional disciplinary measures, schools direct students to participate in quasi-therapeutic interventions intended to address the trauma and mental-health challenges that purportedly cause behavioral issues. While arguably well-intentioned, practices like “restorative circles” (teacher-guided group counseling) and “restorative conferences” (facilitated conversations between a victim and offender involved in a conflict) have taken up valuable class time while failing to improve student behavior.
Attendance, too, has suffered under this more lenient approach. During the Covid-19 pandemic, schools understandably relaxed attendance requirements. But long after the pandemic’s peak, many schools still hesitate to enforce their pre-pandemic attendance policies, such that one in four students is now chronically absent.
Academic standards have similarly eroded. Schools are increasingly adopting practices that inflate grades, such as allowing students to retake tests, accepting late assignments without penalty, giving credit for minimal effort, and even refusing to give failing grades. One study of 33,000 student grades found that 40 percent were inflated beyond what might have been expected, given those students’ standardized test scores. Standardized testing itself is falling out of favor among many education officials, who now advocate for more subjective measures of success to boost the passing rate for lower-performing students.
The student accountability crisis has many explanations, but a fundamental cause appears to be that, compared with previous generations, parents and teachers see students as fragile. As Americans have had fewer children, and had them later in life, parents provide more attention and supervision and make greater efforts to protect children from failure and discomfort. As a result, parents who once deferred to teachers to guide their children’s education now pressure them for higher grades and laxer standards to protect their children’s self-esteem—and transcripts. Meanwhile, graduate schools of education teach pseudo-scientific concepts like the “school-to-prison pipeline” and “unconscious bias,” priming teachers to see students as victims of an oppressive education system.
Showering students with praise while denying them honest feedback doesn’t protect students from harm; it detaches them from reality. Without clear standards and appropriate consequences, students cannot identify weaknesses, learn from mistakes, or develop the resilience needed to improve. Efforts to minimize discomfort in the short term create long-term deficits in knowledge, behavior, and life skills.
Additionally, when schools fail to hold troublesome students accountable, it affects the classroom environment. Unchecked disruptive behavior undermines the learning experience of all students. Chronic absenteeism wastes class time by requiring teachers to repeat material, and grade inflation undermines students’ motivation to excel. By failing to enforce high standards, schools compromise the quality of their education and condition students to accept mediocrity as the norm.
The solution is straightforward: public schools must reintroduce clear expectations and enforce them consistently, restore classroom order, enforce attendance, and uphold academic standards. Parents and school leaders should support teachers in delivering honest feedback, and government should give districts incentives to set a high bar for students. Laws, policies, and practices that stand in the way of these common-sense suggestions need to be eliminated, and a culture of accountability restored in schools. By holding students responsible for their behavior and academic performance, schools can foster genuine confidence, resilience, and achievement.
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