Likewise, when students are struggling, failing to turn in work or at risk of falling behind, teachers should tell them. It’s kinder — and fairer — for educators to set clear expectations and hold students to them.  

Many schools have started to take the opposite approach. Perhaps in the mistaken belief that it’s gentler to give struggling students second and third chances, schools across the country are essentially withholding honest feedback from kids (and ) through no-zero grading policies or by passing students along even though they haven’t mastered the content.

These trends started before the pandemic but have accelerated since then. And they’ve created a growing disconnect between subjective evaluations like grades and objective data like attendance and achievement. Student and rates are rising to new highs, while attendance and academic performance are hitting modern lows. 

Most recently, the testing company ACT announced that average scores this year than at any point since 1991. The declines were particularly notable for Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander and Latino students.

So, what does the research say? Is it better for schools to pass kids along or hold the line on high standards? 

A new working paper from Brown University titled “” digs into these questions by looking at what happened when a state, North Carolina, lowered its standards. North Carolina is unique in that it has a state-level grading scale for high school students, and in fall 2014, it lowered that scale. The threshold for an A dropped from 93 to 90, from 85 to 80 for a B, from 77 to 70 for a C, from 70 to 60 for a D and from 69 to 59 for an F. 

As a result, student grades went up, by a lot — at least initially. In the first year of the new policy, the number of A grades rose by almost 20%, the number of F grades fell by 20% and the average GPA rose by 0.27 points, an 11% increase. Students or parents who weren’t aware of the policy change may have been happy to see these gains. 

Except, the authors found that the easier grading standards had other consequences as well, and those varied across student groups. Students in the top half of the performance distribution were the main beneficiaries of the easier grading scale, and students with incoming test scores below the median saw no GPA increases at all. 

How could this be? After all, the policy made it harder to fail a class. One explanation the authors found is that students at the bottom end of the academic distribution started missing more classes. The new, laxer standards allowed the lower-performing students to increasingly disengage from school and fall further behind their peers. Worse, these effects compounded over time, and the more lenient grading standards eventually led to lower ACT scores for the students who came in the furthest behind. 

This builds on work suggesting that and individual can also affect student choices and behavior over time. On the more rigid end of the spectrum, there’s also a growing body of literature suggesting that holding back students who are struggling to read can be beneficial for their long-term trajectories — and for their younger siblings as well. 

Economist Eric Hanushek has framed this distinction as the difference between schooling and learning. Schooling in this context refers to the amount of time students stay in class, while learning is a measure of what they actually know and can do. It may be easier to keep kids in school, but metric that educators and policymakers should pay attention to. 

Hanushek estimates that the lost learning suffered by students during the pandemic will translate into on their earnings. That’s the average, and the losses are even larger for Black, Hispanic and disadvantaged students who fell further behind. Multiplied across the nation and over each child’s lifetime, that works out to an economic loss to the country of $28 trillion. 

In other words, policies that sound generous in spirit may actually harm students in the long term. Leniency may be easier, but honesty is the best policy, and kids who are the furthest behind will benefit the most from clear, objective and high standards.

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A little more than a decade after the fight over the standards began, the vast majority of U.S. students still learn from curricula that are at least nominally aligned with Common Core. But a wave of research released over the last few years suggests that, far from being either a K-12 panacea or a domineering exercise in Washington overreach, the huge shift in policy had a relatively meager impact on student achievement, and may not have altered teacher practices nearly as much as was originally thought.

The latest data point comes from published in the open-access journal of the American Education Research Association. Analyzing standardized test performance from states that adopted and implemented Common Core early on, researcher Joshua Bleiberg found that scores ticked up only modestly over the first few years. The improvement was limited to scores in math, and even that was enjoyed disproportionately by relatively well-off children.

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Bleiberg, a research associate at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, said that his findings pointed to the same general picture of Common Core that earlier research has yielded: an idea that failed to live up to expectations.

“There are now a few studies, including mine, that find small effects for math or ELA, whether they’re positive or negative,” he said. “I think a lot of people have accurately characterized that as a policy failure. That was not the objective, and the effect sizes were so small.”

To examine the changes triggered by Common Core, Bleiberg compared fourth- and eighth-grade scores on math and reading over six iterations of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. The last two rounds of the exam came in 2011 and 2013, when the standards were beginning to be enacted. Altogether, he assembled data from hundreds of thousands of students across roughly 4,000 schools.

While the majority of states had begun on the road to Common Core by 2013, only some were “early adopters” that had already established new professional development and curriculum standards, or officially mandated that instruction had to be aligned with Common Core. (Fourteen states were excluded from the research entirely, either because they never adopted Common Core or they had comparatively rigorous academic standards in place even before its arrival on the scene.) By exploiting the differences in timing, Bleiberg set out to isolate the effects that could be plausibly attributed to the new standards.

Those effects were hardly transformative — only 10 percent of a standard deviation in NAEP math results. Using eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch as a stand-in for poverty, the growth in scores was greater for economically advantaged white students — and much more significant for economically advantaged African American fourth-graders — than their less affluent peers.

The conclusions are similar to those of other studies that have probed Common Core’s impact on learning, which have generally shown achievement either unchanged, rising very slightly, or even sinking somewhat. Tom Loveless, a former director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, conducted several of those studies and recently published . In an interview, he described the general findings on Common Core’s early returns as simply disappointing.

“There’s no other way to say it, especially over many, many years of implementation, all the money that was spent on it, all the teacher development, and the debate that got so bitter and nutty,” Loveless said. “What a distraction, to get us so fired up over one-tenth of a standard deviation. It’s just minuscule.”

The heart of the reform’s “failure” lay in its theory of action, he argued. Even ambitious regulatory changes must penetrate multiple layers of authority before eventually reaching classrooms. In the case of Common Core, the federal government had to induce states to rewrite their standards of learning, states themselves had to prepare their districts to implement them, and districts had to bring along schools and employees. That tortuous chain of custody, which Loveless analogized to the children’s game of telephone, makes it challenging to ensure that the designers’ original intentions are ever carried out.

“I don’t even think a school principal can do that in his or her own building with a teacher who has low standards,” Loveless said. “So the idea that we’re going to have this broad-scaled, top-down implementation of standards in a way that improves learning — that just doesn’t work.”

Though the standards don’t appear to have significantly raised the bar for student performance over their first decade, Bleiberg said there was little reason to think that anything might be gained by abandoning them now. But it remained an open question, he said, to what extent the huge expenditure of money, time, and political capital had succeeded in altering instruction. In fact, conducted by the RAND Corporation suggested that by 2016 — well into Common Core’s implementation phase — most teachers still weren’t using curricular materials that were highly aligned to the new standards.

The inability of authorities to persuade teachers to buy into the approach may have spelled disappointment from the start, Bleiberg observed.

“States can’t direct, really, what teachers think, and so teachers will correctly use their judgment in their own classrooms. This is a reform that’s particularly sensitive to those types of challenges, and I think the people in 2007-2009 who were thinking about it perhaps didn’t adequately take that into account, and that’s why it didn’t work as well as they thought it would.”