I’d Buy That for a Dollar!

Most of the time I avoid comment on whether the current age is better or worse than the way things were when I was a child; that sort of thing is clearly geezer-talk, and along that path lies madness. Kids today may not actually have things any better or worse than we did; the world grows more complicated every year, but “good” and “bad” are value judgments, and therefore subjective. For every person who sincerely believes that the iPhone is actually the greatest invention since the wheel there is at least one other person who hates everything about cell phones, smart phones, the Internet, or the Information Age itself and wishes we could all go back to manual typewriters, carbon paper and party lines. But I’d be willing to bet that even some of those people would have liked to be able to purchase higher grades in Middle School…

From the pages of the News Observer online comes the story of a middle school in Goldsboro, NC that was having trouble with its school fund raisers. Last years efforts to raise money by selling candy appears to have fallen flat, so this year the school came up with the idea of using class credit to incentivize its pre-teen salespeople in the student body. According to the published account, a $20 donation to the school would have bought the student a 10-point credit on two tests of the student’s choice; enough to make the difference between a “B” and an “A” – or enough to turn a fail grade into a marginal pass. Of course, school officials dispute whether this would be enough to impact a student’s overall grades in a class, and they insist that no student would be allowed to obtain more than 20 points this way, but I’ve been in class with enough grade-grubbers over the years to know (even if the principal apparently doesn’t) how the students would see this…

Now, I don’t want to imply all of the parents and educators who are talking about how this sends the wrong message to the students and teaches the kids that it’s okay to pay for grades are wrong, exactly; most people do learn ethics by watching their parents (or other authority figures) deal with exactly this sort of decision. What needs to be pointed out here is that this is a slippery slope – and this fund-raiser is hardly the first step onto it. Kids today are already facing such inequities as private test preparation for the SAT (or equivalent) that determines who will get into college based on whose parents can afford such services, and private consultants who can help “package” a student’s college applications to similar effect. The college you select will determine your starting position in a great many careers (or your choice of graduate schools), and every college student in the world has services that will offer to provide “sample” term papers targeting them in various media ads. Even the good kids have to be wondering if it wouldn’t be more efficient to just purchase the grades in the first place…

But what I think is the most disturbing thing about this entire story is the origin of the grades-for-cash program: a parent advisory group came up with it, and the school’s principal approved it. If the school district hadn’t stepped in and shut it down, this program might have become a regular feature at Rosewood Middle School, and might even have spread to other schools. Which means that all of the people who have been railing about the degradation of our educational system by parents who think they can buy their child’s way through everything are actually quite right – and it’s later than we thought. Maybe we should start thinking seriously about education reform in this country while we still can…