Santa Fe Public Schools considers eliminating grade D

With more than 11 percent of the district’s students getting at least one F on a report card, Reynolds and the school board decided to do something to change that attitude. They got rid of the D grade on report cards for middle- and high-schoolers, meaning students had to achieve at least a 70 percent — a C — or fail a class.

Now Santa Fe Public Schools is considering the same practice based on what Reynolds and administrators in other school districts say has been a sea change in student achievement. Santa Fe’s five school board members last week reviewed a brief presentation on what impact eliminating D grades had on other school districts, including Mount Olive, and then asked Superintendent Veronica García to hold a study session to investigate the issue.

Such a change could have enormous implications in Santa Fe because students now can graduate from high school by doing no better than all D’s, with an average score of 65 percent, a district spokesman said. If the D grade were eliminated, the bar for graduation would rise to at least a C average.

As Reynolds tells it, when kids in Mount Olive started falling below a C grade, their parents immediately got involved, and “butts all over town got kicked. The kids realized, ‘The jig is up.’ ”

The decision has paid off in terms of increased proficiency rates. Mount Olive middle and high school students far outpaced their peers in New Jersey on the most recent PARCC exams, a standardized testing system also used in New Mexico’s public schools. Mount Olive students reached proficiency rates in the range of 73 percent to 83 percent in English language arts. Their scores on the PARCC math exams fell well below that level — with 26 percent to 58 percent of students achieving proficiency — but overall, still above the state average.

“It has raised the bar for what we expect of students,” Reynolds said. The rate of students getting an F on a report card has been about 1.5 percent since 2010, he added.

In Santa Fe, school board member Maureen Cashmon said a change in the system seems warranted.

“A D is not really helping our kids,” she said. “It’s not showing that they know the material. Especially in high school. … We are not doing our kids any favor by letting them have D’s on their transcripts.”

Board member Steven Carrillo, who introduced the idea, said he expects the measure, if adopted, to “raise the bar and expectations of our young people, particularly at the high school level.”

With 58 percent of the district’s high-schoolers receiving at least one D on a report card in the past year, a lot is at stake. The measure could lead to greater academic achievement rates or a higher rate of students failing classes in a school district with dismal proficiency rates and a graduation rate that rose above a D level for the first time last year.

One might expect the district’s students, who will be most affected by this decision, to stand firmly against the idea. But interviews with nearly 20 high school students attending summer school in Santa Fe suggest otherwise — even among those who often get D’s.

Capital High School student Terence Benavidez, toiling away in a summer school class at Ortiz Middle School because he has received “C’s and D’s all my life,” said he thinks it’s a great idea for one reason: “You can’t go through life with an F.”

Junior Angel Martinez, a summer-schooler trying to make up for a D in one class, agreed. “It would make me work harder,” she said. She is not the only teen to admit that D’s are the bottom rung of a ladder to graduation, a low bar to reach if you don’t want to push too hard. “As long as I get a D, I’m passing,” she said.

Many students said they were sure they would earn C’s if they were given the choice between that and an F, but they also said their friends wouldn’t pull it off. “You’re gonna see a lot more F’s,” said Capital High senior Anton Ruiz.

Other students say the potential change may not take into account the efforts of students who really are doing their best but can’t manage to pull their grade higher than, say, 68 percent.

“It’s a good idea, but more complicated than just the grade,” said Santa Fe High freshman Tatianna Encinas. “If you struggle to get that D and suddenly can’t get it, you would get an F.”

Daniel Ortiz, a Santa Fe High sophomore, said this is not a black-and-white, C-or-F issue. “I feel like if you get rid of the D, you get rid of an opportunity to raise your grade,” he said, explaining that though he got a D in biology, that was enough to earn him half a credit toward his overall graduation requirements.

If the district drops the D grade, he said, “An equal amount of people will fail and an equal amount of people will try harder and get a C. But there will be a lot of anxiety along the way.”

Teachers interviewed about the idea expressed mixed feelings on the subject. Capital High School teacher Alexandra Robertson said students will come through for one reason: “It’s human nature — ‘We’ll do the bare minimum to get by’ — so I think we’ll see them get C’s.”

Santa Fe High School teacher Blase Bickett said other factors, including figuring the impact on a district working to raise its graduation rate — which was 71 percent in 2015-16, a nearly 4 percent increase over the previous year — need to be considered. “To lose kids to the F — that’s the decision,” he said. “For the district to take that tough stand is going to be very difficult to do.”

A D grade, he said, does serve a purpose: “It says, ‘You did the bare minimum to pass the class.’ But when somebody looks at a D, what does that say?”

Some board members said last week that they think a D might hurt a student’s chance of getting into college, but in New Mexico, that’s probably not the case. Admissions personnel at Santa Fe Community College, The University of New Mexico and New Mexico State University all said they do not look at a student’s individual report card but rather at their cumulative grade-point average.

Dacia Sedillo, an associate vice president at New Mexico State University, said, “Where this could hurt a kid’s chance is a D could have given them just one more point in their GPA. If they are talking about getting rid of D’s and giving students C’s instead, that will help their GPA. But if they are talking about getting rid of D’s and giving students F’s instead, that will make it harder for those students to get into a college — at least in New Mexico.”

And perhaps elsewhere, too. The Los Angeles Unified School District didn’t use a D grade for 10 years, from 2005-15. But the district realized in 2015 that more than 20,000 high school students might not graduate because they were basically D students who would be getting F’s. So the Los Angeles school board voted in 2015 to restore the D grade.

Some college officials there since have said those D’s will not help kids get into college. Critics counter that not all students choose to pursue college after high school and that a high school diploma, D’s and all, still give graduates a shot at a job.

Reynolds said intervention programs must be in place to help students adjust to the new no-D grading system, including tutoring and instant parental notification.

In fact, in the Eminence, Ky., school district, a similar policy failed almost immediately because the district did not offer any programs to help struggling students who found themselves in the F pool. As a result, the district’s rate of students failing classes jumped from 5 percent to 18 percent in the first year of the initiative.

Since then, that district has made adjustments to support students, and has seen gains of 13 percent on standardized test scores at the middle school level and 10 percent at the high school level.

Carrillo said such support systems will be needed in Santa Fe, as well. “That’s where I see us failing: if we don’t put those measures in place to help students and teachers.”

Santa Fe Superintendent García said she will schedule a study session on the topic because a lot of questions remain to be answered.

“What is the intent of not having the D grade?” she asked. “Does it really raise standards? Do we pilot it first? Do we start the concept in middle school so by the time those students get to high school they know it is the new standard? It has merit in investigating it, but I need more data.”

Her fear — one echoed by school board President Lorraine Price during last week’s meeting — is that “if you eliminate the D, teachers may be less inclined to give an F. … the C could become the new D.”

Contact Robert Nott at 505-986-3021 or rnott@sfnewmexican.com.