At Gaithersburg High School, long after the late bell rings to signal that everyone must be in class, dozens of students remain in the hall, laughing, cursing and checking their phones, says science teacher Kurt Richter.
And it’s not just the science corridor that’s packed with students during class time. They gather in bathrooms and hallways throughout the building. Sometimes the students are so loud that Richter goes into the hall to ask them to quiet down.
“Just last week, I saw one of our security personnel … come up [to a group of them] and say, ‘Hey, y’all, you’re missing class. Why don’t we try to go back and learn?’ ” he says one day this past spring. The kids responded, “Just go away, you can’t do nothing.”
For the most part, the kids are correct, says Richter, who is also the parent of two Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) graduates. He cites changes to longstanding MCPS policies that now make it harder for teachers to fail students who routinely arrive late or skip class altogether.
Sharon Gardner, who has been teaching social studies at Seneca Valley High School in Germantown for nearly 30 years, says that her five-story school is filled with “nooks and crannies” where students gather during class time, and when a staff member chases a group of kids off one floor “they just go downstairs … [to another] floor and the [staff] on that floor didn’t know that you just chased them off of the floor above.”
Gardner says a favorite haunt for truant students at her school is what teachers pejoratively call “the TikTok space,” an area under a stairwell where kids go to record and upload videos to their social media sites when they should be in class.
“It’s … happening everywhere,” Gardner says about so many high school students in the district skipping classes. And she doesn’t blame the pandemic. “I just think that our policies have exacerbated a problem that was already happening.”
A growing number of teachers, parents and education experts say that MCPS—long considered among the best school districts in the nation—no longer deserves a passing grade. They cite overly lenient absentee policies, grade inflation gone awry and below-grade-level curricula. Many point to two decades of well-meaning rule changes designed to ease students’ stress and promote equity among an increasingly diverse population. Instead of achieving these goals, detractors say, these changes have stripped students of accountability, learning and even the incentive to show up to school.
“If I need to go to class to keep my A, I will go,” but not “if I’m not … learning anything that will help my grade [and] I’m not learning anything for a test,” admits a straight-A student at another high school in the county who says her parents would only allow her to be interviewed anonymously.
One longtime MCPS substitute teacher who asked not to be identified out of fear of retaliation says she was teaching a first-period class at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda this past spring with only one student out of 10 present when the late bell rang. “First period is definitely the worst. These kids stroll in whenever they want. They’ve got Starbucks cups; they’ve got McDonald’s,” she says. “When the system says you’re not going to be penalized for these absences and tardies, would you, at 17, bust your ass to get to school on time?”
It used to be that students who accumulated five unexcused absences or 15 unexcused tardies would receive a failing grade for that class, according to a 2010 report by the county’s Office of Legislative Oversight. The consequences were severe enough that nearly every student was in the classroom when the late bell rang, says Richter, who has taught in the MCPS system for 22 years.
Now, the onus is on teachers (or counselors, at some schools) to implement “attendance improvement plans” (AIPs) for students who are chronically absent. Until last spring’s semester, teachers had to establish a two-way line of communication with a student’s guardians before the AIP could even be implemented. The policy was revised early in 2024 to say that teachers still need to notify guardians, but it no longer requires them to respond.
Richter says he twice tried to implement an AIP for truant students in his advanced science classes prior to the 2024 change but “the process was so arduous, with so many different steps involved, that each time it got held up at some point after I submitted it.” Last school year he only had a few students who were chronically absent, he says, but “some teachers [had] many in each class.”
Chronic absenteeism—defined by MCPS as missing 18 or more days in a school year or 10% of the calendar year—is a problem nationwide, and it has only decreased modestly from
pre-pandemic highs in most school districts, according to data compiled by the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank. But at MCPS, absenteeism rose slightly at the high school level, from 31.4% in the 2022-23 school year to 32% in 2023-24, even as it dropped in the county’s elementary and middle schools, according to district data.
MCPS seems to be aware of the problem. A spokesperson said via email that the district is “looking at current grading and reporting practices to further incentivize students to attend classes more regularly,” and that it is “supporting schools to pilot innovative scheduling approaches.”
In recent years, MCPS has also seen a drop in student scores on tests that measure performance and college readiness, while nationwide scores on these tests have improved, according to the College Board, a nonprofit that runs the SATs and Advanced Placement (AP) exams.
Yet all the while, GPAs countywide have continued to rise. More than 51% of the class of 2023 graduated with a weighted GPA of 4.0 or higher, versus 27.8% for the class of 2013, according to MCPS.
“I absolutely think standards have dropped,” says Nikkee Porcaro, the founder of No Anxiety Prep, a tutoring and test preparation company in Kensington. “Teachers are … pressured to, you know, pass students who shouldn’t pass … and the students I’m working with, [many of them] are coming to me with these crazy 4.7 and 4.8 GPAs and then they can’t do Algebra 1.”
When Sami Saeed, then a senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, took over the role of student member of the board of education at the start of the 2023-24 school year, he witnessed crises at MCPS’ central office practically from Day 1.
It started with a scandal involving a middle school principal who’d been promoted despite several teacher accusations of sexual harassment. After that, there was the forced resignation of MCPS Superintendent Monifa McKnight, who had held the job for only two years after serving as interim superintendent for less than nine months. (Former Stafford County, Virginia, Superintendent Thomas Taylor took over the superintendent role on July 1.) Then there was the lengthy list of central office leaders and school principals who retired or departed unexpectedly, including four principals who vacated their posts midyear, something MCPS’ Retirees Association described at the time as “unprecedented.”
Now a freshman at the University of Maryland, College Park, Saeed thinks the school board and MCPS have done an excellent job tackling the student mental health crisis, but says it’s time to focus on increasing student accountability.
Take the 50% rule. Introduced in 2006, it mandated that teachers give students at least 50% credit on any assignment they turn in, so long as it showed some degree of effort. The rule, which was controversial even then, was based on the theory that it would incentivize students to at least attempt difficult material. But early in the pandemic, the rule was revised to require teachers to give students at least 50% credit on every assignment, even assignments they didn’t turn in. And the policy wasn’t automatically changed back when MCPS returned to classroom learning.
“During the pandemic, central guidance to schools was to err on the side of the student and emphasize the importance of two-way communication prior to the assignment of zeros for missing work,” the MCPS communications department said in an email when asked about the softening of the rule.
“I think that was a bad decision,” says Saeed, who supported the 50% rule’s original goal of encouraging students to put forth “an honest effort,” but not the pandemic-era change. “Keeping that in place … [was] just incentivizing people not to do assignments.”
Only in early 2024 was the policy quietly walked back to the pre-COVID era days of requiring teachers to give 50% credit on assignments that show at least minimal effort, but not on assignments that aren’t turned in. The decision wasn’t announced publicly, but rather was sent in memorandums to high school principals, which has led to some mixed signals.
“If a student does not submit an assignment, meaning the teacher does not have any data to be able to provide the student with feedback to assess the student’s learning, the teacher then is not able to give that 50% [and] the student will receive a zero,” says MCPS’ Kisha Logan, director of the Department of Pre-K to 12 Curriculum. “So that’s what the regulation says, you know, and that is something that we actually have been looking at as a district at the secondary level.”
Saeed says one reason there’s so much confusion over MCPS policies is because many of the changes aren’t decided at the school board level, but are made instead by MCPS’ central office, which considers them “regulation changes,” not policy changes, and doesn’t communicate them to the public. “I think that MCPS … [from] what I’ve seen, tries to avoid kind of sending things out to the community and … [tries to] keep things kind of more under the radar. … I honestly do think that probably will change under Dr. Taylor’s leadership,” Saeed says.
In the U.S. News & World Report rankings of the top U.S. public high schools, Walt Whitman High School, perennially Montgomery County’s highest achiever, recently lost its longstanding spot in the top 100, dropping from a national ranking of 93 in 2019, to 111 in 2021, and to 139 in 2024. The only other MCPS high schools to crack the top 200 this year also dropped in the rankings over the period of 2021 to 2024—Poolesville High School slipped by more than 50 slots to number 172, and Thomas S. Wootton in Rockville by more than 70 to 196.
MCPS is still the strongest public school system in the state by many measures, according to data from the Maryland State Department of Education. But the data also reveals that Maryland schools are not performing particularly well. In 2023, just over 55% of MCPS English 10 students scored in the proficient range on the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program (MCAP), compared with 53.5% statewide. In Algebra 1, 22.2% of MCPS students scored in the proficient range, compared with 17.2% statewide. Yet Maryland was ranked the fifth top school system in the nation, according to a February 2024 announcement by the Maryland Association of Counties. The rankings, which were based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics and The Nation’s Report Card, considered factors including academic performance, bullying rates and pupil-to-teacher ratios. Only Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut and New York scored better.
As for tests once considered crucial in determining college readiness, fewer MCPS students took AP exams last year than a decade ago, decreasing from 66% in 2013 to just under 60% in 2023. And the percentage of those scoring a 3 or higher—which is considered passing—on at least one exam dropped by five percentage points to just over 46%. MCPS still surpasses national averages by a significant margin: Less than 35% of public high school students across the U.S. took an AP exam in 2023, and of these, less than 22% scored a 3 or higher on at least one exam, according to the College Board, which administers the tests.
On the SATs, county data shows that the average composite score among 2023 MCPS graduates was 1064 (out of a possible 1600). That’s more than 100 points lower than a decade ago, when the average composite score was the equivalent of 1190, based on a conversion from the 2400 scale that was used at the time.
“Grades keep going up and up, but the assessment from standardized tests are way off,” says Ned Johnson, president and founder of PrepMatters, a Bethesda-based tutoring and college test prep company.
In December 2023, MCPS published a new School Profile Dashboard, making it easier to access and compare school informaton. The dashboard shows that Whitman’s 2023 graduating class earned an average SAT score of 1285, down from 1312 the year before, with 76.7% of students sitting for the exam. At John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, the average SAT score for its 2023 graduates was only 845, with 73.3% of them taking the exam. Per the College Board, the average composite score nationally was 1028 for 2023.
Johnson says several policy changes over the past decade have contributed to students being less motivated to learn and less prepared for college. Among them: MCPS’ decision several years ago to get rid of midterm and final exams and put a greater emphasis on quizzes and short tests, projects and homework assignments. He says it means that students can get high grades without mastering the material. One of his students at PrepMatters figured out that in one of her classes, if she turns in every in-class and homework assignment, she can get as low as a 70 on each of her tests and quizzes and still get an A for the quarter.
“Students [have] figure[d] out how to get the higher grade without having to do the extra work. I don’t blame them. I blame Montgomery County,” says Potomac-based education consultant Shelley Brody, who has been tutoring in the county for more than 40 years.
Sydney Merlo, who graduated from Whitman this past spring, says she was happy to learn early in her high school days that MCPS had ditched midterms and finals, but now, she says, “It makes me a little bit nervous … because honestly, you do have midterms and finals in pretty much every college class … that’s probably the one area that [MCPS] might under-prepare you.”
When asked via email whether changes to the final exam policy might be coming, an MCPS spokesperson simply explained the policy: “Teachers may create assessments to help them determine student learning. Districtwide assessments are also implemented for certain courses and may be required at various times of the marking period.”
During the 2023-24 school year, Rebekah Jacobs’ son was required to read only two books for English class at Wootton High School, she says, and none of his writing assignments was more than four pages long. And he, like all freshmen at the school, was in honors English.
Jacobs’ daughter, meanwhile, then an eighth grader at a private school in Bethesda, was assigned more than twice as many books—including one that her brother’s ninth grade class was reading, too—and she was assigned a 10- to 12-page research paper, Jacobs says.
The two very different expectations placed on her kids is one reason the Rockville mom thinks that Montgomery County’s public schools have lost their edge. “I don’t know why fire alarm bells aren’t ringing in people’s ears, but you know, they are in mine,” says Jacobs, who has worked as a middle school and high school English teacher, a reading specialist and an education consultant.
Other parents say that even when teachers tackle more complex books, they don’t always have students read them. During the 2022-23 school year, Paul Jaskunas’ son was supposed to be studying Homer’s The Odyssey for his sophomore year honors English class at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School (B-CC), but the students were only assigned a short excerpt from the book. To round out the unit, the class watched a 12-minute YouTube video summarizing the plot, performed a skit of one scene, and read a novella about Penelope, Odysseus’ wife.
“You want to give [students] a chance to, like, dive into a few of these texts and … give them the chance to love [them], or at least if they’re not going to love [them], find out why they don’t,” Jaskunas says.
Jacobs and Jaskunas are both members of the curriculum committee of the Montgomery County Council of Parent-Teacher Associations. At a recent workshop with MCPS administrators in attendance, the committee reported that in classrooms at every socioeconomic level, “students are not reading a lot of texts within the grade level band.” Even at high schools with 90% pass rates on the MCAP, where even the feeder schools had 70-plus-percent MCAP pass rates, “teachers are not assigning grade-level work,” the organization reported.
A 2018 study called “The Opportunity Myth” reveals how pervasive this problem is across the country. Sponsored by the nonprofit TNTP, formerly The New Teaching Project, the study’s researchers followed nearly 4,000 students in five school systems in the U.S. and found that on average, students spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that were below grade level. It also found that “while more than 80% of teachers supported standards for college readiness in theory, less than half had the expectation that their students could reach that bar.”
Jennifer Solove, a former English teacher with MCPS, says that during the 10 years she led AP and International Baccalaureate (IB) English language classes in the county, she heard a growing number of complaints from parents and students that teachers were choosing not to teach books in their entirety “mostly because they don’t think students will read [them].” Solove, who left MCPS after the 2022-23 school year and now teaches in another school district, says she thinks that’s “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
MCPS has tried to make English Language Arts (ELA) curricula at the elementary and middle school levels more rigorous by purchasing nationally recognized curricula for all teachers to follow starting in the 2024-25 school year. Yet at the high school level, the curriculum is still locally developed.
Even MCPS acknowledges that its high school teachers have more flexibility than might be ideal, and that teachers may sometimes be modifying material, rather than simply adding support for students who need it. Jaclynn Lightsey, MCPS supervisor of secondary English Language Arts, says that will change with revisions that are being made to the ninth grade curriculum in the 2024-25 school year and to the grade 10 curriculum the following year.
“Our previous curriculum was really a curriculum guide—that’s actually what it was called—so it was indeed very open. … There were many, many texts to choose from. … The writing tasks were worded in a really open way,” Lightsey says, noting that the curriculum could potentially look pretty different from classroom to classroom and from school to school.
The new version will give teachers a choice of only two or three books per unit, versus as many as 12 in the past, and instead of just outlining the major writing tasks and standards, “the revised curriculum actually goes week by week and even day by day … so that the content builds on itself in a meaningful way,” Lightsey says. Teachers still have flexibility to address students’ needs, she says, “but within a range of options that we know are going to provide students with similar experiences.”
Some students favor giving teachers more flexibility than less. A senior at B-CC with a weighted GPA of 4.8 says she had different ELA teachers each semester in the 2023-24 school year, and though she “definitely noticed a huge discrepancy in how … [each] of them teach,” she didn’t think her quality of education was diminished by either one.
“My first one graded a little bit harsher than my second one,” says the student, who requested anonymity. “We got assigned a few more books in my first one than my second one. But then I will say that I felt that the assignments I did in my second one were, you know, more fulfilling. I felt that I learned more within them, so I think there’s kind of a balance there.”
The math curriculum presents even more challenges for MCPS. Coming out of the pandemic, the expectation was that students learned the subject in Zoom school, but data suggests they didn’t. Less than 65% of MCPS students scored in the proficient range in Algebra 2 on the 2023 MCAP versus 95% in 2019.
Johnson, of PrepMatters, says that since the pandemic, more students are coming to him for academic tutoring to address gaps in their learning, particularly in math. “If I’m a teacher, and I’m supposed to work in Algebra 2, I don’t really have the bandwidth to go back and try to reteach Algebra 1,” he says.
Saeed says he took Algebra 2 during the pandemic year and “[didn’t] learn a dang thing.” He says some kids even joined group chats where students who took an exam in first period would post the answers so subsequent classes could fill in the blanks without even attempting to learn the material.
“So you get into precalculus next year … [with] Algebra 2 as a prerequisite and no one knows what’s going on … and then the question [for educators] is like, what do you do to respond to that? Do you lower the expectations … make [the next class] easier?” Saeed says. “[We] heard so many presentations to the board about this, and I think that [MCPS is] very aware of this issue and [is] doing their best.”
Take this quiz: If a student earns a 79.5% during his first quarter of a class and an 89.5% the second quarter, what grade would you expect he’d earn for the semester? If you guessed a B, you’d be wrong. At MCPS, it’s an A, which translates to a 5.0 if the class is an honors, AP or IB course, and a 4.0 if it’s not.
Why? Because of grading changes made by the district about a decade ago that even students admit make it too easy to earn A’s, including the policy that A’s are calculated as anything from 89.5% on, B’s as 79.5% on, etc., and that if a student gets an A in one quarter and a B in the other, the higher grade prevails as the semester grade. Same goes for a student who earns a B or a C in one quarter and one grade higher or lower in the next; only the higher grade appears on the student’s transcript. MCPS does not put numerical grades on students’ transcripts either, or plus or minus grades. It’s all reflected on a marking table that teachers must follow that’s part of MCPS’ grading and reporting regulations.
These days, says Merlo, the recent Whitman grad, “students struggle to make themselves stand out on college applications because they’re competing with so many people in our grade who have 4.0 GPAs.”
Now a freshman at Indiana University, Merlo, 18, says she and some of her classmates consistently earned high grades at Whitman but garnered the same recognition as students who gamed the system. She says some students even used apps that helped them figure out how low their grades could be on assignments and tests and still get an A in a class.
The result of giving out so many A’s causes high achievers “to get so stressed and get involved in a million extracurriculars and sort of overwork themselves, because they feel like if they want to get into a top university, their grades aren’t enough, because there are just so many kids with perfect GPAs,” Merlo says.
Whether anything changes remains to be seen. “We will be gathering feedback and input on possible changes to this table from stakeholders this year,” an MCPS spokesperson said in an email.
At the county’s most prestigious public high schools “there’s that sort of pressure to inflate the grades [because] … these are the kids who have a shot at your top [colleges],” says Porcaro of No Anxiety Prep.
One former MCPS teacher, who didn’t want to be identified over concerns of alienating colleagues who are still working in the district, says the first year she taught AP literature at one of the county’s top high schools, she was called into the department chair’s office and told she wasn’t doling out enough A’s. “I said, ‘Wait … just let the students adjust to my standards and the A’s will come,’ ” she says. It turns out the students did rise to the challenge, she says, “but I had to ask for that faith.”
Meanwhile, at MCPS high schools with a higher population of low-income students, there’s pressure to inflate grades so that more students pass, says Seneca Valley’s Gardner. She says the grade inflation at her school is the same grade inflation as at the county’s top schools, it just looks different. At Seneca Valley, nearly half of the students received free or reduced priced meals during the 2022-23 school year, according to county data.
“I think every teacher has seen that ‘hall walker’ that is in the hallway constantly, like, oh my gosh, every period … yet they’ve got a 3.0 average,” she says. “I think it’s a problem at every school.”
That’s what Richter, the Gaithersburg High School teacher, is worried about. “We used to focus on educating students; now we focus on graduating them,” he says. “If we just [give] every kid in town a diploma, we’d have a 100% graduation [rate], but we wouldn’t be an educated population. … Our security personnel are really trying, and I think our administrators are trying, but I’m not sure what we can actually do. … It’s maddening … and it makes me sad.”
Journalist Amy Halpern has worked in print and television news and as the associate producer of an Emmy Award-winning documentary. She lives in Potomac.
This story appears in the September/October 2024 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
