I’m an NYC teacher — grading ‘equity’ is destroying our schools

Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels attends a press conference in New York City on Monday, March 9, 2026, announcing the expansion of 1,000 new 3-K seats in Staten Island. Luiz C. Ribeiro for NY Post

As a New York City public high-school teacher, I’m all too aware that our grading standards have been crumbling. 

But even I was stunned when I heard of a student at a friend’s school who received credit for all his classes despite failing to show up for an entire semester — with an English credit, for example, awarded based merely on poems he’d written at home.

It’s an extreme example, but hardly an isolated one.

Our schools have been corrupted by lenient policies ostensibly intended to make grading more “equitable,” but are in truth a means of artificially boosting graduation rates.

Kamar Samuels, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new schools chancellor, has made vague promises to bring “rigor” back to the city’s education system.

If that’s true, he must undo the attendance and grading mess his predecessors have left him.

Ever since the COVID pandemic, the Department of Education has essentially made attendance optional, by forbidding teachers from factoring it into students’ grades. 

It’s a policy that somehow remained after students returned to the classroom, even though it no longer made sense.

Meanwhile, many schools have eliminated zeros and imposed an artificial minimum grade — usually 55% — for all assignments and assessments. 

Some have even eliminated late penalties, allowing work to be turned in months after the due date for full credit.

Taken alone, each policy is damaging.

Combined, they are disastrous. 

Students now can skip months of class and still pass with a minimum of work, especially if they rely on artificial intelligence to complete missed assignments (as many, many do). 

And with no minimum attendance requirement, teachers lack an important check on administrative pressure to inflate passing rates.

Class-cutting has exploded under these perverse incentives, as students pick and choose which classes they feel like attending.

But you’ll have to take my word for it: The DOE-released data shows only the percentage of students present during each school’s daily “attendance” period.

We simply don’t know how often they attend their actual classes.

Just this week I heard from a student I’d never met before, a senior on my roster since the semester began in January, inquiring about doing “makeup” work so she could pass. 

She has an official attendance rate over 90% — so she’s in the building almost every day — but never felt the need to show up in my classroom.To emphasize its dismissiveness about class attendance, the DOE has removed the comments “Excessively Absent” and “Excessively Late” from the report-card options available to teachers, and eliminated the PupilPath program that once let parents track their kids’ attendance for themselves.

If Samuels is serious about rigor, he needs to turn this around — and fast.

Attendance must return as a component in grading. 

Schools need to stop giving near-passing grades for missed assignments, and ban end-of-semester “makeup” packets for students we barely see.

Samuels should also add transparency: The public deserves to know how many classes students are cutting at each school, and how many kids receive credit for classes they hardly attend.

Stuck in an upside-down world, teachers are deeply frustrated by the lack of public discussion of the policies I’ve described.

But there’s cause for optimism.

After years of ignoring teachers’ complaints about cell phones in the classroom, the public demanded action when noted psychologist Jonathan Haidt publicized the many ways electronic devices harm young people. 

Soon schools around the country, including here in New York, were enacting phone bans.

We may be nearing a similar breakthrough regarding performance expectations in our high schools.

Witness New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof’s February item blaming “equitable grading” policies as a reason that blue states have fallen behind in public education. 

Red states like Mississippi are taking the opposite tack — and seeing results.

In stating the obvious from a position of prominence, Kristof validated teachers’ longstanding complaints.

A colleague recently told me that at her previous school, the culture of nonchalance growing from these lax policies meant typical class attendance of just 50%. 

Tragically, that school served mostly low-income students of color — cheated out of the education they deserved by administrators’ reluctance to set higher standards.

Samuels has pledged to promote “equity” as well as “rigor” in our schools. 

Let’s demand, at the very least, that he ensures our disadvantaged students show up for class.

Mike Dowd is a social studies teacher in Brooklyn.