Can you say, “Students who have no business passing their high school classes are being passed due to teachers being threatened with disciplinary action if they don’t pass nearly every student”? That’s why the GPAs are so seemingly high. And when the “graduates” take the SATs, the rubber really hits the road and their true academic achievement level-—dismal as it is-—is revealed.
That is what I have both seen and heard. Teachers have told me of how their Principal pressures them to pass kids and give good grades so the parents don’t complain. Teachers themselves also often want to avoid having parents complain directly to them. I saw one gal who got As in her AP English courses, yet she was flunking out of USC because she couldn’t write. I finally started editing her essays, and she once again got As and Bs. She has been accepted into a graduate program at Johns Hopkins. She is finally now starting to learn grammar, but her grammar still is worse than mine was when I was in tenth grade. She attended a private high school and I think the school wanted her and her parents to feel good about her education while she was in their school. I think public schools are the same way.