When I served as a superintendent, I fired a teacher for giving an A to every student he taught.

George D. was a high school social studies teacher in Arlington (VA) when I led the district (1974-1981). In the Fall of 1976, one of our high school principals called me and said that he had received complaints from many parents that George D. had given an A to every single student. Both Black and white parents were outraged because they believed that there was a bell-shaped curve of performance and in a class of 30 students, maybe 3-5 would receive As. Most students would receive Bs, Cs, and Ds and a few would fail. These parents believed in a meritocratic system where teachers were expected to grade students on how often they did their homework, participated in class, and performed on tests. Parents told the principal that this teacher mocked and undercut values of hard work and persistence by giving every student an A.

I asked the principal to meet with the teacher, ascertain whether or not the teacher had done what parents alleged and, if so, find out why he had. Also to take notes and direct quotes from the teacher. I further asked the principal to meet with some of the teacher’s students to confirm what the teacher had said and the grades they had received.

The principal called me at home that evening and said he had spoken with the teacher and, yes, George D. had given all of his students As because, George D. said, the system of grading used in public schools was biased against poor and minority students, shut down real learning, and reproduced the inequalities prevalent in society. The principal further told me that the students he had interviewed had all received A grades.

I asked George D. to meet with me the next day. Having with me the notes that the principal had taken in his interview with the teacher and from what students had told him, I wanted to know if what George D. had told the principal and students was accurate. Correcting a few details, George D. basically agreed that he had given each one of his students an A. Moreover, he had not contacted parents to discuss his decision about giving each of his students an A.

Why did he do that, I asked.

George D. gave as his reasons the discrimination that minority students faced in their lives and his efforts to level the playing field and focus students on learning social studies content and skills rather than working to get a certain grade.

I chose not to argue the merits of what he said. I wanted to confirm that the facts were accurate. He did not dispute the facts. I called each of the five members on the School Board informing them of the situation and that I planned to dismiss the teacher. None of the five members disagreed. Since George D. was a probationary teacher, Virginia state law at the time permitted a superintendent to fire such teachers without going through the process laid out in the School Board-teacher union contract protecting Arlington tenured teachers from such dismissals.

The following day I fired George D. He then went to the Washington Post and other local newspapers, a radio talk show, and other media telling his side of the story. The papers and local TV stations carried the news of his being terminated the following day. When called by reporters I had no comment since it was a personnel matter. Within a week, no mention of George D. occurred in the media and a new teacher had taken over his social studies classes.

What is the point of this story?

Americans highly prize conflicting values of treating all students equitably while encouraging individual excellence. Yet both values can not be easily achieved within high schools where teachers have to give letter grades to individual students based upon their academic performance. George D. made a unilateral decision giving sole priority to treating all students equitably. Either he had not considered or knew, but ignored the fact that policymakers, teachers, and parents, while trying to offer equal opportunity to learn, also highly prize individual achievement.

Common high school practices underscore the significance of evaluating individual student’s performance:

*Ranking graduating students by grade-point-average (GPA);

*Displaying bulletin boards of those students who had earned As and Bs.

*Issuing Individual report cards.

Most parents, policymakers, researchers, and practitioners believe in their heart-of-hearts that only a few students achieve academic excellence while most classmates will perform in the middle range and a few will fail. That belief in a “natural” distribution in performance has been compressed into a fact-of-life within age-graded schools (and other workplaces) that parents, policymakers, and practitioners heed.

There have been occasional efforts to eliminate A-F grading (see here, here, here, and here). These advocates offer similar reasons that George D. gave me in defense of his actions. In retrospect, I can see now (although at the time, I didn’t have the words to say it clearly) that both I and George D. had stumbled into a fundamental dilemma anchored in the DNA of public schools. Nearly a half-century later, these conflicting values of treating students equally while honoring individual academic excellence remain.