SAN FRANCISCO – A recent article in The Atlantic is making the case that Ds do students more harm than good, and the author is advocating for doing away with the “sub-mediocrity” marks altogether.

Columnist Andrew Simmons, a San Francisco-based educator, writes that there’s a clear distinction between students who flunk their classes and those who earn Ds, and the latter are likely calculating their grades to avoid classwork while still qualifying for a high school diploma.

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“Fs are rare in my 10th- and 12th-grade public-school literature classes. While I would like for Ds to be rare, too, 18 percent of my students earned one by the end of the spring semester,” Simmons wrote.

“Unlike the few who got Fs, they received the same amount of credit on their transcripts as did anyone with an A, B, or C. They just probably won’t be going to a selective college (at least any time soon).”

Essentially, “when students know that Ds will earn a diploma as readily as As will, some game the system,” he wrote.

Simmons argues that with increasing public pressure to hold teachers accountable for student grades, and to increase academic rigor, it makes little sense that students who earn Ds are allowed to progress toward a high school diploma. He predicts many of them will ultimately “enter the slow-moving currents of part-time community college attendance” where they’re likely to struggle because they did not master the basic concepts of learning in high school.

“In my correspondence with former students who have already graduated, I have observed that the kids who became accustomed to Ds in high school often struggle if and when they’re in college because they never developed the academic and personal skills necessary to succeed there,” he wrote.

“Without the oversight of teachers, counselors, and parents that they may have had in high school, they are freer to fall—and to lose what scant interest they may have once held.”

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The solution, Simmons suggests, is to eliminate Ds altogether, because he believes many of those barely getting by will up their game to avoid failure. He pointed to a New Jersey charter school that’s already made the transition.

“Ds are simply not useful in society,” Larrie Reynolds, superintendent at the Mount Olive, N.J. charter school Simmons referenced, told the New York Times in 2010. “It’s a throwaway grade. No one wants to hire a D-anything, so why would we have D-students and give them credit for it?”

Simmons also highlighted a Los Angeles charter school he worked at that also did away with Ds to increase college acceptance among its graduates, and it seemed to work.

“At this school, students ‘failed’ a class when they scored below 62.5 percent – a cut-off number derived from a five-point grading scale that was based on state standardized tests. Yet very few scored below that threshold. The percentage distinguishing a C- from the abyss of failure below was significantly smaller than it had been before, but it was the midway point between ‘Basic’ and ‘Proficient’ on rubrics using that five-point scale,” he wrote.

“At the end of the school’s first year without Ds, over 90 percent of the senior class accepted invitations to attend four-year universities, and most students had at least entertained the option.”

But Simmons alleges many schools are unlikely to re-evaluate their letter grading system and consider eliminating Ds because the below-average marks are what keeps many schools from facing sanctions for low graduation rates.

“Mass failures also create a logistical nightmare for counselors and administrators who must answer to enraged parents, placate concerned district and board officials, and find kids make-up opportunities,” he wrote. “Schools may not be able to accept the risk of more failing students, if only for a transitional period. Even a year in which the failure rate doubled or tripled would be dangerous.”

Yet Simmons thinks the issue with Ds boils down to expectations, and allowing students to graduate with the minimal effort it takes to earn them “seems illogical and cynical.”

“I wouldn’t be opposed to Ds if it weren’t so easy to get one without doing much,” he wrote. “Some teacher give kids an automatic 60 percent (D-) for turning in an assignment with nothing more than a name at the top – and that’s problematic given that, as reformers stress, students suffer due to low expectations.”

“A student is not the sum of his or her high-school transcript,” Simmons concluded, and the bad marks don’t necessarily mean students will struggle with life after school, “but they are preordained to face extra obstacles to future goals – goals they may not have set yet.

“Meanwhile, some students never realize that they have the potential to do more than man a cash register.”