The Biden Administration is working to eliminate GPA requirements for teaching grants so that the recipients will no longer be chosen based on merit. The change is being made to grants which enable students to pursue degrees in education with an intention to become public school teachers. Effectively, the new policy will drastically expand the pool of potential teachers while simultaneously lowering the quality of education in America.
Grades to not influence grants for teachers
Anyone who has spent any amount of time in the American school system knows that GPA is not always a perfectly reliable method for judging the intelligence or aptitude of a student.
There will always be smart people who turn out to be bad students and less-than intelligent people who know how to maintain a GPA which is higher than what they deserve.
When it comes to handing out taxpayer dollars, however, there are only so many methods that can be used to judge worthy grant recipients with any degree of reliability.
GPA is not a perfect judge, but when it is necessary to evaluate how well someone is doing in school there is probably no better alternative.
At least, that was the case until the Biden Administration found their new method. The Department of Education is now proposing to throw out GPA requirements and instead evaluate students based on their racial identity.
This change accompanies a large increase in the amount of money that will be given out in the grants aimed to aid future school teachers.
Public school quality may suffer even more
As usual, the Biden Administration claims that the elimination of GPA requirements will help minorities. The grant changes are intended to encourage minority teachers who will go on to work at predominately minority schools located in poverty-stricken areas.
Will the students at those schools actually be helped by the policy change? It seems unlikely. Schools in impoverished areas need quality in their teachers, not just quantity.
Teaching is a very popular profession in America. There is no shortage of public school teachers. There is a shortage of good public school teachers, and this policy change does nothing to remedy that.
For every great future teacher with a bad GPA, there may be dozens of terrible future teachers with bad grades who will be propped up by the Biden Administration and sent to teach regardless.
Teachers and students alike will suffer from a policy which encourages unqualified individuals to take up the teaching profession in spite of their own academic performance.
Even if the explicitly racial angle of the change in grant policy is completely ignored, the Biden Administration is adopting a stance which will likely do long-term damage to American public education.
