Opinion: Proposed “Grading Floor” Ban in S.C. Schools Shortsighted

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

In South Carolina’s State House this winter, education has once again been reduced to arithmetic. A measure now advancing through the House would ban public schools from assigning a “grading floor”—the lowest possible score allowed, typically a fifty instead of a zero—and from considering benchmark tests in calculating a student’s grade. It would also require students who fail a course to complete every missed assignment before being allowed to make up credit, even in cases of illness, injury, or family loss.

Its sponsor, Representative Fawn Pedalino, a Republican from Turbeville, calls the proposal a way to “make grades matter again.” She might as well have said: make failure sting again. The bill’s supporters frame it as an act of discipline reform, a restoration of lost rigor in education. They speak of consequences and personal responsibility, of teaching children that, in life, one gets what one earns. To them, a floor on grades undermines the moral order of the classroom.

But walk into almost any public school in South Carolina—particularly those where over half the students qualify for free or reduced lunch—and you’ll hear a different philosophy. Teachers do not hand out fifties to reward sloth. They do it to prevent despair. A single zero can send an average plummeting beyond any mathematical recovery, no matter how much a student may improve. The grading floor keeps the door open for redemption.

“It’s not about giving away points,” said one high school teacher in the Upstate. “It’s about keeping a kid from deciding that it’s too late to try.” Grades, she explained, are not moral judgments. They are, or ought to be, communication: a conversation between a teacher and a student about where learning stands and where effort should go next. To legislate grades as crime and punishment is to mistake pedagogy for policing.

Some teachers’ and school administrators expressed concerns about the proposal, not because they wish to celebrate mediocrity, but because they’ve seen what happens when lawmakers impose uniformity on a landscape that demands nuance. South Carolina’s seventy-four school districts vary in wealth, demographics, and need. Some have resources to catch students before they fall too far behind; others operate with skeletal staffs and vanishing funds. The state superintendent does not track how many districts use grading floors, but researchers with the Palmetto Promise Institute estimate at least twenty-two do. In those systems, the policy often differs by grade level—elementary teachers might apply it through eighth grade, while high schoolers earn what they earn.

The bill would erase that local discretion, placing teachers in a position where compassion becomes defiance. Its requirement that all coursework must be completed before credit recovery strips teachers of flexibility to help those who miss time for reasons beyond their control—broken bones, hospital stays, grief. For a student whose life has been interrupted, punitive rigidity isn’t a motivator; it’s a door closing.

And for students with disabilities, the risks are even clearer. Educators and advocates warn that mandatory zeros and inflexible grading policies can violate the spirit, if not the letter, of federal law protecting students with Individualized Education Programs, or IEPs. These students often require modifications—extra time, alternate assignments, smaller steps toward mastery. A strict ban on grading floors could undercut those accommodations, erasing the tailored support that inclusion depends on. In trying to impose fairness, lawmakers risk creating inequity by design.

Education policy has always flirted uneasily with moral clarity. The notion that fairness can be legislated by formula is an old and seductive one; it flatters the belief that children can be molded through consequence alone. But the classroom is not an ideological laboratory. It is a social ecosystem, messy and unpredictable. What looks like leniency to an outsider often looks, to a teacher, like triage.

Supporters of the bill like to say that students who know there’s a safety net will stop trying. But that claim ignores what psychologists and special educators have long understood: motivation is rarely born of threat. It grows out of connection, out of a belief that effort leads somewhere. Removing the floor may teach accountability to a handful of indifferent teenagers—but it will also convince hundreds more that failure is inevitable, especially those for whom the system already feels stacked against them.

The bill also strips teachers of another crucial tool—the use of benchmark assessments to measure growth. These tests, unlike final exams, capture progress in motion. They help teachers reward effort, persistence, and growth rather than perfection. To dismiss them as “killing GPAs,” as one legislator argued, is to misunderstand their purpose entirely.

What’s most striking about the proposal is how little it trusts educators. It assumes that state legislators, convened in Columbia, can better interpret the complexity of a classroom than the people who stand inside one each day. A teacher knows that a late paper might be carelessness—or it might be the symptom of a chaotic home, a parent’s addiction, or a job that keeps a teenager awake past midnight. To equate all lateness with laziness is to misunderstand life itself.

Real life, Representative Pedalino insists, offers no do-overs. But in truth, modern life is nothing but do-overs—retesting, retraining, rehabilitation. Second chances are the architecture of adulthood, not its failure. Society is built on the faith that people can improve. Why should students be denied that faith?

Opponents of the bill warn that, if enacted, it will come with “growing pains”: falling GPAs, lower graduation rates, more grade retention. Supporters will see that as virtue restored. Yet a dip in the numbers is not proof of renewal—it’s a blunt force result of policy acting on people. And the people most likely to feel its sting are those least equipped to recover.

Education succeeds, paradoxically, when it accounts for human frailty. The point is not to remove consequences but to make redemption possible. The grading floor is simply that: a floor, not a ceiling. It ensures students can still stand up when they stumble.

In the end, this debate is not about arithmetic. It is about trust—trust in the teachers who spend their days navigating the rough terrain of adolescence, and in the children who are learning, not only equations and essays, but resilience. To make grades “matter again” by cutting away empathy is to mistakes harshness for honesty, order for justice.

South Carolina’s lawmakers might consider a gentler proposition: that real rigor lies not in cruelty, but in care.