In the USA, parents who do not accept their children's low grades or negative behavior marks on their report cards are taking their disputes with teachers and school administrations to the judiciary.
Educators state that parents, who had warned their children about bad performance in the past, began to monitor schools more closely, especially after distance education during the epidemic, and put direct pressure on school administrations to change grades.
A nationally representative study conducted by EdWeek in 2024 with the participation of 1,500 educators revealed that 4 out of every 10 teachers in the US are under pressure from parents to change grades.
According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) newspaper, educators who participated in the research note that families with high income levels are more likely to object to grades.
Esther Wojcicki, a retired teacher and writer living in Palo Alto, stated that parents have gained a new sense of righteousness in protecting their children and said, "Parents go to war for their children, especially when they get a bad grade."
Requests to change grades and parent pressure lead some educators to leave the profession.
Samira Hardcastle, who worked at John F. Kennedy Secondary School in Nashville, Tennessee and was previously selected as the teacher of the year, resigned, stating that the grade of a student who did not submit his art homework was changed by the school administration.
In his resignation letter, Hardcastle accused district officials of producing the untruthful memo in an attempt to "pacify an angry parent."
Speaking to the WSJ, Hardcastle said: "There's no accountability, so they learn that their work ethic doesn't matter. This will be a hard lesson for them when they step out into the real world and realize it doesn't work that way."
Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools Spokesperson Sean Braisted argued that it is not correct to describe the incident as changing grades only at the request of parents.
Braisted noted that administrators gave the student another chance to complete the assignment and scored the project independently.
Palo Alto school board member Rowena Chiu stated that the basis of the tension lies in the difficulty of being accepted to leading universities in the USA.
Takashi Kato, the founder and CEO of a startup company operating in the field of artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Palo Alto Unified School District after his 10th grader son's English homework on Arthur Miller's "The Witch's Cauldron" was marked as "76 percent artificial intelligence production" by artificial intelligence detection software.
Although the teacher gave him the right to rewrite the assignment, he gave it a "D" on the second submission and the student's final course grade dropped to a "C" level. Kato submitted a 1,162-page file containing his son's draft and revision process to the school.
Arguing that software might be biased against non-native English speakers, Kato offered to accept a "B" grade to resolve the dispute, but when the request was rejected, he resorted to litigation.
Kato's lawyer, Evan Nelson, commented on the issue: "If you are going to accuse a student of using artificial intelligence, you need to understand the impact of this on the student and give him the right to a fair trial. It was never about grades or money; the only purpose was to try to correct this mistake."
While Kato withdrew the lawsuit in September, Palo Alto School District Spokesperson Lynette White stated that there was no settlement.
At Walter Hays Elementary School in Palo Alto, mother Weiwei Luo appealed to the court after a third-grade student stuck out his tongue at a friend after being kicked during a game of catch during recess, and the teacher wrote her observations about the incident in the opinion section of the report card.
Luo, who found the teacher's evaluations untrue, took the matter to court, claiming that the process was not fair because his lawyer's video connection was lost during the objection hearing.
