Long before Americans decide whether to trust the government, respect workplace expectations, or take responsibility within their communities, they spend more than a decade learning how institutions work. Institutional credibility is learned, and schools are one of the first places students experience whether rules are legitimate, predictable, fair, and meaningful.
While formal civics courses teach the branches of government, voting, rights, constitutional structures, and maybe even civil discourse, there is also a hidden civics curriculum taking place daily. These lessons are taught through the policies and practices of the school. Research on adolescent institutional trust describes adolescence as a period when young people develop beliefs about the fairness and legitimacy of institutions, with their experiences with authority playing a role in the trust they develop.
From a worthy desire to make grading fairer and keep struggling students from giving up, schools have increasingly implemented practices intended to make academic success more accessible. One example is “equitable grading.” A 2025 Fordham Institute report, based on a nationally representative survey of public school teachers conducted in partnership with the RAND Corporation, found that about half of teachers said their school or district had adopted at least one such policy. Among the most common were minimum grades of 50 for missing work, no penalties for late assignments, and unlimited retakes.
During my 18 years as an educator, I saw this transition and the contradiction these policies can create firsthand. Students were given deadlines, but teachers had to accept work weeks later without reducing scores. Students heard that assignments must be completed, but received substantial credit for work they never did. In the same survey, 81 percent of teachers said giving partial credit for work never submitted was harmful to student engagement, while 56 percent said the same about accepting late work without penalty.
The disconnect extends beyond grades. In a 2019 Fordham Institute report based on a nationally representative RAND Corporation survey of more than 1,200 teachers, most teachers reported that discipline was inconsistent or inadequate in their schools. The impact on students’ institutional perceptions becomes clear in Katrina Morrison’s Journal of Classroom Interaction study where she found that students perceived school rules as unfair when adults applied them inconsistently.
Schools may communicate clear expectations for attendance, behavior, and academic responsibility, but when students repeatedly experience exceptions, inconsistent consequences, or policies that remove accountability, they learn that what an institution says and what it actually expects do not always align.
These experiences teach something about how institutions work, and young people are extraordinarily good at discovering the difference between what an institution says and what it actually does. Over time, students can begin to see rules as opening bids, responsibility as transferable, and official expectations as different from actual expectations. Students do not consciously decide these beliefs. They develop them through repeated experience.
Those lessons do not disappear at graduation. They can shape the habits young adults carry into workplaces, leadership, and civic life. The quiet harm of policies created with good intentions may reveal itself when young adults enter institutions that expect them to meet deadlines, accept consequences, follow processes, and take ownership without being rescued from every mistake.
What happens when people spend their formative years learning that institutional expectations frequently are not real? The risk is that they come to expect exceptions instead of processes, see responsibility as something imposed externally, and become cynical of institutions.
The connection to civic life is not simply rhetorical. A longitudinal Child Development study of 515 Black and Latino middle school students found that an equitable school climate predicted stronger civic attitudes one year later. School experiences are part of civic development. If we want citizens who can trust legitimate institutions, accept responsibility, navigate disagreement, and participate constructively in democratic life, schools must model accountability that is both credible and humane.
One of the mantras repeated in schools about improving student outcomes is “build relationships.” It is good advice. Relationships matter. The problem comes when building relationships is treated as incompatible with holding students accountable. In the schools where I worked during the final eight years of my career, I often saw rules bent and expectations lowered in an effort to preserve relationships with students. But removing accountability also removes opportunities for growth. Accountability done well is not the opposite of relationship. It is part of it. Accountability done well shows love because it builds stronger people.
The answer is not harsher schools. An overly punitive environment risks teaching equally damaging civic lessons: authority does not have to explain itself; power matters more than fairness; mistakes permanently define people; and compliance matters more than growth. Schools do not have to choose between accountability and compassion.
We can implement a better model of support: high expectations paired with high support, consistent and restorative accountability, and meaningful opportunities to recover from mistakes without erasing responsibility for them.
Research supports that pairing. A study of more than 87,000 Virginia middle and high school students found that both disciplinary structure and student support were associated with stronger student engagement, higher course grades, and higher educational aspirations.
That model begins with clarity of expectations and consistency in outcomes when expectations are and are not met, based on systems rather than emotion or pressure to produce favorable data outcomes. It pairs accountability with restoration, providing consequences while also giving students the opportunity to develop new patterns of behavior and the skills to move forward. And it provides support that does not remove ownership, including tutoring, counseling, and credit recovery that still requires students to demonstrate learning.
Democracy requires citizens who can live within shared rules, take responsibility for personal actions, distinguish between disagreement and injustice, and both trust credible institutions and hold institutions accountable when they fail to demonstrate credibility.
Those skills are not learned only in government class. They are practiced in hallways, classrooms, athletic teams, lunchrooms, discipline offices, deadlines, group projects, and conversations with adults.
If we want citizens who believe responsibility matters and institutions can be trusted, the institutions children encounter first must demonstrate that expectations are real, accountability can be fair, and mistakes can be repaired without being erased.
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