Are you allowed to give your students a failing grade?

New teacher here working my first teaching job as a leave replacement in second grade. I’m in my second month now and was grading papers for the first time and marking questions that were wrong with an “x” like I did when I student taught in another district. My co-teacher freaked out because apparently this is a huge no-no in this district.

We are only allowed to circle the wrong answers, and then we have a sheet that goes with the tests and we are only allowed to mark the grades as “meeting” or “approaching.” Even if a kid gets ZERO questions correct, we cannot write anything less than “approaching.” If the score is 40% or higher, they get “meeting.

Is this common? Does this happen everywhere?

Also, I posted here previously about my bad experience at this school. We use garbage Lucy Caulkins scripted curriculum, have tech that doesn’t work, students don’t get any movement breaks at all, students in desperate need of special education, ESL and speech services have gone ignored until the middle of the school year this year even though their problems have been known about for at least 2 years, and I constantly have the principal, my co-teacher and my mentor telling me about their high expectations and standards which is laughable to me because we’re in a wealthy area and most of these kids get outside tutoring/parental help at home and come in already knowing more advanced concepts than what we teach while the kids who don’t have those advantages are left to flounder. What a joke.