Modern Education
The headlines create the kind of stir you want. As they always say, the devil is in the details. The goal of modern journalism is to get more eyeballs and clicks. Oh heck, who I am kidding? That has always been the goal of journalism. As we were told in school, “if it bleeds it leads.” Well, I would suppose race-baiting is a close second there.
The Oak Park and River Forest administrators (Chicago) have decided to change their grading system. The operative phrasing that catches the eye is that they will make allowances for skin color and the ethnicity of students. Of course, without getting into the details of the report we have no idea of what this actually means.
In the “do your own research” era of our culture we are left with probably the least amount of actual scrutiny possible. Most will watch a video on YouTube, do a quick Google search, and call themselves experts on reverse discrimination. Clearly, school officials are reacting to inequities they see in student achievement. Of course, the question is whether the changes proposed will make things better or worse.
What I can do is acknowledge what I have seen in 24 years in education. That involves the difficult process of taking a giant step back to avoid the “back in my day” portion of the proceedings. All of us walked five miles to school, in the snow, uphill and uphill both ways. We had to beat off grizzly bears with our Trapper Keepers, and we always got docked for late assignments and were ever kept at bay with the fear of the dreaded zero.
One of the barriers to progress is the memory of how “tough” we had it. That toughness was always seen as an important rite of passage. It was something we needed to learn to be fully functioning adults. It taught us responsibility. It matured us. It made us who we are. Then again, maybe that wasn’t the best way for us to learn. Maybe there was a better way to do things. Maybe a different way would actually measure learning more accurately.
Education (like most other fields) evolves slowly over time. Over the course of those 24 years, I have seen education evolve from assessing zeroes and taking off points for late work, to simply grading for mastery. Students can retake tests to demonstrate mastery. They are not assessed penalties for late work. Absences matter less and less. We have students that miss 20, 30, and sometimes 40 days that somehow get credit anyway. They get that credit if they demonstrate mastery.
Is this a good thing? That is the ultimate question and it is a loaded question for those in the profession. Older teachers remember the days when students were docked for missing school and missing assignments. They were docked for tardies and dress code violations. They were docked for disrupting class and other minor infractions. Docking in all of these scenarios felt like the right thing to do. How else will someone learn responsibility?
This is obviously open for debate. We want students to learn responsibility and become fully functioning adults. We also want them to master the content we teach them. The question is whether these two things should be married together. It sounds like this is what the schools in question above are aiming to do. They are aiming to make sure that student achievement is separated from student behaviors. Clearly, that’s not the way we were brought up. Sometimes we just have to learn to accept that and move on.
A bit of back-in-my-dayism. My teachers taught their subject. They didn’t have to be our nurse, librarian and social worker. Also, if we made bad grades, our parents blamed us, not the teacher. I feel like since more moms have gone to work, we’ve tried to make teachers into moms and that’s not their job.
1It’s fake info.
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-fake?s=w
2I have no problem with a system grading students on their mastery of the material, provided that all students are held to the same standard, instead of being docked for violations of the dress code, absences, tardiness, and other minor distractions. If, however, “making allowances” means that students are held to different standards, depending on their ethnicity and skin color, I have a huge problem agreeing with that. We had a two-tiered educational system, not all that long ago; we do not need for it to return.
3Good catch JDM. I figured as much. However, what I’m describing is actually being done.
4JDM: thanks. I also looked askance at the article when they claim what percentage of different students “failed the SAT”. The SAT does not pass or fail anybody; the scores range from 400 (hand in the test with no questions answered) to 1600 (nailed every question). It’s up to college/university admissions committees to apply their own pass/fail criteria to the information, preferably in context with all the info about the student.
Plus the site did not offer any citations for their claims. Looking around at other alleged news articles on the site suggests that it’s a political hack, probably run by a non-English speaking group.
I also support grading based on mastery. When a student challenges my grading of their assignments, tests, or overall course, I give them a chance to demonstrate they actually know the material. Normally that consists of me just asking them the same question or posing the same problems that were on tests or in assignments. In over 40 years of classroom teaching, not once has a student successfully shown my grading was wrong.
My question is the following: way back when I was a public school student in Texas (shortly after the Civil War), report cards had an entire section dedicated to the issues like tardiness, attendance, participation, number of fist-fights, etc. Is that no longer the case? I’d be reluctant to drop a student’s grade in geography on the basis of them missing days in school.
[Disclaimer: my report cards invariably nailed me on the category of “needs to exercise control in talking”. It was a just and fair evaluation.]
5I can’t speak for every district or campus, but we don’t really do that at the high school level. We do keep track of that stuff but not on the report card itself.
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