Grading schools does injustice to mission of education
By Roy Ockert Jr.
April 21, 2015
If you’ve spent any time at all in school, you’ve been graded, and you know that can be a terrifying experience. Outside of school, we live almost exclusively on a pass-fail system that doesn’t quantify our efforts to function in the world.
But in an effort to measure learning progress, educators have devised grading systems, most of which revolve around an A-F scale. The letter E is mysteriously omitted, and whoever did that surely deserved a failing grade.
I received my last grades many years ago — in graduate school — but as a college-level journalism professor for 13 years I handed out quite a few. And I can testify it’s no less agonizing for the grader than those graded. No teacher likes to flunk a student who is trying to learn.
Grading is an individual thing between the student and teacher. The teacher sets the standards, and the student tries to measure up. Over a semester a student who makes a C may learn more than one who makes an A but for whom the subject comes easy. I worked a lot harder to get a B in College Algebra than I ever did in any journalism course.
The question then is: How do you grade a teacher? Or a school?
Because I did so much better in English, history and writing, were my teachers in those courses much better than those who tried to get math and science across to me?
Any teacher can tell you that no two students are alike. We all have different talents, motivations and interests. I got interested in history because of a teacher who appreciated my ability to write about it after other teachers failed because they focused on parroting facts in their grading schemes.
It follows then that no two classes are the same. A high school English teacher one semester might have a class dominated by bright, interested students, and the next semester might be facing a class with several troublemakers who hamper learning for everyone. The same teacher in a poor, rural school may have far greater challenges than one in a wealthy district.
That makes it awfully hard to grade teachers or schools. Yet today educators are being required to do just that.
In an effort to quantify education, we have swamped our public schools with standardized tests designed to see what their students have learned. “Teaching the test” has become the No. 1 mission.
Test scores are being used to determine continued existence, funding and merit pay for teachers fortunate enough to have jobs in the right schools and who teach the right subjects.
Now comes the bright idea to assign a letter grade to every school. For that we can thank the Arkansas Legislature, which in 2013 passed Senate Bill 752, sponsored by Sen. Jim Hendren, R-Gravette, with nary a negative vote.
As Act 696, the legislation merely adds a letter grade for each public school, basing it on information already included in the school’s annual “report card.” But our lawmakers didn’t believe we understood those reports, that a letter grade would clarify all those numbers. Thus, they had the educators produce a new set of numbers to set grades.
A school scoring at least 270 points gets an A; one with 240-269 gets a B; and so on — with E skipped, of course.
You can now look up your favorite school online at https://adesrc.arkansas.gov.
What you can do at that Web site is find the school district and the school you want, then download a report card with 14 pages worth of statistics . You have to dig down to about midway before you find the grade on a page labeled “School Performance.”
Fortunately, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, whose publisher favors this sort of quantifying system, on Sunday published the letter grade and point score for all public schools in the state. Thus I know now that no Jonesboro school rates better than C and that no high school in Craighead County earned an A. And I thought we had some good schools.
Statewide, it seems that the higher grades generally went to elementary schools and lower grades to the high schools. I didn’t try to quantify that, though.
Two University of Arkansas educators in a blog they call edusanity.com posted an article giving an F to Arkansas’ plan to grade its public schools, calling this an “unconscionable proposition.”
Dr. Jason L. Endacott and Dr. Christian Z. Goering wrote: “Putting people or people-based organizations like schools into narrow categories is an attack on people and the organization of school itself. Is this a thinly veiled attack on the people of Arkansas through their public school system?”
They compared the grading system to counting garage doors. Any school in a district where few houses have a garage door but maybe a carport is likely to be a failing school; conversely, a school in a district where you find many houses with three or more garage doors is likely to get an A or B.
That’s facetious, but it points out the folly of grading schools on achievement and growth alone and ignoring the impact of poverty.
A letter grade might help one student, but painting an entire school with one grade does great injustice to our mission of raising each child to reach his or her potential.
Roy Ockert is editor emeritus of The Jonesboro Sun. He may be reached by e-mail at royo@suddenlink.net.