On this blog, we have often discussed how easy it is to get drawn into accepting an intolerable practice. When it is first introduced, no one objects because it is worth trying, and over time, as this innovation becomes standard practice, those who don’t like it are ignored because it’s too late, it’s done that way and will go on being done that way.
Take the idea of giving letter grades to schools. My best recollection is that this idea started in Florida under Governor Jeb Bush, who thinks that testing and accountability solve all problems. Then New York City copied Florida. Now other jurisdictions are doing because, well, because Florida and New York City are doing it.
In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, there is an excellent public school. One year it got an A, and everyone was happy and proud. The next year, it got an F, and no one knew why: Same principal, same teachers, same methods, same materials, same students. What was the point of the A or the F? The principal didn’t know. Neither do I.
Several readers sent me an article about how the state of Florida made a mistake in giving out letter grades and raised the grades of a number of schools in Palm Beach. Good for Palm Beach, but remember that the whole system of letter grades is stupid. Of course, there are mistakes, including many that will never be corrected. Just because you get an A doesn’t mean that the competition is valid. It is not.
One of the great things about fiction, especially science fiction, is that we see how people get trapped in a world that is not of their making, a world that offends their sense of decency. Most people accept that world as it is. A few don’t. The question is always whether the dissidents figure out a way to get others to see the world as they do or whether they die fighting an unjust system.
Giving a letter grade to a school is the height of absurdity. It’s one thing to create a report card, which informs the school about ways it can improve. Such a report card might have thirty different categories, each evaluated to show the school its strengths and weaknesses and to start a conversation about how to improve.
But a letter grade is a Scarlet Letter. It says “This is an A school” or “this is a D school,” whatever.
Imagine if we sent children home with a report card with a single letter on it. “This child is a D.” Parents would be outraged. They would immediately understand that you are branding their son or daughter, not evaluating their performance. The purpose of evaluation is to support and improve, not to stigmatize.
To change the world, which now seems so locked into bad and destructive practices, we must change our vision. We must spread our vision to others and help others to understand that schools, like children, are complex, not unidimensional. We stopped putting dunce caps on children many years ago. We should stop thinking that schools will get better if we put a dunce cap on them.
Maybe teachers should start assigning grades to their local BOE’s, state BOE’s and the national “leaders”. Every new policy or fad that gets shoved down our throats, no matter how inane, is always our fault when it fails even though is was doomed from inception. When will the designers of such failed ideas be held accountable? When do we get to point at them and expose their stupidity?
On a separate note, watch this new advertising flop by Students Last..posted on the Rubenstein blog. This TFA dropout has no shame.
http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/07/22/first-ever-studentsfirst-video-that-did-not-make-me-laugh/
Diane,
Please allow me to change some wording in this blog to highlight another educational absurdity. My changes will be in capital letters as I don’t know how to do italics in this format and if I cut and paste the italics and bold don’t come through the paste.
Student GRADE POINT AVERAGES Are Preposterous
On this blog, we have often discussed how easy it is to get drawn into accepting an intolerable practice. When it is first introduced, no one objects because it is worth trying, and over time, as this innovation becomes standard practice, those who don’t like it are ignored because it’s too late, it’s done that way and will go on being done that way.
Take the idea of giving A GRADE POINT AVERAGE (GPA) to STUDENTS. I’M NOT EXACTLY SURE WHEN THE PRACTICE STARTED BUT IT APPEARS EVERYONE IS DOING IT NOW, AT LEAST AT THE HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL, MANY MIDDLE SCHOOL ALSO USE THEM AND I’VE HEARD OF SOME ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS DOING IT.
In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, there is an excellent STUDENT. One year SHE got a 4.0 GPA, and everyone was happy and proud. The next year, SHE got a 1.0 GPA, and no one knew why: Same principal, same teachers, same methods, DIFFERENT materials OF COURSE, same student. What was the point of the 4.0 GPA or the 1.0 GPA? The principal didn’t know. Neither do I.
HER PARENTS sent me a LETTER about how the state of Florida made a mistake in DETERMINING GPAS and raised the GPAS of a number of STUDENTS in Palm Beach. “MAYBE THE SAME HAPPENED TO HER” SAID HER PARENTS. Good for Palm Beach, but remember that the whole system of GPAS is stupid. Of course, there are mistakes OR ERRORS AS N. WILSON CALLS THEM, including many that will never be corrected. Just because you get an 4.0 GPA doesn’t mean that the competition is valid. It is not, AND AS WILSON SAYS “IF THE TEST EVENT IS NOT VALID, IF INDEED THE TESTS [FROM WHICH THE GPAS ARE DETERMINED] ARE INVALID, THEN ALL ELSE IS VAIN AND ILLUSORY.”
One of the great things about fiction, especially science fiction, is that we see how people get trapped in a world that is not of their making, a world that offends their sense of decency. Most people accept that world as it is. A few don’t. The question is always whether the dissidents figure out a way to get others to see the world as they do or whether they die fighting an unjust system. UNFORTUNATELY MANY HIGHLY QUALIFIED TEACHERS HAVE BEEN FORCED OUT FOR FIGHTING AGAINST THE UNJUST SYSTEM–EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS AND STANDARDIZED TESTING FROM WHICH THE GPA IS DERIVED.
Giving a GPA to a STUDENT is the height of absurdity. It’s one thing to create a report card, which informs the STUDENT AND PARENTS about ways HE/SHE can improve. Such a report card might have thirty different categories, each evaluated to show the STUDENT its strengths and weaknesses and to start a conversation about how to improve HIS/HER LEARNING.
But a GPA is a Scarlet Letter. It says “This is an 4.0STUDENT” or “this is a 1.0 STUDENT,” whatever.
UNFORTUNATELY we DO SEND children home with a report card with a GPA on it. “This child is a 1.0.” Parents SHOULD be outraged. They SHOULD immediately understand that you are branding their son or daughter, not evaluating their performance. The purpose of evaluation is to support and improve, not to stigmatize.
To change the world, which now seems so locked into bad and destructive practices SUCH AS ASSIGNING A GPA TO A STUDENT, we must change our vision. We must spread our vision to others and help others to understand that schools, like children, are complex, not uni-dimensional. We stopped putting dunce caps on children many years ago. We should stop thinking that STUDENTS will get better if we put a GPA SCORE on them.
And the GPA is just a proxy for letter grades, A, B, C, D, and of course can’t be without an F-FAILURE! And the letter grades are nothing more that cut score points on a percentage scale and those cut points are not the same everywhere. More educational ABSURDITY!
To question grades, standards and standardized testing is to question the status quo (not the rock group), the dominant ideology. And those challenging the ideology are seen as insane, blasphemous, as causing chaos and anarchy and therefore must be silenced, shunned or better yet crushed.
Having spoken out against Florida’s school grades since they were detected by my ears so many years ago, I took my concern further and created non statistician produced data about their failures and circulated it. Sadly, these failures were buried just as professor’s findings that indicated the system was a bomb. I listened to comments such as well, you may not like it but Tallahassee does or appreciation of the money it brings to Florida’s poorly funded schools. Very few persons of power had much to say and those that did, seemed to embarassingly acknowledge that my concerns were valid.Occasionally, I would hear a reference from a board member which alluded to my concerns. I watched the paper for years try to educate the public as to the bogus nature of these farcical indicators. Mostly, I heard the empty boasts of nothngness ring on and on. I wondered why and I hypothesized that Donald Campbell’s Law was in action. After all, the state’s school grades are high stakes. Districts scramble to earn meaningless boasts and a bonus money flow. Districts scramble to avoid unfair sanctions. Gaming the system becomes a solution. Looking good became the goal rather than doing good. Children are pawns and parents provided information of a poor nature, This is called an accountability system. Although such a system is to be fair, valid, and reliable, Florida’s system is not and thus seems to be unfit for the terms of both A+ Plan and accountability system. We see a lack of reliability in the most interesting jump from 80 to 30 % in proficiency rates in the three grade levels tested being changed in the course of a phone call to be no longer 30% but near the 80% level after all.This change did not necessitate a change in answers thus the results had remained the same and the outcome oh so different..so much for reliability. (Certainly somethng seems amiss when the state allowed comparison of two different tests with variations in administration, weighting factors, scoring, and cutoff scores.) Skewing by SES reveals an unflattering picture on fairness and interferes with validity as well since instructional quality is not the indicator being measured.
Florida’s schools and students have always deserved better.
Florida Fusser,
If you haven’t read Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577 I highly suggest it. It’s not an easy read but it totally destroys grading, standards and standardized testing.
For a shorter reading on the invalidities involved in standardized testing I recommend his “A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review” found at: http://www.edrev.info/essays/v10n5index.html
I hope you enjoy!
Duane
I just clicked on to post a comment when I read yours first. EXACTLY! Thank you for posting your comments.
Children are talked about not as children who have strengths and challenges but as a number. Amazing that no one has considered a tatoo of the number on each child’s arm.
In my school, from time to time,teachers assign a writing assignment to their students asking them about their goals and dreams for the future and post them on bulletin boards. This is a great writing exercise.
The sad thing is that I have read many of them just to see what kids are thinking about. So many students write that they want to be a level 4 and their goal is to move from a level 1 to a level 4. It makes me cry. Do they even understand what a level 4 is? Does anyone? They have just been told that a level 1 or 2 or even a 3 is not acceptable and makes you a failure. So, they want to be a level 4 and then they can be a success. Who is feeding them this claptrap? My guess is their parents and teachers and those few level 4’s who feel superior to all around them.
Why are we not looking at each student’s strengths and interests and developing them? Why are we not looking at each student’s challenges and providing resources and support to help them improve? Why are we not looking at a student’s personality and encourage them to pursue activities that are in sync with who they are?
Back to the Level 4’s who think they are so special. I wonder what happens to them if they slip even to a 3.5.
What are we doing to our children?
Ann,
Thanks for your kind words!
“So many students write that they want to be a level 4 and their goal is to move from a level 1 to a level 4. It makes me cry.”
Me too, almost literally. It also infuriates me that we have done this to the kids.
“Do they even understand what a level 4 is? Does anyone?”
No, although the test makers and givers think they do but they don’t.
“They have just been told that a level 1 or 2 or even a 3 is not acceptable and makes you a failure. So, they want to be a level 4 and then they can be a success. Who is feeding them this claptrap?”
Unfortunately probably about 95% of the educators, parents, main stream media and politicians. Most of the students, at least at the high school level, know it is a bunch of “claptrap” (that doesn’t mean that they don’t feel the pressures exerted on them to “help the team out”) but around here in rural Missouri they might call it bullshit or horseshit or as I then correct them as those aren’t “proper” school words, “excrement of either bovine or equine origin”. Boy, do the students like that one.
“What are we doing to our children?”
Killing their desire to learn, letting them know that they are being used by the adults as a means to an end (What did Aristotle have to say about that?) and that it is okay to use others for your own end, irregardless of what the others think/feel/believe. In other words we are causing immense harm to the students using these nefarious practices that are grades, standards and standardized testing.
Applying letter grades to schools, GPAs to any student and all such foolishness are ALL the product of the educational system’s consistent use of A-F grading for dozens of years. In the post, Diane said, “The purpose of evaluation is to support and improve, not to stigmatize.”
Please, after a moment’s thought, tell me: What is the support value of a year-ending report card grade, no matter whether A, B, C…but particularly what is the support value of an F?
A sudden thought on grading.
The 2012 Tour de France (http://www.letour.fr/indexTDF_us.html) bicycle race just finished today. For those who don’t know about it, briefly, it is a long race (3,497 kilometers this year) held over three weeks. To call it an endurance race is putting it mildly, as it involves all-out sprints for some days and grueling mountain “stages” in both the Pyranees and the Alps.
Okay, the grading bit. The mass of riders that stay together for the finish all get the same time (grade). The outliers in the lead most often become the notable winners of things like the overall fastest (yellow jersey), best in the mountains (polkadot jersey), etc.
NOBODY in the race gets C, D, or F grades. It is possible to not finish and get no credit for the race, but usually that isn’t even considered bad because it happens because of sickness or injury.
Schools might want to do something similar. (Diane might be able to confirm that it is how school culture once worked). Recognize the excellent performances. Honor the best and brightest. Do not penalize the others. Remember, the students have all gone through the same year of work. Does it matter to their success in life if they were middle of the peloton (pack)? Does it even matter if they were one of the least successful? Will a quiet finish in the tail of the group make a bad citizen? Is it really more effective to apply the letter grades of D or F to these children? Does finishing the year matter so little, and it it better for the students to have a negative label applied to them?
Starting on the journey and finishing it matter far more than being first, and there need be no stigma for finishing last. Just ask Tyler Farrar, one of the American riders in the race. He finished 151st, almost last. He was over three hours back from the winning total time of Bradley Wiggins, the overall race winner.
Tell me it would be fair to say that Tyler deserves an F. Are you kidding me?
Good analogy!!
“Recognize the excellent performances. Honor the best and brightest. Do not penalize the others.”
Yes, recognize the excellent performances for each individual to each individual and his/her parents but not to the public.
No, do not “honor the best and brightest” One cannot “honor the best and brightest” as is done in Le Tour de France which is a race and has clear rank order finishes “Honoring the best and brightes involves “cut off” points with measuring devices that are less than accurate and valid. And who determines what is the “best and brightest”. That is still sorting and separating the students in a fashion that lets those that aren’t “honored” know that they are “inferior”.
Nowhere in the document authorizing public education here in MO, the constitution, does it state that it is the public schools charge to sort, separate and rank students. Quite the contrary, our fundamental charge is: “A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people, the general assembly shall establish and maintain free public schools for the gratuitous instruction of all persons in this state within ages not in excess of twenty-one years as prescribed by law.” Nothing about sorting and separating there. “Honoring the best and brightest” is still too hierarchical for my taste.
I’ll concede that honoring the best is an element of competition, and I do not think learning/education is competitive. Schools have become hotbeds of competion with grading as a contributing factor. “You do realize, Sally, Harvard won’t look at you unless you have a hign GPA.” Sad guidance.
The only valid competition is to improve, to be more effective than before. This is comparison against oneself, not others.
Yet, we love to chase one another around the school yard. At least we used to before recess was elimiated in favor of more time on task. That common, joyful play might be one reason we see grades in schools. They’ve possibly been institutionalized as a way to capitalize on the joys of running around. I’d say the use of grades has been a dismal failure.
The concept of “peloton grading” is an idea to minimize the damage of grading. Children often are proud to know a “star” and look up to their peers and kids in higher classes. We are comfortable giving applause to the performance of a band and the soloist, almost to the same degree as we cheer for the kid striving to be first across the finish line.
Kids in a class don’t mind slapping a friend on the back for a job well done. They just don’t want everyone to turn around and jeer as they cross the finish line last. Today, such behavior is called bullying and the nation’s schools are developing curricula to try to stamp it out. (I wonder how the grades will be determined for that curriculum?)
Yet, there it is. Tell a kid he got an F. How is that not bullying?
The trouble grading causes is less that it acknowledges outstanding performance. The trouble is that the system, bell curve or not, stigmatizes much more than it highlights exceptional performance. Ask most kids in class who’s smart. They know, and it isn’t because they have been keeping a rank book during the year.
“Yet, there it is. Tell a kid he got an F. How is that not bullying?”
Thoroughly concur, except it’s worse than bullying as it comes from the “authorities” which gives it even more weight.
There is the phenomenon identified by Foucault as “subjectification”, similarly to what Hacking calls the “looping effect” and what I call “internalization” whereby people internalize what the authorities tell them and it changes their “being” into something else. I’ll post what I have written about this in a new post so as to not make this reply tediously long.
My son attended the public school you mentioned and I was on the PTA before and and after the excellent principal came in. I remember the year the school got an F. My response was to laugh because of the absurdity of the grading system. I would imagine the staff of the school, especially the principal, felt otherwise. Ironically, Mayor Bloomberg had visited the school a year or two earlier on the first day of school as an example of a successful and greatly improved school. I give credit to the principal, staff, students and parents for its success, not Tweed.. The grading system is just one more example of the test obsessed and vapid nature of the Bloomberg/Klein regime in NYC. As a historian and curriculum developer, I am appalled by the way the NYC DOE de-emphasizes history, but standardized tests are no longer being used to assess children’s mastery of history or social studies, Therefore it does not matter.
The grading system is absurd. The Mayor and Chancellor came to an event at PS 8 in Brooklyn to celebrate its success–and six weeks later, the grades came out and the school was graded an F. Parents laughed it off. But many schools have been closed on the basis of this nutty system. No laughing matter for them.
Foucault’s Subjectification:
. . . is concerned with the with the process of self-formation and the way conformity is achieved by problematizing student activities and opening them up to observation and punishment. What does it mean to be a “self” and how the student as an individual is pressurized into creating him/herself in a given fashion (dictated by the schools/society.) The individual student defines him/herself as normal in relation to factors such as age, gender, sexual orientation, health, race, family background, educational level and many others. This “power of the norm”-all individual actions are now within a “field” of comparison which subjects the student to various pressures and attempts to “normalize” him/her-can be overwhelming. A “normal” student then comes to view him/herself as a member of the “homogenous” society in which he/she lives. The student “subjectifies” what the school authorities have to say about and how they act upon him/her.
Hacking’s “Looping Effect”:
. . . in discussing different kinds of “subjects/objects” of scientific inquiry Hacking is concerned the how the difference of classifications in the natural sciences where the object of study has no “knowledge” of being studied or being classified and therefore cannot change its “behavior” contrasts with the classification of an individual being studied in the social sciences. To use his example, a quark doesn’t know that it exists, is named such and therefore does not change its behavior due to it being named or classified as a quark. In the social sciences, e.g., in education discourse, the knowledge of a “name or classification” by the student causes an interaction with that particular name/classification making it (the name/classification) unstable over time. And that knowledge and its interactive consequences effect the individual over time both positively and/or negatively.
An example of Hackings “looping effect” would be that a student, by knowing that since kindergarten he/she has been labeled an “A” student will, by the time they get to high school, consider themselves capable of earning an “A” and worthy of said label. Whereas a student who has been consistently labeled a “D” or even “F” student will take that knowledge and begin to question it and more likely than not reject it and the system that tells him/her that the label is supposedly true. Or if we label a student as a “trouble-maker” doesn’t that then reinforce itself in the mind of the student? Would you want to stay in a situation where you were constantly labeled trouble-maker or below average or a “failure”-the only grade in the scale that actually has a meaning attached to it? Is this not perpetuating a “violence” against said student and therefore wrong?
Combining Foucault’s and Hacking’s concepts I call it “internalization”. Whether for the good or for the bad, students will internalize the way the schools describe, label, sort and separate and interact with them.
SOMEONE in Tallahassee understands the absurdity of it all, and that someone is a graphic artist. Check out the visual argument on the Florida School Grades page:
http://schoolgrades.fldoe.org/
Teachers in my district have always thought the annual school grading season resembled a medieval ritual–think “entrail reading” or “chicken sacrifice”–more than it did thinking. The “target” for school grades moves more often than a six-year-old hopped up on Mountain Dew, and everyone in the state knows it. Yet we still proclaim the loveliness of the emperor’s clothing and shout down any voice of reason that dares question the outcome, especially if that voice comes from a teacher. What do we know? We chose teaching as a career, and you know what THAT means–we’re either too dumb to do “real” work or unthinking drones of the all-knowing, all-powerful UNION (which we don’t really have, either, since Florida is a right to work state).
This year, I am moving from a school with a string of low grades to a school with a string of high ones. The two major differences between the schools? School A is in a low-income ZIP code and is very small. School B is in a leafy, high-income suburb. My degrees won’t change. My skill level won’t change. The fact that I have two degrees and was a finalist for Florida Teacher of the Year won’t change, either. But because I’ll now have classes full of students who have grown through years of advantage (think two-parent, college-educated homes with disposable income to pay for Internet service and specialized academic camps), I’ll suddenly look–on paper–like a different teacher. A better teacher. And I have been a damned good one all along; you can ask my former students, and they’ll back me up with a string of excellent grades in college, multiple degrees, happy marriages, and nice families.
It’s madness, all of it, and the fact that the rest of the states want to follow Florida’s example is disheartening.
I am missing something on that page. I see an orange, an apple, and an A+. What else?
They’re comparing apples to oranges, which can’t be done!
Tennessee passed letter grade law.
bmost1,
Letter grades for schools are invalid. They measure the income levels of the families.