A high school teacher on grading

[George Sheridan <learn@jps.net>]

Getting an education in California: Why don't they complain their kid's 
grades too high?
By Michael Mahoney -- Special To The Bee
Published Sunday, March 28, 2004
http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/8672825p-9600662c.html

My kid got a C in sandbox, and I am not happy. I don't want to be one of 
those parents who obsesses about his children's grades. But as a 
professional educator myself, I know how competitive the admissions process 
is, and I don't want her to be rejected by the top-ranked kindergartens 
just because of an unfair assessment she got from her pre-school teacher.

I wanted like to talk to the teacher, but my wife said forget about it. She 
went to the parent conference when I was stuck at back-to-school night at 
the high school where I teach, so now she thinks she knows more about this 
than I do.

What's to know? In the course of an hour-long talk about our daughter's 
development, the teacher gave her this three-page list of activities and 
skills that 4-year-olds do. Next to each item she had marked a plus, a 
check or an O indicating the kid's development or interest or something 
like that. As a trained educator myself, I saw through this code. I figured 
that if a plus mark means A, and an O is, well, unthinkable from a genetic 
standpoint, then a check means average, or C, right?

I've seen my daughter in the sandbox. She shovels, she sifts, she makes 
castles that are strikingly similar to the more decayed Norman ruins we 
exposed her to in utero during a trip to Europe four years ago. This is not 
C work. This is not check mark work.

And it seems I'm not the only one who is concerned about grades. E-mails I 
received from a couple of dads a while back questioned the way that I 
assess student work. One dad who objected to his daughter's B+ on an essay 
told me that he himself had read and re-graded not only his daughter's 
paper but the papers of several of the girl's friends.

I try to imagine him asking these kids if next time they came over to the 
house could they bring a copy of that "Grapes of Wrath" essay they wrote 
for Mr. Mahoney. It's an image that makes me feel a little less 
over-invested in my own kids' lives. And I am also comforted that while we 
had different takes on the strengths and weakness of each paper, the only 
grade I completely blew was that of his daughter.

Parents who think their child got a lower grade than he or she deserved 
usually point out that grading is subjective. They tend to ignore that 
maybe they aren't in the best position to inject objectivity into the process.

(This is especially true when they begin their disinterested critique of 
grading policy by pointing out that a C is going to keep their kid out of 
Berkeley.)

But their concern is echoed by education critics who complain that grades 
earned in the classroom often do not reflect scores students receive on 
standardized achievement tests and that grading policies vary widely from 
school to school and even among teachers on the same campus. Supporting 
claims of grade inflation, the critics note that far more students receive 
A in math classes, for example, than score at the highest level on state 
tests of the same material.

Of course, teachers counter that the tests are at best an imperfect gauge.

Peter Sacks in his book "Standardized Minds" says the tests are invalid 
compared to the assessments of "teachers in the trenches." However, we must 
admit that while teachers can be fair, our grades will always be 
subjective. This is especially true in English, my subject area.

Judging the creativity and insight of an English essay can never be as 
rigid as determining if the proper nouns are all capitalized or the paper 
has the correct ratio of concrete detail and commentary. As Holden 
Caulfield indignantly points out in "Catcher in The Rye," the difference 
between a good essay and a lousy one isn't a matter of sticking the commas 
in the right place.

Still we strive for consistency and fairness. We talk and compare papers 
and at least at my school there's a surprising consistency in the opinion 
of what separates a B-plus paper from an A-minus one.

The attention focused on grades by both critics and defenders of 
standardized exams poses a test for all teachers.

The challenge is to set a higher bar for good grades and even for passing 
ones so that our grade books reflect the results of the state's standards 
tests. But in the interest of fairness and consistency, we must do this 
without making our grading policy more rigorous than anyone else's.

We must assess students' attainment of standards, but as a practical matter 
we often must factor other than academic achievement. (Who wouldn't cut 
just a little slack to the recent immigrant who came every day for extra 
help and kept improving all year? Who wouldn't mark down a brilliant essay 
that was turned in a week late?) Of course, we must fight against grade 
inflation. But we must also deal with the fact that no parent ever called a 
school to complain that his kid's grades were too high.

Perhaps somebody can devise a grading system that is completely fair and 
accurate, one that pleases education reformers and all those concerned parents.

I'd take on the challenge myself, but I need to get my daughter down to the 
park to work on her mud pie technique.

About the Writer: Michael Mahoney teaches English and journalism at Rio 
Americano High School.


George Sheridan