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Student Grading Standards: Too Lenient or Curbing the Failure Rate
Sun, 09/21/2008 - 19:52 | Education
For this school year, the Dallas (TX) public school district made a controversial decision to revise classroom grading rules in an effort to create a uniform grading policy. An article in The Dallas Morning News cites:
"The purpose behind it is to ensure fair and credible evaluation of learning – from grade to grade and school to school," said Denise Collier, the district's chief academic officer. Some teachers said the new rules offer kids too many loopholes.A subsequent article in the same paper quotes the district superintendent in defense of the new rules:
Dallas school superintendent Michael Hinojosa and two trustees defended new classroom grading rules Friday, and urged teachers and parents to learn more about the requirements before dismissing them as misguided. Dr. Hinojosa asked teachers and parents to consider that in the long run the rules will help more students succeed.Do relaxed rules for high school students help more of them succeed or give young people the wrong impression of how the business world operates?
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Comments
Sounds like someone knows how
Sounds like someone knows how to weaken our society with letting children be children and not learn anything...the children are suffering and we as a country are suffering for whomever is getting away with this policy.... i hope you can do something to help this and thank you for voicing your opinion..
This has to be De Ja Vu.
This has to be De Ja Vu. This is exactly what my fellow teacher colleagues and I were discussing at work today. This is not just happening in Dallas, but I would be willing to bet it is happening all over the country. I teach in the Hazelwood School District in Florissant (St. Louis County) Missouri and we have this same issue. Students are allowed to turn in their assignments whenever they want to and we have to accept it without giving them a penalty for it being late. The rationale from the administration is that it is not fair to penalize students grades because of behavior issues, and not turning in work is a behavior. They only want us to grade on what the kids are learning. My question to that is how in the world will we know if they have learned something if they are not doing the work. This is the seventh week of the current school year, and I have at least 20 of my 78 students who have assignments missing that were due the second week of school. Back in the day if we did not turn in our work, we were given a 0 for that assignment, and it was no such thing as turning it in a month late. We are truly setting our kids up for failure. Meanwhile school administrators are putting more and more pressure on us as teachers. They come in and out of our classrooms to make sure that we are keeping the students engaged, and that we are walking around the class and teaching lessons that will keep the students from being bored. They don't want us doing things like teaching them how to spell or how to conjugate verbs, or vocabulary. Those things are not important. What is important is that we are teaching them things that will help them think outside the box. So what if they don't know how to write a complete sentence, or if they can't spell. How dare we make them look up words in a dictionary. We were told last year that if any administrators walked into our classrooms and saw kids looking up words in a dictionary that we would get in trouble. In fact we were only allowed to have two dictionaries in our Communication Arts classrooms. I can go on and on forever, and here I just thought it was my school district.
This issue is serious and the above responder is correct in saying that our entire education system is in need of reform. Our kids are not learning the basics, yet they are passing each grade with flying colors. The school districts are always saying that we need to set high expectations, but their actions show that the expectations are extremely low when they allow students to get away with turning in work whenever they feel like it. Not only that but in my school district last year we went to a 90/10 grading scale. That means that 90% of the students grade is based on test and only 10% is classwork or homework. I have two main issues with this. The first one is that many kids don't test well. you may have a kids who knows a concept, but freezes up when it is time to demonstrate it on a test. The second issue that I have is that when kids know that homework and classwork are worth only 10% of their overall grade, they are going to be less likely to complete in because they feel like if it is only worth 10% of the grade then not doing it is not going to have a real effect on their grade. Believe it or not I was apart of the committee that they claim made this 90/10 decision, but I must have been absent the day that they decided this because at no time did I ever agree to such a thing.
So as a teacher, I totally understand how those teachers in Dallas are feeling. This is the sort of thing that is driving good teachers out of the classroom.
I don't think this gives
I don't think this gives young people the wrong impression of how the business world operates because this is how the business world operates. Look at the current economic crisis facing our country, a free market system where nobody at the top loses. The fact that the question refers to the business world as an outcome of the educational process is part of the problem. We must stop seeing education as a means to only produce a work force. This has been the driving force behind the failed policies of NCLB. Merit pay, high stakes testing, numeric quotas are all of the things that facilitate this policy. None of these elements mean that students are actually learning.
The problem here is the same around the country, a lack of educational leadership. Accountability is not finding who's at fault, but a shared responsibility.
The article is quoted as saying, "The new guidelines were developed by district staff and did not require school board approval."
This decision affects all stakeholders, parents, teachers and the business world. All of these stakeholders should have had a say in the decision, again, no leadership. We keep trying to test quality into the educational system, and it's not working. The entire educational system must be reformed to produce the quality needed, not just for employment, but the society at large.
The irony of this situation and this question is the fact that the man who was totally against merit pay, testing for quality and numeric quotas was the same man who taught the Japanese how to produce quality automobiles. W. Edward Deming was the American statistician who was sent to Japan after WWII to help them revive their manufacturing. He turned them into the powerhouse they are today. How many American companies have won a Deming Award, the standard of excellence for manufacturing? Have you seen GM's numbers lately, so who's business world are we talking about?