When I think of education, specifically US K-12 education, both public and private, I think of kids learning things. With a school being defined as an institution for the teaching of children, this seems natural. I think this purpose gets undermined by something else. Grading.
Not testing, but grading, like you might grade a steak. Grading places students in a hierarchy, identifying certain students as smart, other students as… not so smart. Grading, as it’s done today, creates a database of students, tracking their performance in a portable, easy to share report, in convenient card form, so that outside agencies, schools, employers, etc. can be readily provided with performance data about students. We grade students and help these agencies to pick and choose which students are afforded benefits, offered positions, jobs or scholarships, and which are not. Grading changes school from a place of learning into a proving ground for one’s future opportunity. We understand this, it forms a deep undercurrent guiding our activities regarding school, but we don’t often say it out loud. You don’t get an angry parent in front of the school board saying the school isn’t doing enough to differentiate the high performers from the slackers.
Despite this, tremendous amount of effort is put into developing these grades by schools, ensuring their usefulness, from constant testing of students, to the development of standardized tests, to tracking the grades of the students in individual schools or districts. Students cram for tests to get a high score, and we all know full well that they will forget it in a few weeks time, until they cram again for the final. The goal being not necessarily a top notch understanding of the subject at hand, but a good grade to put on the report card. The grade becomes the focus, not the learning.
Now, you’ll say, grades are important because we don’t know how well a student grasps the content without grades. This is a fair point. However, if a student does poorly on a test, the grade tends to just sit there like a mark of shame, and not a lot of effort by the school goes into re-teaching what this student failed to learn, or necessarily even documenting what it WAS they never learned. The grade, though, that is well documented and will remain part of this student’s record, unchanged, whether or not the student eventually learns how to use Sine, Cosine and Tangent correctly. Even if we used grading/testing to directly help students learn more effectively, giving those grades to colleges and employers doesn’t help students learn at all.
Parents, when they see a bad grade say “work harder to get those grades up”. You got a bad grade in Fractions? You can “fix” it by doing better on the next topic, Geometry. We know that whether or not the kid knows fractions is irrelevant, the class is done with fractions, studying fractions NOW is a waste of time because the damage is already done. Maybe study it again when Finals comes along.
In the adult education world, grades are not really a ‘thing’ the same way they are for kids. If I go to a class to get my CDL certification I don’t get a grade. At least I don’t put down on my resume that I got a 90 in the class, or a 75, I put down that I completed the class to the satisfaction of the instructor, passed the test and can now legally drive large trucks. Nobody is keeping track of the adult classes I took where I didn’t do well, where I decided it wasn’t for me, and then punish me down the line for that failure. But we do this to kids, in addition to just the need to learn new things all day long, they deal with the pressure of knowing that what they do right now, when they’re 13 years old, is going to have a lasting impact on their future opportunities.
