Grading the Grading

While I had railed against obsessive parental academic pressure in a previous blog posting, I fully acknowledge that I grew up in a household where my brother and I were expected to excel. What my parents had to navigate through were non-standard grading mechanisms in elementary school to assess whether I was at the top of my second grade class or not.

There's an article in the New York Times which reports on an elementary school's use of a numbers-based grading system, which try to assess students in a numerical format ranging from 1 (not meeting New York State academic standards) to 4 (meeting the standards with distinction) around a number of very specific skills. The program has been met with some frustration as parents try to "decode" what this actually means in terms of relative performance to others, especially given the relatively low bar of New York State academic standards. As one educational pundit said, "You really don’t know whether anybody has learned anything. They could all have done miserably, just some less miserably than others.”

What I think happens with these newfangled grading mechanisms is that academic-focused parents essentially come up with their own translation of the grades (e.g. 1 = A, and 2 through 4 = no more toys or television for three months). In my elementary school, our grading system was comprised of E(xcellent), M(ore than satisfactory), S(atisfactory), and U(nsatisfactory). I remember coming back home with a report card in second grade with about 30% E's and 70% M's and my distraught parents called for a conference with my teacher and principal, who couldn't understand why I wasn't scoring E's across the board. I vaguely recollect that my teacher had tried to (in vain) explain to my parents that M's were good (more than satisfactory, after all), but my parents were having none of that.

Threats to me, my teacher, and my principal to ship me off to parochial school notwithstanding, I plodded through okay. Well, more accurately, I plodded through more than satisfactorily.