Reform K12 has got a great post up that should be read by every teacher who is afraid to give low grades and by every administrator who thinks that being "child-centered" requires a lack of standards. He also provides the mind-bogglingly obvious (to most of us, anyway) approach for giving students honest, meaningful grades:
Here's our approach. At the beginning of the term, identify to students exactly what they'll need to do and perform to earn a certain grade. If you've got weighted categories--such as 50% for tests and projects, 25% for homework and classwork, and 25% for quizzes--tell the students what these weights are. Then, on each assignment, test, quiz, or whatever, be sure the students know exactly how they scored.
Here's the really tough part: At the end of the term, assign the children grades based upon their numerical average. In other words, give the kid the grade he or she earned.
If you're a non-teacher or a "traditional" teacher, you're probably shaking your head, saying "isn't that completely obvious?"
Meanwhile our child-centered teacher readers are saying, "No, you can't do it that way!"
The argument is simple. Traditional educators know that children should be graded on performance, pure and simple. A student either has the knowledge and skills to earn a passing grade, or doesn't, with higher levels of performance earning higher grades.
Progressive, or "child-centered" educators think this is cruel and heartless. "How dare a teacher just mechanically punch numbers into a calculator and come up with a cold numerical average, and then say that this is what a child is worth? It is up to the teacher," they say, "to take into account a myriad of factors in determining a child's grade, including things like effort, attendance, and even factors like socioeconomic status and home life."
Traditional educators have an easy reply to this complaint by the progressives: Grades are not (and never have been) a measure of a child's worth! If Johnny's report card has a D in Mathematics, that doesn't mean Johnny the human being is worth a D, it simply means that Johnny's performance in the knowledge and skills of Mathematics is worth a D!
Insert "test scores" in place of "grades" in that last paragraph, and you also have the traditional educators' response to complaints about standardized tests. Inflated grades and standardized test scores that are ignored or downplayed are favors that students don't need.
Posted by kswygert at March 22, 2004 12:26 PM