Grades, Grads and Generosity Part II

by The Albatross

Part I is here.

Public education turns teachers into minions whose obedience is required to make the system run.  So nauseating was the “request” that it churned the stomach of The Albatross, but the bird had good reason to be accommodating.  Teacher evaluations were still pending.  In a timid act of obedience,  the bird opened the grades for prior marking periods.  Refusing to do so would mean dying a useless death.  Administrators know that our mortgages and kids’ college education ensures our loyalty. 

The gambit worked.  The administration again succeeded.  The “request” was met with merciful speed and efficiency by the faculty.  Grades from prior marking periods were opened up.  Students were allowed to submit whatever assignments they wanted from whatever marking periods they wanted.  This was an unprecedented and unparalleled event, but there is no policy against opening grades from prior marking periods.  It simply seems to be a rule, implicitly understood. Perhaps Hamden High School no longer has rules.

This new phenomenon of making up work months old created quite a backlog for former Power School administrator, Shannon McKeon.  (Ms. McKeon has since received a promotion to Central Office.)  On June 20, 2022, Ms. McKeon emailed faculty,  “I am working through all of your requests to unlock gradebooks [for prior marking periods], and hopefully, will get caught up tomorrow during the day.”  Shannon had a lot of requests.  A lot of grades were being changed.

(For the unfamiliar, teachers record grades electronically in a program called Power School.  When a marking periods ends, Power School locks the grades for that marking period to prevent anyone tampering with them.  Only the Power School administrator has the capacity to unlock grades.  And yes, there is a Power School administrator, with her own office.)

There was a frenzy of grade changing.  Teachers pulled it off, doing an exemplary job of getting an entire year’s worth of grades changed in a couple of days and getting everyone passed. 

On June 23, 2022, Assistant Principal Lisa Dyer emailed teachers, expressing her appreciation.  [Thank you for] “making sure our seniors got to the finish line,” she wrote.  “Finish line?”  There were no lines.  We did whatever we wanted.  That is why this whole thing is such a threat to places called schools.

“Getting to the finish line” is the new euphemism for making sure that students pass with the highest marks conceivable.  It is about as deceptive a line as you can write.  It has also infiltrated our thinking: It is the teacher’s job to get the student to the finish line and make sure that he graduates.

A former math teacher, Mrs. Dyer knows that grades should be precise, like a patient’s medical record or a client’s tax forms, a foolproof way to comprehend a student’s work.  One neither under-reports nor over-reports.  One is accurate.  Accuracy is the point of grades.  As far as humanly possible, grades should be unbiased, but there was no humanly possible way accurate assessments could be made of hundreds of assignments that were often months old.  Grading became work submission and ticking boxes.

But yes, we did shepherd those seniors to the finish line.  We overperformed, didn’t we?  Surely this accomplishment, in the history of American high schools, has never been equalled.  Teachers made graduation a go. 

Graduation would have been shelved had not the gradebooks been unlocked.  But can we really believe grades when we play so fast and furious with them?

Every teacher has always had students who want the rules bent just for them.  It is hard to say “no” when someone is pleading, but giving students grades that they do not deserve is a great challenge.  It means that all you have been doing, the lesson planning, the instruction, the correcting assignments, is folly.  It means that your class is a joke and you are a fool.

This year has not been a new dawn.  Grading is still work submission and box-ticking.  Students play all marking period, and when the quarter ends, they submit work and demand grades.  Despite a new district-wide late work policy, which no one follows,, students expect to submit assignments when they want, and teachers continue to be “generous,” ignoring any remaining scruples that may be left.  We continue to work the magic with make-up days; by skimming over assignments instead of correcting them; flying over reality; creating a fantasy of student work.  So teachers do own the grades.   If students owned the grades, there would be failure en masse, an indication not only of failing students, but a failing institution.   Fiction sustains our institution, and fiction is necessary to sustain it.  We have to obscure the fundamental reality of life at this high school or there will not be one.

But administrators own the grades, too.  They have a satellite relationship with grades, using teacher evaluations as leverage.   

There also seems to be new criteria for determining grades: Student Circumstances.  If grades are given based on student circumstances,  they make no sense.  Any grade can be rationalized based on that variable.  Grades become whims.  In The Second Treatise on Government, political theorist John Locke thought nothing more awful than to subject someone else to your whim.  Bending or breaking the rules was an abuse of power.  

The administration has put to rest any notion that grades are empirical and objective.  We have been duped into thinking that grades actually mean something when it is not very hard to manipulate them to look whatever way you want. 

Since grades are so deceptive, let us abandon them.  If student circumstances are a component of grades, the most accurate grades may be none at all.  An inaccurate grade tells us nothing.  It is not indispensable. We can get students to the finish line without them.

Maybe, just maybe,  those standardized tests do tell us something. 

Superintendent Highsmith certainly thinks so.  He proposed an eight million dollar budget increase based on test scores, not grades.  Highsmith knows better than to trust grades.  He knows that standardized tests point to the truth.  This outlook may be a bit heretical, since standardized tests are also supposed to reflect bias against minority groups, but no matter.  Depending upon the day and what their objective is, educators favor standardized tests over grades, then the next day grades over tests. 

It all comes down to which version of the education narrative, grades or tests, you want to believe. 

In any event, cheating is not as costly as failure, which involves either summer school or more sections of the same class opened up.

In a couple of weeks, another batch of grades will be locked in Power School.  Superintendents and administrators will give glowing speeches about the seniors.  After the ceremony, they will hug themselves and break out the champagne.  

Last year was not an enviable performance.  This year, we have been walking through a long, moonless night.  What will happens as the year ends, no one knows.  But to think that grades are not being changed as this column is being written is a delusion.