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To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

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Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#31

Post by gizmo686 »

notus wrote: post #21
xupybd wrote: post #9

>“It’s sad, but the good news is there's a simple intervention — don't give report cards on Friday.” Yeah that avoids the one instance of child abuse but that's not the big picture here. How is it that there are that many people that struggle to cope that this is common enough to show up in this research. I feel for both the parents and the children here. If something like grades are causing the parents to lash out a…

I feel like we are kind of doing a disservice to children by even having grades K-8. I don't really see what the value is in having them. Parents over focus on it and seem to measure their own child's worth based on grades and children also seem to measure their own self worth based on grades. IMO there is no case where a child that young should be failing anything, if they are failing a class that young there is som…

I assume that you mean having grades in grades K-8, and not that schooling should not start until 9th grade.

I went to a K-12 school for high school (transferred in at grade 9); and they didn't give any grades in K-8 [0]. Having said that, I do not think the concept of grades for younger students is inherantly bad, it is just that parents and students are terrible at receiving them.

I assume you do see the value in report cards in general. The problem with gradeless report cards, is that it is easy to misunderstand them. For instance, if a teacher says "Johny should improve in X", it is not clear if there is a problem, or if Johny is actually doing amazing, and X is just the place where there is the most room for growth. Ideally, the teacher would be able to communicate this information perfectly; but having a simple grading system can be a valuable to to accurate communication.

[0] And their reasoning for giving any in 9-12 was primarily for college applications.

Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#32

Post by cortesoft »

educationdata wrote: post #12
nkozyra wrote: post #3

I don't think the actual study[1] takes the kind of correlation=causation approach this snippet does. That said ... > In addition to distributing report cards earlier in the week, schools could consider including messaging to help prevent corporal punishment that crosses the line into abuse. But that’s a sticky issue in Florida, where some counties still allow corporal punishment in public schools. (Florida’s not alo…

What is absolutely insane? The existence of "corporal punishment" or "physical abuse"? According to the quoted sentence ("prevent corporal punishment that crosses the line into abuse"), corporal punishment is not the same as abuse. The article also says: "Corporal punishment may include pain but is not supposed to result in injury; corporal punishment resulting in injury is physical abuse." So the line is whether the…

Corporal punishment is insane.

Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#33

Post by educationdata »

gizmo686 wrote: post #24
educationdata wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is strange that the study does not report raw numbers of instance. How many happened after post card release vs. not after post card release? I can't find the raw numbers of such. Only raw number of breaking down by race. Also, "Of the 167906 calls to the child abuse hotline for children aged 5 to 11 years, 2017 (6.7%) were verified as physical abuse cases". Only 6.7% verified???

>Only 6.7% verified??? I have complaints about the quality of the study, but this is not one of them. Keep in mind that anyone in Florida who suspects abuse is required to report it to the hotline. Probably more significant is the more traditional mandated reporters, who are trained to report any suspicion of abuse, out of both an abundance of caution and to protect themselves from liability. By design, such hotlines…

I am not blaming the high false positive rate (although itself is problem). The problem is that this kind of high false positive rate has a huge impact on the quality of the study. Be aware the followed analysis does not account for the error in reporting and verification. There are simple too many noise.

Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#34

Post by jacobolus »

Aloha wrote: post #25
notus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we are kind of doing a disservice to children by even having grades K-8. I don't really see what the value is in having them. Parents over focus on it and seem to measure their own child's worth based on grades and children also seem to measure their own self worth based on grades. IMO there is no case where a child that young should be failing anything, if they are failing a class that young there is som…

I think some feedback system is important, you need a mechanism to let the parents know Johnny is struggling and need something to help them. That said, letter grades are useless to gradeschoolers (K-5).

Letter grades are largely useless as an educational tool, even in high school – they provide delayed, coarse, not very actionable feedback, while inflicting a lot of unnecessary emotional stress/pain which directly interferes with learning. The real purpose of letter grades is largely bureaucratic and they are designed for the convenience of teachers and school administrators. What they are good for is sorting and labeling the students, though as a side effect they are also quite effective at directing student effort toward gaming them rather than caring about the quality of their work.

My primary school eschewed grades in favor of detailed written progress reports. These took a whole lot more work for the teachers to prepare, but were much more valuable. (In particular, knowing that they would need to write them caused teachers to pay attention to the progress of every student and take notes about it on a regular basis.)

Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#35

Post by 1000units »

xupybd wrote: post #9

>“It’s sad, but the good news is there's a simple intervention — don't give report cards on Friday.” Yeah that avoids the one instance of child abuse but that's not the big picture here. How is it that there are that many people that struggle to cope that this is common enough to show up in this research. I feel for both the parents and the children here. If something like grades are causing the parents to lash out a…

Offering incentives for the poor to not breed would have a huge impact. Currently we do the opposite.

Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#36

Post by educationdata »

ebg13 wrote: post #28
educationdata wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is strange that the study does not report raw numbers of instance. How many happened after post card release vs. not after post card release? I can't find the raw numbers of such. Only raw number of breaking down by race. Also, "Of the 167906 calls to the child abuse hotline for children aged 5 to 11 years, 2017 (6.7%) were verified as physical abuse cases". Only 6.7% verified???

> Only 6.7% verified??? Verified "as physical abuse cases", meaning that the rest were deemed to not be.

Could be. Then the study should report how many were verified as abuse, how many were physical abuse.

Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#37

Post by matte_black »

1000units wrote: post #35
xupybd wrote: post #9

>“It’s sad, but the good news is there's a simple intervention — don't give report cards on Friday.” Yeah that avoids the one instance of child abuse but that's not the big picture here. How is it that there are that many people that struggle to cope that this is common enough to show up in this research. I feel for both the parents and the children here. If something like grades are causing the parents to lash out a…

Offering incentives for the poor to not breed would have a huge impact. Currently we do the opposite.

We need to do a better job of providing subsidized birth control. Half the kids in school these days have no reason to exist given their parents situation.

Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#38

Post by bordercases »

xupybd wrote: post #9

>“It’s sad, but the good news is there's a simple intervention — don't give report cards on Friday.” Yeah that avoids the one instance of child abuse but that's not the big picture here. How is it that there are that many people that struggle to cope that this is common enough to show up in this research. I feel for both the parents and the children here. If something like grades are causing the parents to lash out a…

Weren't you a kid?

Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#39

Post by mirimir »

educationdata wrote: post #12
nkozyra wrote: post #3

I don't think the actual study[1] takes the kind of correlation=causation approach this snippet does. That said ... > In addition to distributing report cards earlier in the week, schools could consider including messaging to help prevent corporal punishment that crosses the line into abuse. But that’s a sticky issue in Florida, where some counties still allow corporal punishment in public schools. (Florida’s not alo…

What is absolutely insane? The existence of "corporal punishment" or "physical abuse"? According to the quoted sentence ("prevent corporal punishment that crosses the line into abuse"), corporal punishment is not the same as abuse. The article also says: "Corporal punishment may include pain but is not supposed to result in injury; corporal punishment resulting in injury is physical abuse." So the line is whether the…

Yeah. What about punishment resulting in emotional injury?

All that corporal punishment teaches is that it's OK for the powerful to punish the weak.

Re: To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

#40

Post by beatgammit »

b_tterc_p wrote: post #26

They had 2,000 data points... so they looked at the proportion of points on a given day when there was a report card released the previous day and when there wasn’t. Assuming Saturday’s accounted for, let’s say 20% of the population (blindly assuming) then they had about 400 data points and got a p value of 0.02. I’m assuming they did something to normalize for the number of days because there’s going to be far fewer…

Perhaps, but a report card is likely to get more attention on a Friday than another day of the week, and I could see consequences stretching into the weekend, which is supposed to be a time for a child to relax from the school week.

That being said, I think we should put far less emphasis on grades and report cards in general, so I'd rather just not give out report cards on a regular basis. Grades and reports cause a ton of stress for kids that just gets in the way of learning. I also think children should be allowed to go at their own pace and have some level of control over what they learn. It's okay if a child lags in one area and excels in another for a year or two. Interests change, and children learn far more rapidly in subjects they're interested in.

I agree that just moving report cards may not solve the problem. We need to reexamine why we give report cards and decide if there isn't a better way (and there are a lot of alternative teaching methods that may do better than the way most public schools are run).

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