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Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

latimes.com

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Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#161
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have to agree there is institutional racism in schools to think this is garbage writing? Worried you'll get called a racist for suggesting an anti racist is wrong? Actually on topic though, Asia is laughing at us. Removing homework and grading? Because "racism"? You shouldn't be penalizing well off people (white or not) with worse schooling because some lower class students (black or not) dont have enough…

They mention that because it emphasizes their other point. It's the equivalent of "I'm a vegetarian but even I drool at the thought of bacon". You don't have to mention that you're vegetarian....it's there because it places extra emphasis on how appealing bacon can be. sigh did I really to break it down like that

There's the other side of the coin though. You say that not to emphasise the point, but to protect yourself.

"I'm not a racist because I agree with x", don't call me a racist for disagreeing with you.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#162
post #132

I was really hoping this is a decent article about what some teacher or school did about the problem. It starts like that but then it goes kablookie... So, a certain Joshua Moreno is fed up with the system and did something about that, 2 paragraphs. GREAT. Then the rest of the entire article is about institutionalized racism and how the current system fails us. At no point do we get a good example about what mr Moren…

Why do you have to agree there is institutional racism in schools to think this is garbage writing? Worried you'll get called a racist for suggesting an anti racist is wrong? Actually on topic though, Asia is laughing at us. Removing homework and grading? Because "racism"? You shouldn't be penalizing well off people (white or not) with worse schooling because some lower class students (black or not) dont have enough…

> Why do you have to agree there is institutional racism in schools to think this is garbage writing?

I'm only going to argue this point. I could claim an idea is bad because I disagree with the idea. Let's say you say that something is racist and I disagree and we have an argument about whether that thing is racist or not. The article claims (among many other things) that there are racist undertones here.

However, that's not my point here. The problem here is the article claimed to talk about A (school reform) but spent 70% of it's page space on B (things suck, and racism is involved). And I didn't care about B when the author promised me A and the author DID NOT ACTUALLY COVER A. I'm not attacking the B idea, just the inconsistency of the whole writing.

Malcom Gladwell (for example) covers institutional racism in schools VERY WELL in his podcast Revisionist History. He delivers B quite successfully. And I'm sure other authors are great at discussing B if they want to.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#163
post #135
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you and people like you say it superficially true ("just grade on objective performance!") ...but also completely disingenuous. Student X is an only child, has educated and well paid parents who instill work ethic and have the means, time and ability to commit to helping X get the best grades, including hiring tutors for things they can't or don't have time to teach. X lives in a safe, affluent area and associat…

> Granted, these are obviously exaggerated and hypothetical stereotypes, which I don't really want to contribute to perpetuating, but they illustrate a point. You don't exactly have to be some kind of bleeding heart social justice activist to see how unfair it is to Z to be "objectively graded" as lacking "performance" when compared to X. I don't think that it follows from this that it's unfair for Y/Z to have a lowe…

> put others in a low income country shantytown with no access to any facilities, coaches, with poor nutrition …

When we actually do do that, we seem to get world-beating Kenyan and Ethiopian athletes.

Not so many affluent, well-fed Swiss ones though.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#164
post #124
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with stress/anxiety/deadlines is a vital life skill. At some point people have to face failures and consequences (even if the failure was "not their fault"!) and learn to handle them; if they don't do it in school they'll be doing it for the first time in college, or in the workplace, or with governmental requirements.

Sure, but are you really arguing that getting bad grades is a good way to learn how to deal with anxiety? Do you have evidence for that statement?

If you were starting from scratch and looking for a way to teach people to deal with stress/anxiety/deadlines, what would you do? Setting up a realistic, consequential-feeling but ultimately not too consequential, environment with stress/anxiety/deadlines where they would practice and learn seems like the common-sense way to do it to me. Even if you had specific things to teach (coping techniques etc.), you'd probably still want to have that kind of environment to test them out in practice.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#165
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have to agree there is institutional racism in schools to think this is garbage writing? Worried you'll get called a racist for suggesting an anti racist is wrong? Actually on topic though, Asia is laughing at us. Removing homework and grading? Because "racism"? You shouldn't be penalizing well off people (white or not) with worse schooling because some lower class students (black or not) dont have enough…

> Actually on topic though, Asia is laughing at us. Are you really that self centered that you think that people around the globe care.

They care very much. Most other countries follow the US pretty closely.

I have a weird thing going on in my personal life where every so often a Chinese friend will suddenly ask me about something in American domestic politics that I've never heard of. And every so often I'll ask about something in Chinese domestic politics that they've never heard of.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#166
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you and people like you say it superficially true ("just grade on objective performance!") ...but also completely disingenuous. Student X is an only child, has educated and well paid parents who instill work ethic and have the means, time and ability to commit to helping X get the best grades, including hiring tutors for things they can't or don't have time to teach. X lives in a safe, affluent area and associat…

HN is full if the “homework doers” who scored well and got nice professional jobs. Hence the downvotes.

Yeah, I'm one of them. And I too use to think it was all me and my aptitude and merit and hard work. Now, it makes me cringe how I could ever think that. With age I've realized how privileged I was, and how many people who really worked far harder than me and still didn't get ahead.

To be clear, schools can't fix all the worlds injustices. Life is unfair and realistically we may never be able to fix that. But we can stop doing this that are making it blatantly more unfair than it has to be...

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#167
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean allowing multiple redos for tests doesn’t seem awful. Especially if the test questions can be mixed up. My physics and calculus classes did this with online software & I mastered those subjects pretty heavily towards the end. I understand this can’t be repeated for all subjects but the general idea doesn’t seem like the worse

It's a lot of work to prepare a good physics exam, partly because you don't want to pose questions that the students are already familiar with.

At what level? Undergraduate physics / secondary honors track, sure. But in MS physical science and the intro physics HS class I'm familiar with-- doing simple, well-understood kinematics problems is where a whole lot of test effort is spent (while trying to build intuition and process that the best students will be able to use for harder problems).

I mean, it's fun to ask "trick" questions, like what happens to a helium balloon in a turning car, etc, but I wouldn't assess based on them. If students are going to be engineers or heavily use physics, they can go to AP physics and college physics classes and draw complicated free body diagrams and set up big equations.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#168

> give students a five-day grace period to turn in work I don't see how that changes anything. It just means the homework deadline is 5 days later. > eliminate zeroes in grade books Meaning if one does well on the first assignment, the rest of the semester can be ignored. A savvy student, once they achieved an A, will be motivated to not turn in any more assignments or tests. > and re-do tests Once you know what is o…

Redoing tests is actually amazing! Worst case is that you learn the same amount and best case you really get a good understanding of the material! I’ve had two classes with test redos and I always learn more with them!

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#169
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They mention that because it emphasizes their other point. It's the equivalent of "I'm a vegetarian but even I drool at the thought of bacon". You don't have to mention that you're vegetarian....it's there because it places extra emphasis on how appealing bacon can be. sigh did I really to break it down like that

There's the other side of the coin though. You say that not to emphasise the point, but to protect yourself. "I'm not a racist because I agree with x", don't call me a racist for disagreeing with you.

[deleted]

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#170
post #11

> Los Angeles and San Diego Unified — the state’s two largest school districts, with some 660,000 students combined — have recently directed teachers to base academic grades on whether students have learned what was expected of them during a course — and not penalize them for behavior, work habits and missed deadlines. That lesson is going to serve them well in the workplace. Teach students that they are entitled to…

the point of school is to give you a basic educational foundation, not to prepare you for the workplace

David Graeber in "Bullshit Jobs":

"Once time was money, it became possible to speak of “spending time,” rather than just “passing” it—also of wasting time, killing time, saving time, losing time, racing against time, and so forth. Puritan, Methodist, and evangelical preachers soon began instructing their flocks about the “husbandry of time,” proposing that the careful budgeting of time was the essence of morality. Factories began employing time clocks; workers came to be expected to punch the clock upon entering and leaving; charity schools designed to teach the poor discipline and punctuality gave way to public school systems where students of all social classes were made to get up and march from room to room each hour at the sound of a bell, an arrangement self-consciously designed to train children for future lives of paid factory labor.25"

"25.:Those who designed modern universal education systems were quite explicit about all this: Thompson himself cites a number of them. I remember reading that someone once surveyed American employers about what it was they actually expected when they specified in a job ad that a worker must have a high school degree: a certain level of literacy? Or numeracy? The vast majority said no, a high school education, they found, did not guarantee such things—they mainly expected the worker would be able to show up on time. Interestingly, the more advanced the level of education, however, the more autonomous the students and the more the old episodic pattern of work tends to reemerge."

Of course it's not just getting up and shuffling from class to class, but also waking up regularly, meeting deadlines, managing time efficiently. All of these things combined with the "basic educational foundation" which is in fact largely preparatory for later education and workplace fundamentals does seem to point against your assertions. And, frankly I think it's all harmful.

Edit:

Should probably also indicate that socialization in a hierarchical setting with various modes of authority being assumed while also dealing with virtual strangers at all points in the day is also not unlike work.

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