Some kids are smarter than others. Some kids work harder to learn than others. Some kids have the benefit of parents who read to them, make them study, help them to learn and instill in their children the value of education and knowledge. And schools have long used a grading system to distinguish between those who achieve competence, those who achieve mastery and those who don’t. The former rise to the top of their class. The latter become judges find other ways to fulfill their dreams.
Is that fair to the kids who fail?
The Department of Education wants to lessen the impact of grades on class ranking amid the COVID-19 pandemic in favor of factors like “motivation” and “integrity.”
As part of new guidelines issued late last month, the DOE is encouraging principals to change the process that determines valedictorians and other academic honors.
Class rank has traditionally been established through grade point average with some additional weights for advanced coursework.
But citing the hardships on students imposed by the coronavirus, the DOE wants administrators to rethink that system and instead use other measures.
While the guidelines are, at the moment, meant to deal with Covid by excluding measures such as lateness and showing up at all, this has long been part of a larger scheme to end the oppression of grading that keeps some students down just for being dumber and less motivated than other students. Grade inflation has been quietly happening for years, but handing out A’s for coloring within the lines didn’t expand the universe of marginalized Ph.D.s in Lesbian Interpretive Dance sufficiently to fix the problem. It’s time to get to the core issue.
White language supremacy in writing classrooms is due to the uneven and diverse linguistic legacies that everyone inherits, and the racialized white discourses that are used as standards, which give privilege to those students who embody those habits of white language already.
This was the argument made by Arizona State University professor of rhetoric and composition, Asao Inoue. Rephrasing this in cogent words, he’s saying kids who grow up in families, neighborhoods and schools where people speak standard “white” English are going to speak and write better than those who do not if standard “white” English is the measure of accomplishment in the classroom.
Inoue added that White supremacy culture “makes up the culture and normal practices of our classrooms and disciplines.” To combat the issues, Inoue suggested implementing labor-based grading, which “redistributes power in ways that allow for more diverse habits of language to circulate.” He has also coined the phrase, “Habits of White Language,” used to describe the common way teachers and professors grade papers.
Not only does Inoue raise the problem, but he has a solution, labor-based grading.
Labor-based grading would mean weighing assignments based on how much “labor” students put into their work, and not assigning grades based on grammar or quality of work.
“Labor-based grading structurally changes everyone’s relationship to dominant standards of English that come from elite, masculine, heteronormative, ableist, white racial groups of speakers.”
If your first reaction is that Inoue begs the question, since schools either teach a language or don’t, you would have a point. After all, if students were unconstrained by rules of grammar, spelling, syntax, etc., then they aren’t being taught much of anything. There are languages that involve tongue clicking, and I suppose they’re perfectly fine languages, but they aren’t our language, no matter how many descriptors you put in front of “English.”
A point was raised by someone who seemed to claim possession of linguistic knowledge that AAVE had “internally consistant [sic] grammar and native speakers” and was therefore a “language” from a linguistics perspective. Then he added, “but no one has ever suggested teaching AAVE to anyone.” While the contention that AAVE has internally consistent grammar and native speakers reflects someone who hasn’t spend much time above 125th Street. But while AAVE has not been taught to students, it has been used as a teaching tool for students. And now it’s being proposed as an alternative to the “dominant standard” of white English, because the Tower of Babel is only a fairy tale.
But Inoue’s solution bears consideration notwithstanding his soft racism of low expectations. While there may be a tendency to a knee-jerk reaction of disdain for any system of grading that rejects quality in favor of effort, why be so dismissive of “motivation” and “integrity”? Some jobs are brain surgery. A brain surgeon, for example. Others are not, lawyer for example, and aren’t necessarily best performed by our best and brightest. Indeed, sometimes our best and brightest don’t perform functions very well at all, or are so internally enamored with their brilliance that they blow it big time.
It’s not that these things are mutually exclusive. One can be smart and highly motivated. A student can put in great effort to achieve and push the limits of his natural intelligence to their extreme. Is this a bad thing? Not at all, and it may be as much of a quality as being able to do quadratic equations in one’s head.
While the notion that competence and mastery are some elitist scam to keep the marginalized down, so too is effort. Ever meet a smart kid who doesn’t try very hard? He’s got the goods, but can’t be bothered. Maybe he shows up or maybe not. Maybe he does the task or maybe he uses his intellect to make up excuses for not doing so. Is it better to be brilliant or to show up?
This isn’t to suggest that teaching “white” English should give way to grading AAVE as an acceptable substitute, or that the kid who can’t add two plus two should be admitted to medical school, but that effort, the personal responsibility to try one’s hardest and do one’s best, is an underappreciated virtue that deserves to be shown greater respect. It’s not that it demands a new grading paradigm, since education is about academic accomplishment, but it is about who you would want standing next to you when something has to get done, the smartest guy or the guy you could trust to be there and try his best.
Yeah…the guy who’s always around, and likes to ‘be there and try his best’, amirite?
I’m just wondering how Inoue proposes to measure the “labor” that students put into their work. Leaving aside the question of whether it really matters at levels above, say, the second grade, it seems impossible to assess in anything remotely resembling a practical way. Or is that the point–give the teachers unfettered discretion to assign grades at their whim? There’s no possible way that could go badly.
Rather than concern yourself with how Inoue would do it (which doesn’t strike me as a difficult question), the better question is how serious people who appreciate effort would do it to encourage students to be responsible and try their best.
Just relapse to an older method of determining the worthy. Put every birthdate that could possibly pertain to any class members in a big hopper, and draw the valedictorian by lottery. If multiple students have the selected birthday, the one with the earliest birth time takes the honor due to seniority. Birthdate lotteries were long ago determined to be a fair and rational means of selecting people for special honors. We should go back to that, at least until we develop a sorting hat.
If it’s a lottery, do birthdays really matter?
If memory serves, they certainly did in the ’60s…
A better idea would be to make the Class Clown the Valedictorian. At least the acceptance speech might be somewhat amusing, before the tedium of handing out all those gilt edged diplomas for just showing up every day.
Didn’t you get the memo? Showing up every day is racist. (So are memos.)
While I love the thought of anyone talking about how broken the education system and how many people it is failing, I think Inoue misses a vital point. He suggests a very simple solution to be held in the hands of a very convoluted and bureaucratic system and doesn’t consider it from the side of incentives. To me those incentives are very familiar because they are at the heart of corporate America. Labor based grading combined with human observation translates to :”You get an A for looking busy.” and “Look at them they are always at their desk typing.” This is one the many drivers of what people are calling the great resignation.
Have you considered that your feelings are more valuable to you than they are to others here?
“Thesis is clear and developed, sentences are well-formed, but minus twenty for excessive ‘I’ statements. C-.”
People gotta learn the grading style.
The rubric is in the syllabus, for crying out loud.
Doesn’t school work and its grading already implicitly reward effort, though? Grades may be partly based on pure test scores, but don’t most schools, especially at the K-12 level, do a lot of grading on some kind of work product? As you point out, effort has a lot to do with producing results, and a lot of grading is already based on non-test coursework. But Inoue isn’t talking about recognizing the impact that motivation, integrity, and effort have on the quality of work, he’s talking about grading based on effort instead of quality of work.
That’s where Inoue and I differ.
So the professor who complains of “racialized white discourses” is the same dude who “coined the phrase ‘Habits Of White Language'” (HOWL). The Whiteness Industrial Complex strikes again. Down with considerations of heterogenous ethnic heritages, let’s push for framing our identities using whiteness as the metric.
If only our schoolteachers growing up were this progressive, they would have done a much better job fostering our sense of racial identity. We would have known which kids were being taught our own language and which of us were interlopers.
Now you know where our Howl got his handle.
Dammit, who squealed?
I guess jumping ain’t the only thing white men can’t do.
That said, I think I’d rather watch these two try to dunk a basketball.
Folks in Scarsdale loved them. Sold out every show. But after that unfortunate incident on Metro-North . . .
True story. I was in the audience at SNL the week before this show, and they tried out the White Rap as the warm up, which actually went a lot better because Roy Schieder didn’t blow it like Alex Karas.
After the cast party, the cast came back to our house in Brooklyn for blueberry pancakes.
Let me get this straight. You invited the cast of SNL to party the night away at your place, then served them blueberry pancakes for breakfast.
Damn. I knew you were one hip happenin’ dude, but I never imagined you were _that_ hip.
Your new theme song? –
I am hip and happenin’, but clearly not Mel Torme level hip.
I was one of those wunderkind child prodigies who could finish the assigned homework before the teacher could assign it, and who’d spent half the period reading books checked out from the library afterward. I consistently lost points for not showing work or displaying “calculator methods”, and I almost failed Geometry because I wouldn’t write out all the steps of the quadratic equation, for example, despite the fact I was knee-deep in calculus at my last school (the new one did not offer a gifted program).
On the other hand, I distinctly remember that in History of English Language and Contemporary English grammar, my finishing courses for my degree, the professor broke down our grade percentages for us at the start of class, and straight up left 10% as “Merit”. She defined that as ‘class participation, but not completely; consideration, but not complacency; effort, towards the unfamiliar.’
On balance, while I think some percentage of grade being effort-based is not bad, it sets an unsustainable standard that doesn’t apply equally across all subjects. Math for example, is a binary proposition for most basic education: it’s wrong, or it’s right, and there’s no flex in grading that. English, past vocabulary and grammar, is almost entirely subjective, and social studies and history are already utter battlegrounds anyways.
The better person, I’ve learned, is the one who tries harder. Coddled brilliance just produces pending catastrophes. The lack of discipline that follows a lack of effort is a greater threat to success and prosperity, particularly once you exit the school setting, and all that terrible behavior that’s been taught is exposed to public scrutiny all at once, and typically just self-immolates.
My son, who had a similar experience with math as you, never showed his work because there was no work involved. He intuitively knew the answer and it was the answer because it was the answer. One day, he asked me which was better, to be smart or to try hard. I told him both.
And yet somehow the children of Asian and African immigrants do extremely well in school. (The educational success of African immigrants and their children is not publicized because it does not match the political narratives of either the left or the right.)
I’ve little to offer but what’s the bumper sticker store going to do with the …” Proud parent of a D student” inventory?
Judges, what are ya gonna do… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I remember this game. We played it a few years ago but it wasn’t very fun. Will changing the name from Ebonics to AAVE make it more fun?
While I agree that no one should “be so dismissive of ‘motivation’ and ‘integrity,’” as values worth inculcating, I think that they would be inappropriate to base grades, class rank, or other measures that compare students to each other on them. There’s often a trade off between how easy it is to measure a trait and how meaningful that trait is. Implicitly this is what people are referencing when they claim something just measures “how good people are at taking tests” – they’re suggesting the test is a poor measure of any ability besides test-taking.
Motivation and integrity fall into the category of being meaningful but subject to very arbitrary evaluation. Just as one of the issues with vague laws is that they can make enforcement patterns, not actual behavior, determine who they’re enforced against, vague evaluation criteria allow the teacher’s preferences and biases, not students’ actual character, determine how they’re evaluated. For some teachers that bias might be implicit or explicit bias against students of color. For others it might be a progressive bias in those students’ favor. For most it would probably include some bias towards the students they like, and for all it would include a bias in favor of students whose parents complain and cause problems for the administration. And, as much as all of these things will probably happen to some extent, teachers will never be able to escape the accusations of wrongdoing. The day motivation and integrity begin to be formally evaluated by teachers is the day a small army of activists and journalists prepare to excoriate teachers for the bigotry or other issues they’ll find whether the issues are present or not.
As an aside, when I was teaching in a juvenile detention facility we found out that prosecutors could get ahold of our notes on students, particularly how they behaved and how much of an effort they made, and that these were used in sentencing – after that, you’d guess from our notes, our students underwent a sudden behavioral transformation, being “a little distracted” at worst.
You raise the important concern of subjective criteria for grading, honors and award. You also note that even objective criteria is often subject to similar criticism. It seems that there is nothing sufficiently objective that it isn’t subject to criticism, fair or not.
There is no question that bias, one way or another, can infect subjective measures, and certainly something as impossible to quantify as effort is ripe for bias. The only question is whether we can trust the teachers, the same teachers in whom we repose sufficient faith to be responsible for something as critically important as teaching students, to be fair with their subjective grading. It’s a dilemma.
At some point, you have to decide whether to trust teachers or not. You make a good case not to trust them, but then, who do you trust when it comes to promoting life skills like personal responsibility and effort, for which schools are particularly well suited to promote?
Sad reality is that we should be willing and able to trust teachers, and it would certainly be useful if we could, but we’re no longer confident that we can.
There’s a difference between hoping that teachers will inculcate good values and trusting them to evaluate students’ character.
Trust but verify?
Verify would imply having a more objective criteria to judge students’ character. Trust to teach a curriculum, not to verify characteristics this easy to be biased on, or, alternatively, this hard to be objective about.
So subtle humor is not your thing. Okay then.
I think it would be refreshing if one of those advocating against expecting students to learn the basics of the shared culture (which not too surprisingly is shaped in large part by the largest group), would instead openly advocate for Balkanizing the US. It might not make their positions any more attractive, but would at least show some insight into where their proposals are heading.
Shared culture as determined by the majority. Such a quaint notion.
I’m not sure how pertinent this comment is, but I used to teach math and statistics courses at the college level. In order to better assess how many problems to assign for homework, I gave my student 1 extra credit point if they noted the amount of time they had spent working on the assignment.
This helped me, especially when I was starting out, to assign them a reasonable amount of homework. I noticed a correlation (sort of) between time spent on homework and grades.
B students put in consistently more effort and time on their homework than C students. A students put in consistently less time. D & F students put either minimal or outlandishly long efforts. I took this to mean that A students were smarted and understood the material much more quickly. Students that failed either spent no time at it, or heaps of time without any benefit for doing so. Some people just don’t get math. Me, I can’t manage to learn any other language.
Just give everyone $450 000. All our problems are solved.
I like your answer. Are you running for political office?
I’ll vote for you.
That will be just about enough to buy a quart of milk.
But that’s only 2.5% of your daily quota.
Something something racism of lowered expectations. I can’t possibly imagine how this could turn out badly. Social promotion hasn’t helped kids succeed. F it, let’s give em high grades for the wrong answers, too.