After the student gave his tale of woe and left, the phone rang. ““I got a D in your class. Is there any way you can change it to “Incomplete’?’’ Then the e-mail assault began: ““I’m shy about coming in to talk to you, but I’m not shy about asking for a better grade. Anyway, it’s worth a try.’’ The next day I had three phone messages from students asking me to call them. I didn’t.
Time was, when you received a grade, that was it. You might groan and moan, but you accepted it as the outcome of your efforts or lack thereof (and, yes, sometimes a tough grader). In the last few years, however, some students have developed a disgruntled-consumer approach. If they don’t like their grade, they go to the ““return’’ counter to trade it in for something better.
What alarms me is their indifference toward grades as an indication of personal effort and performance. Many, when pressed about why they think they deserve a better grade, admit they don’t deserve one but would like one anyway. Having been raised on gold stars for effort and smiley faces for self-esteem, they’ve learned that they can get by without hard work and real talent if they can talk the professor into giving them a break. This attitude is beyond cynicism. There’s a weird innocence to the assumption that one expects (even deserves) a better grade simply by begging for it. With that outlook, I guess I shouldn’t be as flabbergasted as I was that 12 students asked me to change their grades after final grades were posted.
That’s 10 percent of my class who let three months of midterms, quizzes and lab reports slide until long past remedy. My graduate student calls it hyperrational thinking: if effort and intelligence don’t matter, why should deadlines? What matters is getting a better grade through an unearned bonus, the academic equivalent of a freebie T shirt or toaster giveaway. Rewards are disconnected from the quality of one’s work. An act and its consequences are unrelated, random events.
Their arguments for wheedling better grades often ignore academic performance. Perhaps they feel it’s not relevant. ““If my grade isn’t raised to a D I’ll lose my scholarship.’’ ““If you don’t give me a C, I’ll flunk out.’’ One sincerely overwrought student pleaded, ““If I don’t pass, my life is over.’’ This is tough stuff to deal with. Apparently, I’m responsible for someone’s losing a scholarship, flunking out or deciding whether life has meaning. Perhaps these students see me as a commodities broker with something they want – a grade. Though intrinsically worthless, grades, if properly manipulated, can be traded for what has value: a degree, which means a job, which means money. The one thing college actually offers – a chance to learn – is considered irrelevant, even less than worthless, because of the long hours and hard work required.
In a society saturated with surface values, love of knowledge for its own sake does sound eccentric. The benefits of fame and wealth are more obvious. So is it right to blame students for reflecting the superficial values saturating our society?
Yes, of course it’s right. These guys had better take themselves seriously now, because our country will be forced to take them seriously later, when the stakes are much higher. They must recognize that their attitude is not only self-destructive, but socially destructive. The erosion of quality control – giving appropriate grades for actual accomplishments – is a major concern in my department. One colleague noted that a physics major could obtain a degree without ever answering a written exam question completely. How? By pulling in enough partial credit and extra credit. And by getting breaks on grades.
But what happens once she or he graduates and gets a job? That’s when the misfortunes of eroding academic standards multiply. We lament that schoolchildren get ““kicked upstairs’’ until they graduate from high school despite being illiterate and mathematically inept, but we seem unconcerned with college graduates whose less blatant deficiencies are far more harmful if their accreditation exceeds their qualifications.
Most of my students are science and engineering majors. If they’re good at getting partial credit but not at getting the answer right, then the new bridge breaks or the new drug doesn’t work. One finds examples here in Atlanta. Last year a light tower in the Olympic Stadium collapsed, killing a worker. It collapsed because an engineer miscalculated how much weight it could hold. A new 12-story dormitory could develop dangerous cracks due to a foundation that’s uneven by more than six inches. The error resulted from incorrect data being fed into a computer. I drive past that dorm daily on my way to work, wondering if a foundation crushed under kilotons of weight is repairable or if this structure will have to be demolished. Two 10,000-pound steel beams at the new natatorium collapsed in March, crashing into the student athletic complex. (Should we give partial credit since no one was hurt?) Those are real-world consequences of errors and lack of expertise.
But the lesson is lost on the grade-grousing 10 percent. Say that you won’t (not can’t, but won’t) change the grade they deserve to what they want, and they’re frequently bewildered or angry. They don’t think it’s fair that they’re judged according to their performance, not their desires or ““potential.’’ They don’t think it’s fair that they should jeopardize their scholarships or be in danger of flunking out simply because they could not or did not do their work. But it’s more than fair; it’s necessary to help preserve a minimum standard of quality that our society needs to maintain safety and integrity. I don’t know if the 13th-hour students will learn that lesson, but I’ve learned mine. From now on, after final grades are posted, I’ll lie low until the next quarter starts.
title: “Making The Grade” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-28” author: “Geraldine Mcqueen”
But while Bloomberg may be catching heat right now over the issue, he’s not the only politician to come out swinging against schools that promote kids for social reasons. In recent years, school districts across the country have introduced new standards for grade advancement, holding back children who can’t demonstrate adequate proficiency in reading and math. The immediate results are often dramatic: in large cities like Chicago, nearly half the public school population has been shipped off to summer school in order to advance to the next grade. Less clear, however, is how successful prohibiting social promotion will be in the long term. After all, there’s no guarantee that being held back makes a third grader any more likely to be able to read.
Richard Riley has spent a good deal of time thinking about the problem of social promotion. Former U.S. secretary of Education Riley (one of the rare creatures to survive both of Bill Clinton’s terms in office) came out in favor of federal policies aimed at stopping the advancement of students regardless of their performance in reading and math. He recoils, however, at the notion that you can help students by merely holding them back. From his office in South Carolina, Riley told NEWSWEEK’s Jonathan Darman that politicians have to match tough social-promotion policies with a serious commitment to fixing schools. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: Why is it advantageous for a school system to have a strict policy against social promotion?
Richard Riley: Well, of course, the advantages are that it brings attention to the fact that you’re not giving up on a child and that achievement levels at certain grades are very important.
But if you’re saying a child doesn’t get to advance to the next grade level couldn’t that be interpreted as giving up on a child?
Well, let me give you an idea of where we were in the Clinton administration when we took a position on social promotion. We realized that just passing children along without reaching certain achievement levels or standards was not the way to go and that was really just giving up on a child … However, before you have a policy of holding a child back you need to look at several factors, and we always listed those before we raised the issue of social promotion.
What were those factors?
Expanding preschool opportunities, a realization that a lot of children come to [kindergarten with diminished opportunities] in terms of education and poverty and so forth, smaller classes, an emphasis on reading. Our goal was that all children should be able to read independently by the third grade, and [Bloomberg’s proposed policy] is consistent with that. And parental involvement is a key part of it–for some kids, that’s a key part of it, other kids, unfortunately don’t have the benefit of parents who are capable, able to help them … Those are the kinds of things that we said.
Do you think it’s more important for schools to focus on those things than to have strict policies against social promotion?
The idea of holding a child back is not what we favored. We favored a policy for enabling a child to pass, to move forward–not social promotion, but to move forward based on the education system’s ability to teach the child.
But if a school system doesn’t address all the factors you just mentioned, is it unfair for that school system to have a strict policy saying students have to perform at a certain standard if they want to advance to the next grade level?
Well, if they’re not there, and for children who have not developed and who are struggling, any policy is wrong. In other words, it’s wrong to socially promote them and say, “Just go on through.” That’s not good. It is also wrong to hold them back because it’s not their fault, and holding them back doesn’t do any good unless you’re putting extra services in there to help them develop achievement levels. Reading independently by the end of the third grade is exactly the right message to the system, but you have to start early. Another thing is flexibility: if you have a rule, all of a sudden, that is very strict, you have to be careful with that because all children learn differently and at different levels at different ages.
Is it appropriate, then, to have the decision about whether or not a child can advance to the next grade level be based on that child’s performance on a single test?
It makes a good statement and a good message to the school system, not the child; those children are too young to understand that well. But to the system, it gets their attention and says, “You know, we’re not just going to move children through the system, they’re going to have to, at some point in time, reach a basic level of achievement.”
What’s the psychological effect on children of being held back in school?
I think a lot of good educators would tell you that holding a child back, across the board, leads to more dropouts. Why that is: they’re held back, and they’re older than the other children, and they aren’t in the flow of education … A lot of people who are in that world, researchers, say that holding the kid back makes it very difficult for the child to then go through the whole system, so a lot of them don’t like that. However, big researchers don’t like moving a kid through the system without reaching certain levels of achievement. So you’ve got a Catch-22. You’ve got a no-win deal if you don’t provide what’s necessary.
What should parents do if it looks like their child is in danger of not being passed on to the next level?
That would be a concern of parents, too … If you have one test to say this child is not going to move forward, that seems a little narrow to me. It seems to me like you ought to have consultation with the teacher, the child’s teachers and so forth to make that kind of judgment … The main thing parents can do is to let their children know, clearly, in lots of ways that education is very, very important. Coming from teachers, it’s natural. But coming from parents is a very powerful message. Even if a parent can’t read, saying over and over again, how important [it is] for you to read and having the child read to them … that is a wonderful message from parents.
What should a parent do if their child is held back?
That should be a very important message to the parent that they–along with the school system, the teachers, the principal and everybody else–need to beef up this child’s education. Again, when I favored doing away with social promotion, I favored a policy for success and for achievement and for passing instead of a policy for holding back … And, of course, for some children, that’s a real struggle, and you have to work with them throughout the system.
At what age level is it most appropriate to have standards that are meant to stop social promotion?
The end-of-third-grade reading was the Clinton administration’s national goal. Bush has followed through with that … No question about [whether] the right goal for reading is to look and see at the end of the third grade if the child can read independently and also do just basic math. That’s a pretty good grade level to take a look at those basics.
But couldn’t the threat of not being promoted to the next grade level better motivate students to work hard at a later level because older students are more sensitive to how they’re viewed by their peers?
Well you have those things trigger in later on. You have exit exams from high school–if they want to graduate from high school, they’re going to have to pass that. You have, of course, SAT and ACT tests that kids who are going on to college or whatever will be taking. There are all sorts of incentives for them to do better for them to move on through. [Third grade] is a pretty good age to see where a child is.
Is social promotion a particular problem in America or do other countries have it as well?
I don’t know. I would say more of an American problem than in other countries that I’m familiar with. Of course some countries have very strict policies. So I think it’s more American than other developed countries, yes.
Which way is the trend going on this issue? Is it increasingly popular nationwide for school districts to have harsh standards cracking down on social promotion?
I do think the standards movement, which is what all this is built on, has taken off. I’m a very strong believer in standards as a way to get your arms around education. What should a child know at the end of the third grade? What should a child be able to do at the end of third grade? Those are standards. And then the system is supposed to reach that standard. You can’t start that in the third grade, you’ve got to start at preschool, you’ve got to understand that children come into the system behind. That’s what education’s all about. That’s not a harsh policy; it’s a very supportive policy.
More broadly, as a Democrat, if you were going to advise John Kerry on how to run against President Bush on the issue of education this year, what would you tell him to do?
I’d want him first of all to have education as a priority and realize that public education in America is what’s made America great, and if we are to have greatness in the future, and I’m sure we will, we’ve got to have public education quality, up front, for all children, and I really mean all children. That calls for policies nationally, statewide and locally that make sure that all children, from preschool forward … have high-quality education. That should be a high priority in his administration, and I think it will be.
