It's no secret to educators -- although it still surprises some parents -- that managing the public school day is not entirely about nurturing young minds.
Behavioral problems, absenteeism and the pure nonsense of childhood seep in through the edges of even the best classrooms. In the worst cases, public schools act as daycare for teenagers who require a warehouse during their parents' workdays.
It is a serious problem that merits careful scrutiny, like the work that has gone into the Durham Public Schools' plan to reform grading.
The proposal obliquely approaches all three of our questions.
We are cautiously in favor of some elements of this plan, which moves against paradigms to put grading in service to education -- and, by "education," we mean the actual work of stuffing knowledge into young minds. Grading is a measure of that process, not a scoreboard for college admissions or a way to punish disinterested or difficult students.
"You want students to get the understanding," said Chris Bennett, the DPS assistant superintendent for secondary education. "You want students to have mastery. ... You don't want to grade them on behavior."
So we have the answer to our first question: Teachers are supposed to teach, not measure students' ability to sit quietly in a classroom and absorb information as it is served to them.
The proposed standards also address in part how teachers are supposed to juggle these standards with the realities of the classroom, by emphasizing mastery and setting standard processes in place to make sure that weaker teachers are offering the right opportunities to struggling students.
Some of the changes that put education at the forefront include:
- Required make-up assignments for students who have not completed tests or homework
- A non-competitive rubric for grading, which measures student work against specific standards rather than other students' performance
- Requiring final exams for all core classes
Other changes may reform grading, but seem to fail the reality test, and leave us wondering whether teachers are being robbed of tools that they need to juggle their dual roles as educators and classroom managers. They include:
- Divorcing academic misconduct, including plagiarism and cheating, from grades. Disciplinary consequences are important, but with so many other reforms in place, cheating demonstrates a student's absolute refusal to grasp required materials, and should be graded as such.
- Setting a minimum quarterly grade of at least 60 for every quarter except the last. If the 100-point scale is ineffective, then DPS should abandon it and move to 5- or 7-point "equal difference" scales that measure specific skills.
This plan seems focused on putting teachers back in the business of education, and we applaud it as a fair first step. Now we encourage DPS to put equally serious effort into how to support teachers as they apply this brave new policy.
