Student grades: Are schools using grades to prod parents to comply with rules, deadlines?
Sally Harrell is the parent of two children. As a three-term member of Georgia House of Representatives, she served on the House Education Committee. The DeKalb resident has also served as a co-president of the Emory-LaVista Parent Council.
Harrell sent me an interesting piece on a topic that we have touched on in the past: Grading students on non class-related actions.
In her note, Harrell wrote, “For a few years now I have suspected that teachers knowingly use grades to obtain parental compliance. Graded homework is an example. But never has it been made so obvious to me than through the Georgia Cyber Academy’s grade category, called ‘advisement.’ Worth 5 percent of the student grade in academic subjects, it includes such things as reading parent handbooks, participating in parent/teacher conferences, agreeing to teach your child about Body Mass Index and registration with GA College 411. My burning question is: ‘Is it ethical to use student grades to obtain parental compliance?’”
She tackles that question in this guest column:
By Sally Harrell
For the last four years I’ve graded many papers. I didn’t assign letter grades; I merely marked answers wrong, or wrote comments in the margins when I thought something wasn’t quite right. But I’m not a teacher. I’m a former social worker who decided to teach my kids at home.
It didn’t take me long to realize that the value of checking papers lay in discussing the errors immediately with my children so that they could learn from their mistakes. There was simply no need for letter grades.
Then I remembered something that had troubled me during my children’s three year attendance at a traditional “brick and mortar” public school. They sometimes brought home a piece of paper that contained a test score, but the actual test was not attached. I didn’t get to see which problems my children missed, nor did my children ever see what they did wrong. I was horrified when I realized what a huge opportunity had been missed.
While the missed opportunity was disappointing, I still held out hope that grades indicate mastery. But what if a grade did not indicate mastery? Would it still be a grade?
Enter the state’s largest public, virtual, state-wide, charter school, the Georgia Cyber Academy. Yes, that’s quite a few adjectives. Take them one at a time and you’ll figure out what I’m talking about. I teach my kids at home using curriculum provided by the state, which contracts with a private company to run a state-wide “school” that enrolls approximately 12,000 students. I am provided a remote teacher who teaches some optional on-line classes, assigns grades, and holds phone conferences with me once a quarter.
Last year, along with my children’s report cards, I received the following explanation: “The letter grades shown are not intended to be an indication of your student’s knowledge level or mastery in any given subject area.”
So if grades are not about mastery, just what are they?
The school’s answer was, “They are intended to reflect your student’s progress in the on-line school, submitted writing assignments, blue ribbons earned in Study Island, and completion of Study Island monthly custom assessments.”
In other words, my child’s “A” was merely a reflection of whether or not he did the work. Grades were now detached from learning and mastery. So what’s left in a grade?
A lot.
Georgia Cyber Academy is the brainchild of the private, for-profit and publicly traded company K12, Inc. As with any publicly traded company, the bottom line is profit. During the last few years K12, Inc. has greatly expanded its market in public education by obtaining contracts with state and local governments to initiate virtual charter schools. Georgia has been one of K12’s most successful states in terms of the number of students enrolled.
In order to protect its state contract, Georgia Cyber Academy must put some effort into compliance. But often, in order for the school to be compliant, the school must ask parents to be compliant. Most important, parents must commit to ensuring that their children take the end-of-the-year state test (CRCT). But then there’s a long list of other tasks, some more necessary than others: conferences, signing off on handbooks, watching on-line orientations, signing disciplinary agreements, teaching students about Body Mass Index (state law), completing career assessments (state law), etc.
Parents must be compliant so that Georgia Cyber Academy can be compliant, so that K12 Inc.’s contract is protected, so that K12 looks good on the New York Stock Exchange.
This circles me back to grades. At Georgia Cyber Academy, five percent of the child’s grade is based on whether or not I, as the parent, complete the list of tasks above. It’s called “advisement,” and it amounts to one-half of a letter grade in academic subjects.
So, if I miss a conference, my child’s grade is marked down in math, reading, grammar, social studies and science. So what’s in a grade? Not mastery of learning, but government contract compliance and the New York Stock Exchange!
Whether your child attends a traditional, public “brick and mortar” school, a public charter school, or even a private school, it is in your best interest to ask what comprises your child’s grade. Although the example of the Georgia Cyber Academy is extreme, I would not be at all surprised to find such tactics being used in other educational institutions.
Grades have become commerce that translates into college entrance, scholarships and, yes, even stock values in the world of for-profit education. And many teachers and administrators have figured out that parents will do anything for a grade.
–from Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog
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86 comments Add your comment
bootney farnsworth
December 12th, 2012
2:53 pm
@ burnt
students are the least of anyone’s strategic concerns in education
banshee29
December 12th, 2012
3:09 pm
Debate until the sun goes down. For profit institutions responsible for educating children is a bad,bad, bad idea. Parents catch wind of children getting the grades they need, then more start enrolling. And K12 starts earning more royalties…Bad idea.
Listen, all of you that have nothing but negative things to say about public schools and your teachers that are ruining your children, come visit my classroom. I will show you what a teacher who has had salary reductions for the last 4 years, furlough days, and a worsening apathetic parent base try to destroy my morale does on a daily basis and why my students will be leading this world one day soon. I invite you now, come visit. Perhaps your faith in humanity might be restored when you see what I and some of my colleauges deal with every day, and continue to excell.
HS Teacher
December 12th, 2012
3:24 pm
Finland has great teachers because their pay is equal to that of Finnish lawyers and doctors.
Private Citizen
December 12th, 2012
3:25 pm
When I was a kid my parents never ever ever went to schoolhouse for academic conferences and neither did anyone else. It was not done. Anywhere. People, including parents and teachers, had better things to with their time. Evening time was considered personal time. Home telephones belong to the family. The only reason for a phone call was if somebody needed stitches. Students – Fight for your right to fail!
Parent Teacher
December 12th, 2012
3:26 pm
@CCM
Are you kidding me? Parents should monitor their child’s learning DAILY. This means sit at the table assist, not do, in completing homework, signing daily agendas, asking questions about their day, reading with you child, etc… All this should be completed daily without other distractions like phones, computers, television, games, etc…
This is the problem with education, no one will take responsibility for themselves or their children and expect the teacher to do everything. It takes a village to raise a child, it can’t be done by teachers alone.
CCM
December 12th, 2012
3:27 pm
@ Math Teacher I believe you mis-read what I said. I do not expect a teacher to send a note home…but they should not expect me to sign nightly that my child studied (she by the way has an A in that class).
CCM
December 12th, 2012
3:28 pm
@ Parent Teacher….I never said I should not monitor the studying. But to have to sign nightly that I did MY job? BITE MY BUTT! Not happening.
Private Citizen
December 12th, 2012
3:29 pm
banshee29, I’d love to visit your classroom. Sounds great and more power to you and good luck. I probably wouldn’t want to leave. The kids would be askin’ “Whose that new assistant teacher?! Weird! Wow! But you get to deal with the meetings, not me. Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. It’s each person with the ten ton load, meetings and all. Good luck! good luck! Good luck!
CCM
December 12th, 2012
3:29 pm
I will start signing nightly when the teacher signs she did her job….as I said the kid has an A in that particular class and a 3.75 over all…I think they should worry about the student who is FAILING.
xxx
December 12th, 2012
3:39 pm
At most of the better private schools, particiaption is part of being allowed to enroll. No parental involvement, no offer to return. No need to involve grades, simply replace the student. The folks onthe waiting list will jump at the chance.
williebkind
December 12th, 2012
3:42 pm
So if I am a liberal I get an A but if I am libertarian I get a B and if by grace of God I am conservative then I get a C? I want my tax money back.
Private Citizen
December 12th, 2012
3:43 pm
Times have changed. I used to ride my bicycle home drunk from high school, concentrating on not running into parked cars, before I went and worked in a sandwich shop until 2AM on Fridays and Saturdays, where one of the fellow sandwich makers would literally jump over the counter and beat on somebody from the bars-closing crowd if they made trouble, the coin juke box going loud and proud the whole time. I still took a year of pre-calculus when I was 16 and it was the exact same material in the first two quarters of college calculus the following year right after I turned 17, as if it was a review. Nobody ever called the home for anything and I’m glad.
A guy from California told me one time that when his wife was a teen, she got a job travelling with an outlaw band and danced in a cage on the side of the stage during shows.
williebkind
December 12th, 2012
3:44 pm
“At most of the better private schools, particiaption is part of being allowed to enroll.”
I sure would have liked it if my Dad made enough money to allow my Mom to devote as much time to my education as a high school teacher. I’d be educated.
Private Citizen
December 12th, 2012
4:06 pm
One of my friends I did my math homework with in the afternoons, a year older than me, in high school he was already married and had his own apartment in a public housing project. He told an interesting story of when he picked up his bride-to-be against the wishes of her father and how the father stood on the front porch with daggers in his eyes as they drove off. This was a third one of us, the only one who had a stable traditional household. One night I fell asleep in my car driving home from work and I hit a foot high cement curb on the a divider in the middle of a road and it put a crease and a hole in the oil pan of the car. So I went out to my friend’s house and we went to an auto parts store and bought a map-gas torch, disconnected the motor from the mounts, jacked it up and removed the oil pan and welded the hole closed with the map-gas torch and put it back together and were done. This was not because we liked cars. This was done because there was a problem to fix. The other two guys went into business together and are both multi-millionaires, although one of them is gone now due to some weird pre-programmed health ailment that showed up and just took him out. The one complaint he had in life was that Sun computing had power over him with their software certifications if he wanted to run their brand server software and basically it was a pain in the neck to deal with them. That would not be the case today, as software has evolved past trademark control schemes. It would be nice if the schools figured that out and stopped using public money to write checks for licensing. He also wrote software for BMW and when he was a kid, before he got married, he said rats (vermin) ran around his grandmother’s wheelchair. He who came from poverty. We had no time for “regulation” and were too busy building stuff. -Nobody bothered us about anything ever. Today they call that “arrogant.”
AlreadySheared
December 12th, 2012
4:08 pm
@HS Teacher:
“Finland has great teachers because their pay is equal to that of Finnish lawyers and doctors.”
You, sir or madam, are confusing cause and effect. My understanding is that Finland recruits the creme de la creme for teaching and thus must pay more.
If we started paying teachers like “lawyers and doctors” tomorrow, it would take a loooong time for the best and brightest (currently doing other stuff that pays more) to supplant our current cohort of educators.
Private Citizen
December 12th, 2012
4:34 pm
Finland had public health care long before they mucked about with deciding to improve their education.
“In 1929, a special committee was established to evaluate the status of health care in Finland. Due to the lack of service providers outside cities, it was suggested that municipalities establish local hospitals for their citizens. The decision to establish publicly funded hospitals can be considered the base of the current model of modern health care in Finland.”
“(Finland) began in the 1970s by completely transforming the preparation and selection of future teachers. That was a very important fundamental reform because it enabled them to have a much higher level of professionalism among teachers. Every teacher got a masters degree, and every teacher got the very same high quality level of preparation… So what has happened since is that teaching has become the most highly esteemed profession. Not the highest paid, but the most highly esteemed. Only one out of every 10 people who apply to become teachers will ultimately make it to the classroom. The consequence has been that Finland’s performance on international assessments, called PISA, have consistently outranked every other western country”
________________
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
PS For the Finnish teacher training model to work in the U.S., you would have to restructure the curriculum in the education schools and put intellectuals and core-subject academic as teaching professors in place of the seemingly endless bunch of educrats and their “player” and propaganda based dept. heads and deans. They would stop everything in it’s tracks, as they are accustomed to lots of methd classes and short on content – why, there is hardly any in the Land of Oz smoke and mirrors. If you teach math or chemistry, good luck finding any mathematicians or chemists in U. S. teacher training programs.
Any way, can you figure it out? Which came first in the Finnish system, public health or education reform?
Private Citizen
December 12th, 2012
4:38 pm
It must also be said that Finnish teachers work as professionals with almost no supervision and with no interference from politicians. With a worldly almost anger, the Finnish principal said, “There is no politician who tells me what to do.”
Private Citizen
December 12th, 2012
4:40 pm
It also says something about the pay and status of doctors and lawyers in Finland. They’re not some super-caste.
Private Citizen
December 12th, 2012
5:30 pm
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/12/amsterdam_to_ban_smoking_pot_in_school/
That’s the place where they have dedicated roadways for b.i.c.y.c.l.e.s and no one ever gets a big medical bill in the mail. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOR6zm_Yziw
Sandy Springs Parent
December 12th, 2012
7:58 pm
I tried the K-12 school for exactly 1 day, 3 years ago. It was evident in one day to me that it was one big hoax. It was free text books and a computer for homeschoolers. Over 250 elementary students per teacher. The parent/coach was really the teacher, allowing huge profits for K-12 in Va. You paid extra for any Language classes or other extra classes. Imagine no Spanish classes in K-8, what a gap in your childs education if you did not pay the extra few hundred dollars. You also had to pay extra for fine arts classes. You also had to pay extra to enroll your children in Gym classes, lessons somewhere.
It is easy to see what would happen when you got all those previous home schoolers whose children did as they pleased. Hung around Mom while she was volunteering for the store front ministry church. Lets not forget Mom just had to graduate from high school in Ga. in high school to home school. With K-12, this allowed all the drop outs and GED reciepients of GA 40% to put their children in K-12, aka Home schooling
Sandy Springs Parent
December 12th, 2012
8:23 pm
@CCM I completely agree with you, I am also not going to monitor and sign an agenda each night. My child does not bring it home and hides it. These teachers and schools have no idea what it is to deal with a child coming off of ADD medicine in the evening. It is called all hell breaks loose. No teacher and administrator I can not give them another dose. Just stop giving them a bunch of make-up work because your class is slowed down by a bunch of dummies. As I told you out right seperate the kids out right by academic ability ( and not Target or Tag with its made up cut off beyond the test number)
Naturally smart kids don’t need much homework.They just don’t. I know from experience, even in college. If I got a good professor, I could listen and take notes and I got it. It is still there 30 years later. If the teacher/professor wasn’t any good, then I had to go and read the book and teach it to my self. I as a parent have taught my kids and drilled my kids on the multiplication tables, cursive writing, I taught them to read, using Dick and Jane. We read on the way to every beach trip. No electronics allowed on vacation, that is the time to read good olde fashioned books.
Private Citizen is correct, our parents did not go over to the school house. We did not bring home stuff for them to sign. We simply did not have all this make work homework. We went to schools with discipline. We did not go to schools where there was layer upon layer of non educator make work jobs. Let the teachers teach. I had Howie Griener who was pasionate about US History and the coming megalopolis of BoWash. He was entertaining. I remember what he taught 36 years ago. My daughter can’t remember what she was taught for the test last year.
Private Citizen
December 12th, 2012
10:11 pm
My daughter can’t remember what she was taught… last year.
Wow. That stings. I remember the time my 10th English teacher did a guided meditation on us and practically hypnotised us. It was great. Completely relaxing. A good and memorable thing. Same person directed a play production of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. It was pretty much live and let live and nobody was in our business. Never saw an administrator in the classroom once. It just didn’t happened.
OTOH
December 12th, 2012
10:14 pm
Parental compliance has been a part of students’ grades in GCPS for years just as it is at GCA. In Gwinnett,returning signed forms is homework. No signed form equals a zero for that assignment. The charter school or for-profit status has nothing to do with it.
I love teaching. I hate what it is becoming...
December 13th, 2012
6:36 am
@Sandy Springs “These teachers and schools have no idea what it is to deal with a child coming off of ADD medicine in the evening. ”
Actually, we know quite a bit about it, because we have students whose parents forget to give them the medication on some days, or who have sold it to neighbors and friends and do not have it to give to children. We also have the six students in our classrooms who SHOULD be medicated, but who are not, so they just create “all hell breaking loose” daily while we try to teach.
Private Citizen
December 13th, 2012
9:06 am
Reverse-grading in the movie “Harrison Bergeron” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmEOI5zwFMM#t=1m50s
Math Teacher
December 13th, 2012
11:43 am
@Sandy Springs – Although I don’t have a child with ADD at home, I probably know as much as you do about dealing with that! I deal with “all hell breaking loose” all day, everyday, but, I’m expected to do my job regardless. So, if you are asked to sign a document – please don’t think that it’s a valid excuse that your child has ADD. Would you accept that excuse from a teacher? I think not.
“Oh, I couldn’t teach today because Johnny, Dexter, Troy and David were all coming off of their medication.”
What's Best for Kids???
December 13th, 2012
1:02 pm
I’m still digesting the fact that the grades are no indication of mastery.
If I were to translate this, I would say that the school just wants to keep everyone happy, happy,
happy, and As do that for parents and students.
Who cares if Johnny can’t read? He has an A!
Ridiculous.
I see it in public school; Johnny is too busy, too tired, too ADD to do the work, but at the end of the semester, he absolutely must have an A because he won’t get into university. So he gets the A and viola, five years later, he’s living in his parents basement, as he failed out of university.
We are absolutely handicapping our children by giving them grades that they don’t earn.
HS Teacher
December 13th, 2012
1:58 pm
@Private Citizen, Thank you for that movie clip (Harrison Bergeron), hilarious but scary seeing the parallels to our society today. Reminds me of Idiocracy.
HS Teacher
December 13th, 2012
2:02 pm
Also, thanks for the info. about Finland. I wasn’t aware of many things you mentioned.
Former GCA teacher
December 13th, 2012
9:55 pm
When you sign up for Georgia Cyber Academy, one of the agreements in participating in the on-line program includes conferencing multiple times through out the year. The idea is a team approach, student, parent and Homeroom teacher, working toward learning goals. The grade is documentation of the participation or lack of participation in the conference portion of that agreement. The school needs a form of communicating conference participation and this grading system is the way GCA have chosen to reflect it.
Content grades are another issue.
Private Citizen
December 14th, 2012
12:32 am
HS Teacher, the first time I saw the movie “Idiocracy” I thought it was so/so. It does kind of bog down in the middle when they are looking for the “time machine.” I saw it later, though, and it seemed completely brilliant. There’s a pretty serious message in the movie. The delivery is so confronting, too real. But it is real, that’s the thing. They’ve done quite a job satirizing aspects of out society and are quite clear about the cause and effect. Also, the casting for the movie is superb. Everybody on the production side put a lot into it. Redux of movie: replacing all water on Earth with monopolised corporate owned Gatorade trade-named “Brawndo” and using the slogan “Brawndo Makes You Stronger.” yah
Pride and Joy
December 14th, 2012
8:21 am
Math teacher, your attitude is common. You expect we working parents to leave work to accomodate you before 3 p.m. — yet many teachers on this blog complain that they work far longer than 3 p.m. They claim they work 10 to 12 hours a day grading papers and planning lessons and so on. So it cannnot be both ways. Either you actually only work fron 7 to 3 and you will not accomodate a working parent or if you really do work those long hours that you frequently claim you do, then staying until 6 or 6:30 shouldn’t make a difference to you.
We working parents cannot just leave work for a teacher’s confernece — we’d be fired. We don’t have cushy government jobs with three months off of work and 7 to 3 working hours.
On top of that, the teacher’s conferences I’ve been to — ALL of them — are worthless. The teachers shows me my childrens’ work, which she could have easily sent home in a folder and mailed with her comments or scanned and emailed home.
There is no “conference” to these “conferences.” The teacher lecture to us as if we were some thirteen year old child who got knocked up and had a kid and didn’t know what to do.
Here we are college-educated, caring parents who show up on time and the teacher cannot be bothered to show up to her own conference on time.
Make your conference REALLY a conference. A conference is a TWO-SIDED conversation, not a lecture from an ignorant person with an education degree who doesn’t know how to make her subjects and verbs agree.
Teacher: “DO YOUR CHILD have consequences at home?”
We parents “Yes, he/she DOES have consequences at home.”
The most important question is HOW did the teacher get an education degree when she cannot speak English correctly?
Pride and Joy
December 14th, 2012
8:23 am
Yes my keyboard is sticky “The teachers shows me” should be “show me” and the teacher lecture should be the teacher lectures…
Such a pity that the teacher doesn’t understand it because that is what she is PAID to teach and has an “education” degree to teach.
Pride and Joy
December 14th, 2012
8:34 am
If my child’s grade is lowered by what I as a parent do not do , then my child’s teacher salary should be lowered by what she doesn’t do.
If my cihld’s teacher does not respond to my email, lower her salary. If my child’s teacher does not show up to a conference on time, lower her salary.
Fair is fair.
If I ever step foot into a public school again, you will be certain I will be using my cell phone’s recorder feature to ensure I get it all on tape and on record. When Ms. teacher wants to breeze in ten minutes late to a conference time she insists upon, that little recording will be going into her file too.
Pride and Joy
December 14th, 2012
9:15 pm
Let’s look at what REALLY happens.
Good parents don’t need to sign anything or have their child’s grade in jeopardy in order to be motivated to support their child’s education.
For good parents everywhere, including me, having a teacher ask for my signature as evidence that I did something is insulting and annoying and it prevents a good working relationship from forming between me and my childrens’ teachers.
Let’s take the bad parents, the ones who don’t care. They don’t care enough to send their kids to school – do you think they will be motivated to do anything if their child’s grade suffers? That would be no.
So what you have in effect is a policy that punishes the innocent child for what the parent isn’t doing and those cihldren already have low grades. So we are heaping more pain on the kids that are already at risk and in pain.
How smart is that?
Not very, huh?
Now let’s look at something else.
Is it possible to sign one’s name on something that is supposed to indicate “yes, I did X” when actually I didn’t? Why of course. It’s called lying. Bad parents do that all the time.
So again, if teachers require a parent to sign their name as “proof” that X was performed, well, bad parents will lie and good parents will be offended.
You see, looks like this parental-involvement plan isn’t working because no one really thought through it.
What is really needed here is an INCENTIVE instead of a disencentive.
We often hear teachers say that parents only show up when free food is served, well, duh, serve up some free sausage and biscuits and coffee as an incentive. It’s cheap and I am certain the PTA would pony up the money or if there is no PTA use some of that federal Title 1 money to do it.
Do WHAT WORKS.
Don’t do what doesn’t work.
Lowering grades for non-parental involvement will only hurt those who are already behind the eight ball. You’ll hurt the poor kids with lousy parents. Those kids need all the help they can get. They don’t need a school to punish them for something they have no control over. If we are going to punish them for having bad parents, go ahead and lower their grade for being poor and black too. That would be just as fair, right?
The IRONY here is so strong we could cut it with a knife.
Teachers are CONSTANTLY COMPLAINING they are judged on things they have no control over (test scores) and say they shouldn’t be judged on a student’s test scores. Yet, the same crowd of teachers wants to do the same thing to other innocent people, little kids. Teachers want to punish the kids for the actions of adults the kids have no control over.
So sad.
So pathetic.
Private Citizen
December 15th, 2012
8:52 am
having a teacher ask for my signature as evidence that I did something is insulting and annoying and it prevents a good working relationship from forming between me and my childrens’ teachers.
PJ, teachers are under so much review and scrutiny, they are expected by managers to produce proof of what they do. same goes with having kids sign to document they received report card from teacher. you make a good point. it is like everyone is treated as an object of suspicion. it is not trust-based.