The third of ten arguments for the elimination of school
Having found yourself here, you may be interested, or outraged, enough to want to read arguments one and two. They are here:http://tdurrie.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/one-of-ten/
http://tdurrie.wordpress.com/2010/09/19/two-of-ten/
Marking and Grading
Marking and grading schoolwork, one of school’s most powerful and insidious methods of control—reward the compliant, punish the noncompliant—is such an integral part of the system that we tend to assume that it has always been with us. It hasn’t.
Imagine, if you will, a one-room schoolhouse with around twenty children, usually aged 6 to 14, with all levels of achievement, under the supervision of one teacher. This teacher would have known each pupil personally and have been intimately concerned with their progress in mastering such things as Irish Readers (in Canada) or McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader (in the U.S.) and Elementary Arithmetic for Canadian Schools by E.E. White. Remember, too, that many children were taught to read at home from the Bible. Or, as put by Nicole Lassahn “… education consisted mostly of students in small groups working with mentor teachers. The quality of the education was tied largely to a teacher’s ability to pass on skill and knowledge to this small group of students.” http://soulycatholichs.blogspot.com/2008/05/grades-grades-and-more-grades.html Arranging pupils in grades and marking their work would have been irrelevant. Not to say that there weren’t rewards and punishments, but that’s another matter altogether.
Scientific Management
Enter William Farish (1759-1837). Farish was a professor of chemistry at Cambridge during the industrial revolution, and it occurred to him that the more students each teacher, himself for example, could deal with, the more money he/they could make. Growing numbers of children in cities meant a need for larger schools and larger classes. Adapting factory methods to schools was the answer. In the same way that large operations in the factory were broken down into separate steps, each person performing the same task over and over with the overriding discipline of quality control, Farish figured out that each piece of schoolwork could similarly be broken down and rated on a more or less arbitrary system of performance, just as a clothing or fabric manufacturer could set a standard of workmanship based on what quality of product he wanted produced.
Of even greater importance, especially in North America, was Frederick W. Taylor. Taylor invented the concept of “Scientific Management” in which the operations of each worker were examined and broken down into the smallest increments. The performance of each increment was rated and, then, rewarded and punished according to the results produced. The influence of Taylor and Farish cannot be overestimated when in comes to the creation of standardized curricula, testing, and grading. These methods were readily adapted to schools as populations became urbanized resulting in larger and more populous “egg-crate” schools with students segregated according to age and grade level. No longer were teachers part of a small community, known by everyone and acquainted with everyone. Teachers were now professional “managers” who had to demonstrate control of large homogeneous classes and show, by test results, the quality of their teaching while maintaining standards set by school superintendents, school boards, and a growing body of university-based “experts.” This fit well with the development of curricula as discussed earlier.
A-B-C-D-F and the Bell Curve
Interestingly enough the A-to-F grading system didn’t actually gain popularity until the late 1920s-early 1930s. Even then, it was recognized that there was no way to standardize the meaning of these letter grades. In other words, grading then—and now—is purely arbitrary, based on the judgment of a single teacher or on the results of a standardized test. More of this later.
It was early recognized that not only was grading arbitrary but also that teachers tended toward “grade inflation,” that is giving a more high grades (As and Bs) than low grades (Ds and Fs). Because “average” was getting a bad reputation, it was being avoided. The answer came in the form of the Bell Curve, which “normalized” grading by distributing marks such that the majority of students receive Cs, followed by a small but equal number of students receiving Bs and Ds, and an even smaller number receiving As and Fs. In spite of criticism, this method of grading is widely used today. The absurdity of this becomes obvious upon a moment’s reflection. No matter how demanding or difficult the subject matter, there will always be a few who excel, with a majority falling down the scale as percentages dictate. The same is true if the subject matter is simple. In other words, grading on a curve does not take into account the subject-based accomplishment of students, high or low. Take, for example, a lesson in factoring square root. Some students will probably “get it” and others won’t, but even if every one in the class gets it only a few will get As on their report cards, and another few will necessarily fail.
Nowadays, the school people will tell you that this has all been ironed out by the use of standardized tests, with their simple yes-no or multiple choice answers to predetermined questions. Right-wing organizations like the Fraser Institute are especially fond of such tests and use them to rate schools on how well students are supposedly learning the matters put before them. We will address the issue of tests and their relevance to actual learning in a subsequent article.
Watch your step
Unfortunately, the grades you are given in school follow you throughout life. These are often accompanied by secretive so-called cumulative records in which teachers have noted their judgements of behavioural and other characteristics, to your benefit or detriment. In other words: Fail at school, fail at life.
I would like to end this article with two quotes from Neil Postman’s Technopoly—The surrender of culture to technology (Knopf, NY, 1992): “If a number can be given to the quality of a thought, then a number can be given to the qualities of mercy, love, hate, beauty, creativity, intelligence, even sanity itself. When Galileo said that the language of nature is written in mathematics, he did not mean to include human feeling or accomplishment or insight.”
and
“To say that someone should be doing better work because he has an IQ of 134 or that someone is a 7.2 on a sensitivity scale, or that this man’s essay on the rise of capitalism is an A- and that this man’s is a C+ would have sounded like gibberish to Galileo or Shakespeare or Thomas Jefferson.”
Needless to say, the people who believe in marking and grading do not bother themselves with such perplexing philosophical notions.
I’m loving this series, Tom. The whole grading thing and your take on the lunacy of the bell curve is wonderful.
Perhaps the thing I find we all tend to do with so many things is just accept the status quo. If your teachers tell you this is how it works, you don’t question it – it must be the best way. If your church tells you God exists, then it must be true. The truth (if there is such a thing) may be somewhere in between and not in “yes” or “no” but we don’t like that (nor do computers who work entirely on the yes/no system).
Looking forward to the next in the series.
I, too, am really enjoying your series (and all of your other writings, too).
You’ll probably hate me, but I’m a fan of ratings and rankings. But I qualify this with the requirement that ratings are absolute against pre-defined SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) objectives, and that rankings are relative in an ordinal way. Thus, it could well be the case that a whole class exceeded their objectives but one exceeded them by the most and one exceeded them by the least, and a lovely bell curve results. If so, the overall “bar” can be raised and we can try to help each person improve a little bit at a time from where they were.
Question for you: where do you see things such as certification fit? Are they undesirable or is there perhaps a difference between children and adults?
I’m thinking about the situation with, say, medical experts. If anyone could call themselves a GP or a cardiologist, I think it would help bring down costs and shorten waiting times, but would it be left to the market to whittle down the number of poor performers through word-of-mouth about their shoddy practices? Or, is there a role for some kind of testing and rating?
Cheers!
Darren,
Thanks for your comment (especially the praise!). Let’s look at two objectives of schooling, whatever form it might take). We might split these into “education” and “training.” Of course a surgeon or a jet pilot or a violinist should be trained in the technical details of their profession, some will emerge as brilliant, others as competent, and still others as hopeless. The determining factor is in performance, and this can be best assessed by the community of their peers. How is it decided, for example, that a musician, poet, or painter is worthy of recognition? The idea of testing and rating performance in this instance is simply ridiculous. Couldn’t a similar kind of assessment be applied to other professions? In fact, I’ll bet that doctors, teachers, rocket scientists, etc. and being judged by their peers all the time. It’s just that we don’t recognize or formalize this kind of assessment. If so-and-so has medical degree, they must be qualified to remove my appendix. Hmmm. I’ve always said that having a degree (this is, having passed all the tests and gotten all the grades) is no guarantee of competence. I think you’d agree. We are left with the question: then what? I remind you that all the testing and grading we ascribe to these days is a fairly recent innovation, and that there were doctors, technicians, and musicians long before. There might be two ways of determining worthiness. One could certainly be the market (though given the power of advertising that’s a dicey one); another could be the peers and colleagues of a given profession. We do something like this with Arts Councils.
Continuing the above:
I’m leaving the above discussion, having just proposed a few inchoate notions. The next major consideration is education. As you probably know, schools focus more and more on job training even from the earliest age. They have abandoned what should be their only purpose: liberal education. Given half a chance, most young people will start gravitating to individual interests at an early age; they will find ways to develop skills and knowledge in what interests and drives them. What’s the use of having a brain surgeon who’s an ignorant boor?
Alas, our society now prizes financial success in life more than any quality with which that life may be lived. Schools devote themselves and forever promote the notion that you have to get good grades in order to get a good job later in life. (Fail at school, fail at life.) This is such nonsense, and results in the whole grading fanaticism, resulting in a successful elite and an unsuccessful group of outcasts, often dropouts.
I;m in danger of rambling on forever, so I’ll drop this now. The next “argument” will be about testing.
Tom
So, if I’ve got it straight:
1. For “training” a peer review process would be the appropriate methodology for assessing performance (e.g., arts councils, college of physicians and surgeons, college of teachers)? If so, do they have to apply certain factors for doing the, um, thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating? Might this invite favouritism or would the people on the committee assure objective fairness?
2. For “education” are you thinking that the “primary” elements would be common and then the “secondary” parts would be left to the individuals to pursue? To avoid the haves and have-nots being treated inequitably, would parents be given a certain value of “education credits” to allow them to send their kids to the school that specializes in their area of passion, or would everyone receive a certain number of years of liberal education and, in parallel, they would pursue their own “training” on their own time?
Interesting!
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