Reviewing middle school and high school grading practices

Absolutely not!  This teacher says it all about the wcpss,

"this is going to happen whether or not you see the many problems with this approach."

JUST like FYR!  JUST like 25,000+ reassigned in the next 3 years regardless of the # Horace Tart thinks it is!  And, regardless of what "has been mentioned before" if they don't return kids to their "base" regardless of the Feb. app. process I'll be VERY surprised!

As a math teacher, I have been horrified over the years I have been teaching at how some other teachers grade. The issue is not just should we fail the kids who don't do the homework. I was in the teacher's lounge one day and an English teacher was puzzling over her grades. To save time and get ahead of the game, she computed her grades early and had them done, then gave one more quiz. She averaged that quiz grade in with the final averages (adding the two and dividing by 2) and couldn't figure out why some of her best students had bad grades. They did poorly on this little quiz. It was half their grade. She didn't understand that.

 I have kids in WCPSS and look at SPAN. I can tell by looking at my kid's SPAN grades that half their teachers don't understand how the grades work mathematically. It is no surprise to me after all these years of teaching. One of my kids' teachers said that parent signatures on homework will count 2% or something, at open-house. (Yes, this is high school. Neither my son nor I could believe it and I didn't stoop so low as to sign his homework. This reduced his A to a B.) She didn't categorize different types of assignments, but is using different scales. SPAN computes percents and it doesn't matter that she is using different scales. It is giving them all the same weight. A parent signature is counting the same as the mid-term. I am sure she doesn't know. Another one of my kids' teachers said these class notes would count 30% but then only collected this one time. I am sure she doesn't realize that one day's worth of notes is now accounting for nearly a third of their grade and more by far than any test.

I have seen my with own kids and observed teachers I work with, just meaningless things being assigned. My son actually brought home a 50 by 50 word search one day and was supposed to find a list of words in it. He got so frustrated, I sat down to help him. I couldn't find the words. (this was elementary school). He was afraid to not complete his homework and we had spent more than an hour on this. I called the teacher. She told me that program wouldn't use her whole list because it was too long so not all the words were in there. This is just one of many examples I have witnessed as a parent and with other teachers in my building. This example stood out because I didn't know what to do. It got harder and harder to tell him he had to do all homework. I couldn't believe this. I've seen teachers grade down for not labeling the axes the arbitrary way they say to label it, etc. I've seen teachers give kids who gave the best speaches 0s because they didn't turn in their index cards--while kids who used index cards the way she required and gave terrible speeches got As. 

And I think that businesses would rather hire those kids who knew their speeches and gave good performances, than the kids who followed the teacher's directions but could hardly speak and didn't know what they were talking about.  If businesses knew what the grades meant, they would not want the kids with high grades.... kids who would sit for hours doing a word search where the words are not even in there... or who don't know their speech but have the cards written correctly...

I completely support Ken Branch. Right now we have no way of knowing which kids have mastered anything. Behavior is important but grade it separately.

Someone should do a study of how messed up the grades are because high school teachers don't understand SPAN and how it works. Not that they understood how they graded before, but now the grades are actually being mathematically computed. I can see from my kids' grades that me not signing the homework paper is the same weight as the midterm test. A practice vocabulary test counts the same as the final exam. 

And some schools have the no zero thing. A kid at Wakefield where they have that (I think) might get a B whereas a kid at Millbrook where they don't have that would fail for the exact same work because he didn't turn in some class notes that ended up being a third of his grade. 

 That Clue example need to include C. Mustard, who thought he was using the math dept's grade weights, but didn't understand SPAN. So, he scaled his tests, classwork, etc. according to the scale but classified them all the same in SPAN. Then SPAN recomputed them all on the same scale and homework counted  the same as tests. More than half my kids' teachers are using SPAN this way. It needs to be in the example. If a kid gets a zero on that one day that the class notes are collected, after the teacher set class notes to be 30%, then 30% of the grade will be a zero.

 This is common. It is not rare. 

what really works for what? 

 The dept of E&R did a study of middle school grades and they are highly correlated with race. Level II Asians get As while Level IV black students are getting Cs. What does grading now really work for? For keeping the social order the way we want it? We can't tell a thing about what grades mean. Everyone complains about how the standardized tests aren't good enough to tell us who knows what. But there is nothing else. Why not have grades tell us who knows the material, and have a separate way to tell us who has bad work habits, etc.

I know that teachers really don't like it when kids learn in ways that they have not approved. If kids learn the material, but their notebook is messy and the teacher thinks that only people with organized notebooks should be learning, they will say the kid is really smart and that is why he was able to learn without organizing his notebook.  But he needs a bad grade because only people with organized notebooks should get good grades. There is no possibility that the kid learned some way without organizing his notebook, and that would have been just some extra meaningless task for him. The teacher can't account for why he learned the material. But it is irrelevant. All she cares about is whether or not that notebook is organized. He must go to the bottom track and be taken out of challenging classes. No business would want to ever hire him so it is fine that we set him on the track to dropping out. It is really working. We are driving all sorts of kids out, and keeping them from getting educated. But we've got standards. And our standards are working!