This article in Education Week offers a glimpse of what happens when charter schools are pressured to show high levels of achievement via grades. While the investigation into grade-changing continues, the director of the school has been suspended.
The Preuss School, affiliated with the University of California, San Diego, enrolls students from families in which no one has graduated from a four-year university. It’s been getting a lot of praise (and high rankings) thanks to consistently high grades and other measure of achievement. Some of the school’s graduates have gone on to Harvard, Yale and other prestigious universities. It was discovered that students’ grades were changed, significantly altering the achievement levels upon which the school’s rankings were based.
The investigation into grade-changing continues and the school’s director has been suspended.
Everyone is denying changing the grades but clearly, someone did it. The currents students’ grades have been reassessed and corrected, but the administration made the decision that they would not contact the universities at which their graduates were now enrolled. Obviously, there are many students who have been granted scholarships and other honors based on grades that were inflated, but it didn’t seem fair to students to risk having their awards tarnished and funds yanked.
This is sad for everyone involved, but it’s not an unusual issue. Pressure to look good in the rankings leads teachers and administrators to find ways for their kids and programs to shine. Parents push for higher grades for their kids in order for them to look good to the college admissions folks.
All the way around, this emphasis on grades and achievement gets in the way of LEARNING and raises serious questions about the way we judge our kids and our schools.
At a certain point in the game–and I think we’re there–grade inflation and parental pressure render the GPA meaningless. But the SAT and other standardized test scores aren’t the answer either.
So how do we tell if our kids are doing well? Measure them against themselves! Look for improvements, reinforce learning, demand excellence, and focus on helping them gain knowledge and skills instead of helping them get good scores for the sake of the school’s rankings or their own class standing.
Is this difficult in large classroom settings? No. But it IS difficult in large classroom settings in which testing takes precedence over experiential learning, assimilation of information, and collaborative knowledge building.
