Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Wednesday, May 10, 2006
When an A = just par for the course
Wow, I read a great education blog post this morning that I found through this week’s Carnival of Education, being hosted over at Hunblog. (The carnival is a weekly collection of the best education blog posts of the week, normally hosted by The Education Wonks. I’m included in this week’s carnival for my post about the testing industry’s inability to handle the NCLB workload.)
The post was at Huffenglish, a blog by teacher Dana Huff, and it includes an education blogosphere rarity — the voice of an actual student!
Huff tries to be a tough but fair grader and she wants an A to really mean “excellent,” not just “meets expectations,” as it has come to mean in many classrooms. It’s a noble goal that nearly everyone — students, parents and teachers — agrees with in theory.
But 10th grader Anthony Ferraro argues that it is not practical for a single teacher to grade on a tougher scale than the rest of the teaching universe. Ferraro says this harms the students in the eyes of colleges, who expect straight As and for whom a B is a major red flag and a C is an outright deal-breaker.
Huff counters that colleges have other measures, like test scores, class rank, activities, etc., they can and do use to judge the total student, and that one grade in one class is not that devastating.
It’s an interesting debate and tough problem. What’s an individual teacher to do?
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