NEW LETTER TO FRIENDS OF THE CENTER FOR EDUCATION REFORM
NO. 103
OCTOBER 2012

Dear Friend:

Who comes up with this stuff?

Within our local Montgomery County, MD public schools — acclaimed to be the “best” in the nation —third graders and their parents have evidently been so confused by traditional grades (A, B, C, etc.) that district administrators have developed a new system. Eventually, all students in grades 3-5 will be evaluated as follows:

ES, for Exceptional
P, for Demonstrating Proficiency
I, for In Progress, or
N, for Not Yet Making Progress

The intent, according to officials, is to bring specificity to grading, as if generations of Americans have not understood what the “normal” grades are supposed to mean. Granted, not all As are As and not everyone who gets a C thinks their work was average. But we know what they are supposed to mean and we also know there’s a degree of subjectivity to it.

Proficiency and Progress are gaining traction, no doubt as a result of the new, controversial Common Core which will attempt to standardize what kids learn across the states. Though masked as voluntary measures, states are being pushed and cajoled into adopting them and education establishment types are going willingly along, for reasons that will fill another several pages but I will summarize later. But what standards set out to measure — overall mastery of subjects at the end of one’s tenure in a grade — is not the same as what one teacher seeks to measure in one class. It is possible to measure whether a student is proficient or making progress learning to read, but is it possible to use that same criteria for a particular reading lesson, or when assessing a set of history or geography lessons over a quarter or semester?

Imagine the shouts of joy when your little one comes home with one of these new grades:

Mother: “Oh honey; Look – a P! I’m so proud of you. You have demonstrated proficiency!”
Child: “What does that mean, Mom?”
Mother: “Well, clearly you’ve shown the teacher that you have mastered the lesson about the westward expansion.”
Child: “Well, actually I thought it was a little confusing but okay, that’s good.”

Subscribe now to keep reading Jeanne Allen’s musings on Measurement & Evaluation, The Strike, The Movie, The Debates and the state of the modern day education reform movement in Anchors Away.

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