Does your school use online grading tools?
I have to preface this post by admitting that I was lucky to be a strong student who brought home great grades. My parents set high expectations that I met, so I needed very little home support to be successful at school. So I’m not sure why this New York Times article on online grading systems isn’t sitting well with me.
I like the idea of students being able to track their progress, and I think it lowers parental anxiety to be able to check in and get a snapshot of their children’s progress. So what is bothering me? Maybe it’s just the prominently-featured parent in the article:
ON school days at 2 p.m., Nicole Dobbins walks into her home office in Alpharetta, Ga., logs on to ParentConnect, and reads updated reports on her three children. Then she rushes up the block to meet the fourth and sixth graders’ buses.
But in the thump and tumble of backpacks and the gobbling of snacks, Mrs. Dobbins refrains from the traditional after-school interrogation: Did you cut math class? What did you get on your language arts test?
Thanks to ParentConnect, she already knows the answers. And her children know she knows. So she cuts to the chase: “Tell me about this grade,” she will say.
When her ninth grader gets home at 6 p.m., there may well be ParentConnect printouts on his bedroom desk with poor grades highlighted in yellow by his mother. She will expect an explanation. He will be braced for a punishment.
“He knows I’m going to look at ParentConnect every day and we will address it,” Mrs. Dobbins said.
Maybe what bothers me is that the conversation is so focused on the micro level of grades, not on the overall learning experience, that the question is, “Tell me about these grades,” not, “What did you learn today?” And the article’s words, “He will be braced for a punishment,” stopped me in my tracks. Now I don’t know Mrs. Dobbins’ child, so I don’ t know whether a low grade is an indication of an atypical struggle, an ongoing lack of motivation, a sign that special services interventions would be helpful, or something else. And I don’t know the context of Mrs. Dobbins’ interview to know if she was accurately portrayed.
But if it’s the online tool that is making low grades into a punishment, is that a sign of progressive education?
I think it’s a sign that we’ve got a missing piece in online grade reporting systems: helping parents to make sense of a data set that is far more specific than anything they have seen before.
In an effort to keep parents informed (a legitimate and often-articulated need, especially in middle school), is it possible to have too much information? That online grading programs could accidentally shift the focus away from the way we used to look at parent knowledge of student progress (the laissez-faire approach of, “Don’t ask, don’t tell;” “We’ll let you know if there’s a problem;” “Assume that if you don’t hear from us that everything is OK”) to giving parents an almost hyper-anxious level of detail.
“Knowledge is power,” the saying goes, but the article hints that too much knowledge is stressful.
How can we as educators keep the communication lines open with parents without accidentally providing anxiety-ramping data?
I remember back when I was a classroom teacher that I handed back a bad test to a sweet, kind girl. I was sure she would be upset that her test grade was much lower than her past work, and I prepared for her disappointment and dismay. To my surprise, it was she who reassured me. “That’s OK, Ms. F,” she said. “My parents say I can have a clunker every marking period.”
Wow. Those parents got it. Giving a great kid permission to fail didn’t make her fail. It made her cope with failure and recognize it for the anomaly it was. Sure enough, she was right back at her normal range on the next assessment.