Consider this: a classroom where children don’t receive grades. Shocking, right? Not necessarily.
Alfie Kohn, a proponent of progressive education, claims that the culture in education today encourages “students to put ‘how well they’re doing’ ahead of ‘what they’re doing.'” This phenomenon shows itself through students focusing solely on doing well by earning good grades. In chapter 2 of Kohn’s book The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards,” he quotes a teacher who says, “If I were asked to enumerate ten educational stupidities, the giving of grades would head the list,” as well as education journals that support the concept that “grades ‘divert attention from education itself’ and otherwise prove counterproductive.” Kohn actively supports the idea that grades and test scores are not an accurate representation of a student’s potential. He claims that “researchers have found that traditional grades are likely to lead to three separate results: less impressive learning, less interest in learning, and less desire to do challenging learning.”
The logical solution to this dilemma seems to be the elimination of grades within the classroom. A 2018 article in Education Week urges us to “consider schools and colleges where there are no grades. Imagine classrooms where teachers never place numbers, letters, percentages, or other labels on students’ work; where report cards don’t exist; and where the GPA has gone the way of the dinosaur. In a gradeless classroom, the perpetual lies that numbers and letters tell about learning would cease to exist. Honor and merit rolls would disappear. There would be no school valedictorian.” Schools that have taken this approach, such as the Flushing International High School in Queens, operate under a “mastery-based learning” mindset: “In these schools, there is no such thing as a C or a D for a lazily written term paper. There is no failing. The only goal is to learn the material, sooner or later.”
A student at Flushing International High School in Queens working at her own pace to master a required skill. Credit: Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
There have been, however, those who have resisted this approach to classroom learning. In Portland, Maine, where the shift to mastery-based learning was mandated, parents and teachers were annoyed at the time-consuming change, claiming “that giving students an unlimited amount of time to master every classroom lesson is unrealistic and inefficient.” On the other hand, a 2002 study showed that “80 percent of students based their self worth [sic] on their academic success, leading to low self-esteem and other mental-health issues.” In conclusion, it may be time-consuming to take the time to go through material with students and make sure they actually understand it instead of punishing them with a bad grade, which as other negative consequences; however, the “revolutionary” idea of gradeless classrooms is not such a crazy idea. Grades take the interest out of learning, so why not get rid of them?
Post by: Maya Grant