Research

Quotes from this article:

Forty years ago Bernard Bailyn remarked that American historians of education had carried out their work "in a special atmosphere of professional purpose" and had made the history of the public school the focus of their investigations. Lawrence Cremin seconded that observation and added that, for all intents and purposes, the history of American education had been "the history of the public school realizing itself over time." In the tradition of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley that self-realization of the American public school was portrayed as a progression from local roots to state-wide systems. It became synonymous with the evolution of school government from local control on the district and ward levels to direction and oversight by state administrators. For many school professionals and historians that progression meant progress. They saw it as overcoming local control which they regarded as a relic of the past denoting an endorsement of inequality, dis- crimination, and special privilege. It persuaded them to see the solution to the schools' problems in strengthened state and, eventually, federal control.

In ethnically and religiously homogeneous states and colonies with an established church like Prussia and Massachusetts the central government's influence over education, limited as it was, made itself felt more readily than in colonies of greater ethnic and religious diversity. There, the role of local agencies of civil society, assisting parents in providing elementary schooling for their children, was more pronounced. The prevalence in the colonies, and later in the United States, of social diversity, whether ethnic or religious, and the vastness of space in rural areas laid the foundations for the strong hold of local control in matters of elementary schooling.

A closer look at the German-speaking countries of premodern central Europe will show that, as in Europe generally, schooling had its beginning for a chosen few as a Latin education under the patronage of churches, princes, or local landlords. For most of the population, however, instruction in the vernacular in reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion, if it took place at all, remained a matter of parental responsibility in the home. In this educational task parents were aided by neighbors and relatives and prodded and supported by their churches and synagogues, their civil communities and, in rural areas, by their patrons, the manorial lords. Civic corporations, called Schulsozietdten or school societies, constituted school districts and carried most of the financial burden. Though in Prussia the Crown, as the head of the established church, had been indirectly involved in school sponsorship; it was not before the late eighteenth century that it asserted its role as an active source of educational policies. Until then schooling had been very much a responsibility of parents and civil society.

For settlers in the English-speaking colonies of North America the circumstances of migration and settlement largely determined the arrangements they made for schooling. In Massachusetts, for example, anxiety for collective survival in a precarious physical, as well as social, environment had prompted the provincial government six years after its landfall to authorize the funding of Harvard College to assure an advanced Latin education for their future secular and religious leaders. Within another six years it assigned responsibility for the elementary education of children to parents and masters of indentured servants. It took another five years for the General Court to step in once more and order towns of fifty families or more to appoint teachers for English reading and writing schools and towns of one hundred families or more to open a Latin grammar school to prepare boys for Harvard College. The Court thus imposed upon Massachusetts towns its vision of a state-wide educational system, even though Boston, Charlestown, Dorchester, and a handful of other towns, prodded by their local ministers and other concerned community leaders, had already hired Latin schoolmasters before Harvard College opened its doors.

As the following paragraphs will show, the pressure to consider a more active role for the state in education came not from teachers, parents, or local taxpayers but, as with Jefferson and Humboldt, from philosophers, statesmen, authors, and politicians. They initiated a debate over the desirability of state or national systems of education. They argued that only by gathering up and providing unified direction of their countries' educational energies could governments cope with the demands of economic modernization, social integration, and political stabilization. They asked that schooling be raised from its many diverse local levels to one of common effort and goals.

Quotes from this book:

Reminder about who this guy is.

Prologue: Mallory's Dilemma

To Mallory, one of the most important indications of a high-quality, equitable school is that students are successful regardless of their teacher. One teacher’s students shouldn’t learn different material or be less prepared for the next grade than another teacher’s students.

This literally isn't possible, and the fact that the person writing this (hypothetical?) situation doesn't see this is ludicrous. The values that I bring to the classroom are going to impact my students' grades in ways that are much different than those of my colleagues. In our schools, the relationships that we have with students impact our grading, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.

Though I try to make sure my relationships with students don't do this, it's impossible for me to say they don't. Have I given leeway to students who struggled with life issues and trusted me enough to share them? Yes. Have I also tried to give students the benefit of the doubt when they haven't? Also yes. But I probably still gave the students in the former group more leeway than those in the latter. (This is less common now because I've reflected on those practices, but I know it was something I've done in my past because it was something that I learned from my teachers as a student and from the people teaching me to be a teacher in university.)

Mallory put on her detective hat and considered, investigated, and then rejected several explanations: No substantive differences in instruction. Teachers were using the same curriculum with the same tests and even scored those tests as a team to ensure fairness and uniform evaluation. Mallory scoured students’ previous test scores and grades, with no indication of drastically different profiles of the classes as a whole. No substantive difference in the classroom physically—it wasn’t as if one classroom had a broken thermostat or was closer to a noisy playground. What was even odder was that students with identical standardized test scores received different grades depending on their teacher. The teachers were teaching similarly, the students were demonstrating similar achievement, but the grades showed inconsistency. This data seemed unexplainable, impossible, and grossly inequitable.

This is one of the most interesting attempts at writing a scenario and pretending that what's happening isn't happening? Like, it must be difficult to write a story about an administrator who genuinely has zero clue about anything happening in classrooms and doesn't know any reason why students' grades could be so drastically different between teachers.

Also, what is a "substantive difference in instruction?" Oh, well, it's apparently not this:

On a lark, Mallory looked at the syllabus for each class—each teacher of a course had created her own personalized version—and it shocked her. Each teacher’s syllabus began with a similar introduction to the course content and description of important materials for the class, but then it was as if each teacher was in an entirely different school...

Which then goes on to describe late work policies, homework grading, point assignment, and assessment organisation. Clearly there's no "substantive difference in instruction" if these policies are being employed in radically different ways across the board. (If you have strict late policies, you run your class as such; it is literally a substantial difference between two teachers, their practice, and their instruction.)

Teachers’ different grading policies made it possible for two students with the same academic performance to receive different grades. What particularly confused and concerned Mallory was that some teachers were grading students on criteria that seemed to have nothing to do with their academic achievement—such as whether their paper had intact holes or had the proper heading—and others were basing parts of students’ grades entirely on subjective criteria, such as effort, that were susceptible to teachers’ implicit biases. This grade data that couldn’t be possible suddenly was.

Again, it must be fun to write a scenario where the administrator of a school (or even principal) pretends they have no clue how people are "giving wildly different grades" and "doesn't know how such wildly diverse data can be generated." Also must be fun to further pretend that the administrator or principal doesn't engage in this: They are equally (if not more so) guilty of judging students based entirely on irrelevant "academic criteria."

Especially since they're often putting policies in place that encourage that. Oh. Wait, what did that about the author page say?

Joe Feldman has worked in education at the local and national levels for over twenty years in both charter and district school contexts, and as a teacher, principal, and district administrator. He began his career as a high school English and American history teacher in Atlanta Public Schools and was the founding principal of a charter high school in Washington, DC. He has been the Director of Charter Schools for New York City Department of Education, the Director of K–12 Instruction in Union City, California, and was a Fellow to the Chief of Staff for U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley. Joe is currently CEO of Crescendo Education Group (crescendoedgroup.org), a consulting organization that partners with schools and districts to help teachers use improved and more equitable grading and assessment practices. Joe graduated from Stanford, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and NYU Law School.

Not to say this applies to this author, but it's a convenient thing to note about how tied in Harvard is to charter schools and influential people in that movement in the United States. But anyway, the bolded parts are a bit interesting considering he's literally creating a "poor, clueless administrator."

Even though he knows full well that he would've been responsible for many of the policies that enabled harmful grading practices and could've made significant changes to those systems but chose not to. (Like grading, full stop.)

Teachers’ different grading policies made it possible for two students with the same academic performance to receive different grades. What particularly confused and concerned Mallory was that some teachers were grading students on criteria that seemed to have nothing to do with their academic achievement—such as whether their paper had intact holes or had the proper heading—and others were basing parts of students’ grades entirely on subjective criteria, such as effort, that were susceptible to teachers’ implicit biases. This grade data that couldn’t be possible suddenly was.

The practice of grading is literally an exercise in applying subjective criteria to a person's work. This is not difficult to understand, and pretending otherwise is absolutely bizarre.

To Mallory, no longer were her teachers’ inconsistent policies a theoretical dilemma. The school had spent months of planning and coordination to make sure teachers in the math department were using sequenced curriculum and that each teacher was preparing students to be ready for the next year—called “vertical alignment.” Yet teachers’ different approaches to grading was undermining all of it, sending confusing messages about learning and impacting students’ grades and promotion rates, their beliefs about school, and even their self-image.

I'm pretty sure, even if you "fix" the problems of grading to make it "more objective," students will still tie their self-image to that arbitrary number or letter. That's still harmful, even if you're "grading better."

But now came her second shock: When she began a discussion of grades with her teachers, it was like poking a hornet’s nest. Nothing prepared her for the volatility of conversations about teachers’ grading practices. Many of her teachers, previously open to exploring new ideas about nearly every aspect of their work, reacted with defensiveness and adamant justification. Teachers with higher failure rates argued proudly that their grading reflected higher standards, that they were the “real teachers.” A teacher with low failure rates explained that he was the only teacher who cared enough to give students retakes and second chances. One teacher simply refused to discuss the topic, citing her state’s Education Code that protected teachers from administrators’ pressure to change or overwrite grades. One teacher began to cry, confessing that she had never received any training or support on how to grade and feared that she was grading students unfairly. Conversations about grading weren’t like conversations about classroom management or assessment design, which teachers approached with openness and in deference to research. Instead, teachers talked about grading in a language of morals about the “real world” and beliefs about students; grading seemed to tap directly into the deepest sense of who teachers were in their classroom.

Question: Why is a former principal and administrator writing a scenario where teachers are the primary aggressors in the system? Teachers are a problem, yes. However, many of these concerns get wrapped up as either straight up aggressive or absolutely inept.

A person claiming they "received no training or support" on something is highlighting a systemic failure, which is that grading often doesn't have coherent standards. I have never received training in building a coherent set of standards for grading; I have received multiple assignments in teaching programs and further professional development requesting that I "grade something" according to a given set of standards.

Which have never taught me anything useful, but they did teach me that grading is a bullshit exercise and that we really should be focused primarily on feedback and dialogues. (I wonder how students improve... through feedback or seeing a "C" on their paper. Anyway...)

When she talked about these grading problems with principals of other schools, Mallory was surprised and dismayed to learn that grading varied by teacher in every school. This phenomenon was widespread, even the norm. Teachers thoughtfully and intentionally were creating policies that they believed, in their most thoughtful professional judgment, would promote learning. Yet they were doing so independently and often contradicting each other, yielding in each school a patchwork of well-intentioned but ultimately idiosyncratic approaches to evaluating and reporting student performance. Even when a department or a group of teachers made agreements—for example, to have homework count for no more than 40 percent of a grade—teachers’ other unique policies and practices, such as whether homework would be accepted after the due date, made their attempts at consistency seem half-hearted and ineffectual.

This shit happens, but yet this author wants to play as if principals and administrators don't know (and don't encourage) it? Give me a fucking break. This framing is such trash.

On one hand, like a train’s third rail, grades provide power and legitimacy to teaching and learning. Grades are the main criteria in nearly every decision that schools make about students. Here are some examples:

• course assignment (eligibility for advanced, honors, or AP classes)
• graduation (completion of course requirements)
• academic awards (valedictorian, summa cum laude)
• extracurricular activities (athletics, clubs)
• promotion (able to progress to next grade level or sequenced course)
• retention (repeating a course or grade level)
• additional supports (mandatory tutoring or remediation)
• additional opportunities (special field trips)
• scholarships
• college admission

Grades inform decisions outside the educational world as well. Potential employers consider grades when hiring, and GPAs are often required for youth work permits and reductions in car insurance, which means students’ grades can affect family income and expenses. And those are just the decisions made by institutions. Caregivers and families often provide rewards and privileges (including praise) or enforce punishments and restrictions (including shame) based on grades.

Is there a reason why you're not questioning this system? Like, should this system even allow or deny access to courses, extracurricular activities, or additional opportunities (fails to support learning)?

The rest of these assume that learning should only take place within a hierarchical system, and that's abhorrent. But the presumption that grading should impact all these areas is beyond disgusting, especially since there's no questioning of that system (based entirely on arbitrary criteria) in the first place.

And sorry, what employment is based on compulsory school grades? I have never had a potential employer consider my GPA, but I have had potential employers question where I went to high school to gauge my "suitability" for the job (prestige, assumed assimilation into dominant society) and completely fail to because they didn't know my school. The same has been true of my university degrees. Does it matter that I did well in school? Not at all.

It's mattered where I was and how well known they were.

But like a train’s third rail, grades are so powerful and important to classrooms and schools that no one dares touch them. As Mallory experienced, the questioning of grading practices by administrators, caregivers, students, and even teachers can invoke anxiety, insecurity, pride, obstinacy, and conflict. And so most of us avoid the topic altogether.

Have you tried the question "What if we just don't?" because I feel that might actually be beneficial.

... that I began to see that teachers use grading for many different, and contradictory, purposes:

1. To communicate the achievement status of students to parents or guardians and others
2. To provide information that students can use for self-evaluation
3. To select, identify, or group students for certain educational paths or programs
4. To provide incentives for students to learn
5. To inform instructional decisions
6. To provide evidence of students’ lack of effort or inappropriate responsibility

No wonder that grading practices vary so widely. The teacher who grades to sort students into programs will use grading practices incompatible with the teacher who grades to incentivize students to learn.

This is literally how the State tells us to use grades and how we've all been taught to view grades. Are you going to tell me that these "contradictory uses" aren't part of the overarching system? Like... ask questions, mate. You want to claim to be "critical," ask some fucking questions.

Also, stop blaming teachers for this on their own? This is literally a systemic issue that you're avoiding discussing as such.

Reasons for variation in grade (according to the book):

1. ... I found that many grading practices themselves had deep flaws. For example, I learned that the calculations that we commonly use to derive grades—and often embedded in our grading software—are mathematically unsound.

2. ... I learned that many of us evaluate students on criteria that are nonacademic and highly susceptible to bias. For example, a teacher who evaluates a student’s effort as part of a grade likely applies a culturally narrow definition of what effort looks like.

3. ... teachers often use grades for behavior modification, offering the reward or punishment of points and use (or threaten to use) the zero or F to motivate students even though the “motivational F” is largely a myth; research is clear that low grades, or the threat of low grades, do nothing for the student who has low confidence in their academic abilities or limited experience with academic success—the majority of students who receive Fs.

4. ... I also learned that our grading often creates “collateral consequences” that contradict our intentions. For example, we lament our students’ rampant cheating and copying of homework. Yet when we take a no-excuses approach to late work in the name of preparing students for real-world skills and subtract points or even refuse to accept the work, we incentivize students to complete work on time by hook or by crook and disincentivize real learning. Some common grading practices encourage the very behaviors we want to stop.

Funny, I wonder what questions we could be asking here and what assumptions we could throw away to start a different conversation. (I also wonder why it is that this person keeps blaming teachers for the system they work in, especially when that system punishes us for speaking up about how harmful it is and how elements undermine what the system claims it "wants.")

For example, we teachers often assign students a zero in the gradebook if homework isn’t handed in by the deadline. However, we don’t account for all the reasons that a student wouldn’t turn something in on time. One reason, of course, might be laziness or disinterest—certainly not legitimate reasons. Perhaps a student has after-school classes or sports, which could make it harder to turn in work on time, but arguably this is a self-inflicted wound. But what if a student’s circumstances are beyond her control? What if there isn’t a space at home that is quiet enough, or well-lit enough, or not distraction-free enough for a child to complete homework? What if a student’s caregiver is away at a job (or second job, or third job), so that she isn’t around to provide support? What if the parent or caregiver isn’t formally educated enough or doesn’t speak enough English to help the child complete the homework? What if the child has home responsibilities (caring for an older relative or younger siblings) or has her own job in order to contribute to the family income? What if the student who has few supports simply doesn’t know the answers to the homework? What option is there but to submit the work incomplete or late? Clearly, we don’t want to grade students based on their environment or situations beyond their control, but unfortunately, when we use grading practices such as penalizing students for late work, that is often what we do.

Why are "laziness" or disinterest not legitimate reasons? (Also, define "laziness." And then remind me who often gets seen as "lazy" in school. Wait, ableism and racism are checking in with me and telling me that it's a confluence of the two factors that often get labelled as "lazy.")

Also, who is to say that extracurricular activities or after-school classes are "self-inflicted wounds?" A lot of kids are forced into those activities because of external factors: improving their university applications, parental influence, childcare, etc. Like... it's pretty fucking bullshit to assume these things are always choices; that's not how life works. How can you seriously ask "What if a child's caregiver is at a job (or second job)?" and not recognise that extracurricular activities and extra classes have the same function for some people? How oblivious can you be.

The rest of the questions are useful, but why are those more legitimate than other environmental factors?

To my relief, I also learned that grading, if done differently, can be accurate, not infected with bias, and can intrinsically motivate students to learn. Grades can clearly and more objectively describe what students know and can do. Grading practices can encourage students not to cheat but to learn, to persevere when they fail and not lose hope, and to take more ownership and agency for their achievement. And the power of these approaches can be especially transformative for struggling students—the students who have been beaten down year after year by a punishing grading system of negative feedback and unredeemable failure.

A system designed entirely on arbitrarily assigning letters and numbers to criteria and ranking them can never be objective. It can never not be infected with bias. It's inherent in how we assign criteria and ascribe importance to it. It literally is impossible, and thinking otherwise is nonsense.

"More" objective does not mean "better." It means you're obscuring those biases behind something else.

It didn’t work out so well at first. When I discussed these practices with teachers, I was constantly met with the same arguments: Our current grading system prepares students for the real world and if we alter it we’re doing our students a disservice; “smart kids” can handle changes to grading and can be internally motivated but “remedial” or “regular” students need external motivation; these changes just inflate grades; students will just game the system. Conversations were intellectual jousts that didn’t really change what teachers believed or did. Grading was so deeply intertwined with teachers’ belief systems and their daily practices that it wasn’t as simple as just explaining and justifying the practices. I realized that for teachers to become convinced of the effectiveness and the equitable impact of different grading practices, they had to try them out. Through a combination of persuasion, promises, and appeals, I found some teachers willing to test out these new grading practices.

When the system upholds these exact values, when people are taught through their experiences that this is what is expected, you are going to run into those arguments. Grading is not only "intertwined with teachers' belief systems," but they are intertwined in the very lessons that the system teaches us. If you cannot see that, you cannot understand the depth of the problem.

This is so fucking superficial.

Quote from a person named Lucy, who is an 18-year "veteran of teaching" (which is always a weird phrase, as if we're going to war):

“This challenges what I’ve learned to do as a teacher in terms of what I think students need to know, what they need to show back to me, and how to grade them. This feels really important, messy, and really uncomfortable. It is ’Oh my gosh, look what I’ve been doing!’ I don’t blame myself because I didn’t know any better. I did what was done to me. But now I’m in a place that I feel really strongly that I can’t do that anymore. I can’t use grading as a way to discipline kids any more. I look at what I have been doing and I have to do things differently.”

Hey, look. This is the exact thing I've mentioned. This book bends over backwards to blame teachers when a teacher themselves points out that they're perpetuating the system that was done to them. Weird for that to exist after so much "teachers have been doing this thing" without realising that it is a systemic issue. I swear, Feldman. Critically analyse yourself.

Part I: Foundations

Chapter 1: What Makes Grading So Difficult to Talk About (and Even Harder to Change)?

Here's my answer to the chapter's question before engaging in the content: Hierarchies, the State, and indoctrination to believe schooling is at all necessary. Anyway.

And yet, teaching has never been so challenging and so embattled. Our students, who are increasingly diverse, with greater percentages of students whose first language is not English, and whose families live below the poverty line, need us to occupy so many roles beyond teacher: nurse, mentor, social worker, therapist, parent, cheerleader, tutor, and college advisor. We are responsible to adhere to regulations, laws, and directives under layers of bureaucracies. We often feel buffeted by ever-shifting political winds, pawns in complex political games in which people outside our schools argue over competing values and philosophies that affect what we do inside our classrooms: how and whether to teach certain topics (the perspectives of the Civil War, the genocide of Native Americans, evolution, global warming), read certain authors (J. D. Salinger, Toni Morrison), prepare for standardized exams (SBAC. PARCC, state graduation or end-of-course tests), and use certain materials (state-adopted textbooks, iPads and apps, laptops, smart boards). Solidarity and organizing among us seem less possible because of the waning influence and presence of teacher unions and the fragmentation of how we are trained: alternative certification programs, residencies, university programs, and fast-track programs that even threaten the very concept of teaching as a “profession.” Even the idea of a “school system” seems to be shifting beneath our feet into a “system of schools,” where cities agnostically support a portfolio of traditional public schools, charter schools, home schools, distance learning centers, and even private schools via vouchers and “educational savings accounts.” Salaries are rising but are still well below that of other professionals, and often are alone insufficient to support a family. Too many of us work within schools and communities where violence is a fact of life, adding to our own stress as well as our students’. We are guinea pigs in experiments testing how best to evaluate and motivate us, and we are judged by criteria that suggests ignorance—or worse, dismissal—of the challenges of our students and the complexity of our work. It is no surprise that as many as one out of three teachers report experiencing high levels of occupational stress. An obvious result is high turnover, a “revolving door” of teachers, particularly in schools that serve low-income communities, where teachers stay just long enough to hone their skills before leaving and being replaced by brand new teachers.

There are a lot of things here to unpack that are seemingly being swept under the rug in order to discuss how we can reform grading into a "more useful system" to "help students understand themselves," and a huge chunk of that can also be seen in the faux diversity this passage espouses.

If our students are "more diverse than ever" (failing to check some history: segregation of schooling, imperialist wars creating refugees and migrants, and the inherent eugenics of our school system... among others), then why are we relying upon a singular set of standards that are developed entirely within the context of one hegemonic culture?

If our students "need us to embody multiple roles," why are we not considering how schooling is a failure to our society and that the development of silos for children have segregated them from community?

What does it mean to "professionalise" a position that should've been a guide for learning? What does this mean to "professionalise" a position that relies upon culture to understand the role? What hierarchy does this create? (Here's a hint: It creates a hierarchy requiring respect of our students and families because our authority is superior to their own, but learning requires the community to work together. These hierarchies are antithetical to learning as a whole.)

If we're guinea pigs, what does that indicate about the care of the State? If anything, it should highlight that they do not care and that the role of school is not genuine learning, which we keep assuming it is. Don't work from that assumption; work from an assumption that the school is an indoctrination center that maintains the racial capitalist system. Because it is. Ask anyone who does not benefit from it and often finds themselves in direct conflict because of who they are.

Amid all of these pressures and expectations, with administrators and policymakers defining nearly every aspect of a teacher’s practice, we have one remaining “island of autonomy”: our grades. Grades are entirely within our control—the declaration of our professional judgment of student performance and the most concrete symbol of our authority and expertise.

This guy keeps saying "we" as if he is still a teacher and has never been anything other than a teacher; he's been involved in the bureaucratic nonsense involved in schools, including charter schools. If he recognised the position of teachers (most of whom will not move on from the classroom both because of limited upward mobility in the hierarchies that is inherent in any job and also because a lot of people prefer to stay in the classroom because it is where most of the direct change can be implemented), he'd understand that grades are not purely within our control.

The number of times that I've had a head of school, principal, whatever check my grades and change them based on their personal feelings about a student and their family (or, also, how influential that family is) is... astronomical. I watched the head of school for one place that I worked at change the grades of a child of a teacher because that teacher annoyed her. I've watched principals change grades of sports players in the US. I've seen grades get fluffed up because someone's family sent a lot of money or built a space.

We don't have control over those either. This is such a garbage argument. (Nor do I want control, but the point remains that he's just wrong.)

It's not teachers who implement these structures, btw. It's admin. And if admin truly believed that teachers should be "more coherent" across the board, they'd have done something about it long ago. But they didn't. Because they overwhelmingly think that these structures are fine unless it's harming them.

And even when the sanctity of a teacher’s grade is not so formally codified, administrators know that they tread on thin ice when they talk to teachers about their grading, potentially inviting formal complaints, union grievances, and even lawsuits. Grading is arguably the only aspect of schools in which the power dynamic between the teacher and her supervisor is inverted!

Amusingly, I tried looking for lawsuits around grades, and the one thing I found is a Professor who basically did a weird "teachers aren't childcare workers" complaint (we are, btw), some weird "Southerners are stupid" garbage, and supporting a teacher for not accepting late work because a student was "too accomplished" and "should deal with it."

Like... the whole thing is what the fuck.

And despite hunting for cases of teachers being sued over grades, the one thing I found was how two teachers were able to sue their district after being fired because of giving low grades and being targeted for it.

But how many of these cases go overlooked? How many unions don't do anything to support their teachers in these cases (which has happened)? This guy acts like this is commonplace, but it really isn't. (Along with the fact that teachers can be targeted for inappropriate grading but be released for different reasons.)

So guess who still has control, even in the "inverted" space.

Teachers often agonize over what grade to assign, are uncomfortable with how much grades matter, and face constant arguments, bargaining, and pleading by students and caregivers over grades.

Because grading is an arbitrary exercise that no one needs to be engaged in working with and doesn't do anything to help students improve. Start from that assumption because assuming we need grading answers none of the questions being presented.

Maybe we struggle with discussing grading because we have very little experience doing so. Grading and measurement is rarely if ever included in teacher preparation programs or in-school professional development. As a result, the majority of teachers are left on their own to decide how to grade and why and are unaware of the research on effective grading practices.

First, maybe it's because grading is an entirely pointless exercise that could be thrown away tomorrow with no real impact. There's no reason for it.

Second, if it's not discussed in our PD or preparation programs, maybe it's because grading is so fucking arbitrary and something that we assume people learn through experience as a student. It's a system we perpetuate on children because it was done to us.

Like schooling.

Despite this complete lack of training and support with how to grade, teachers’ grading policies and practices aren’t arbitrary. We apply our professional expertise and experiences and carefully deliberate over what assignments and behaviors we include in the grade and what we exclude, the relative weight of those assignments and behaviors, and the magnitude of consequences, rewards, incentives, and disincentives. And yet, each teacher makes very different choices. If we choose to award points to students for being on time, raising their hands to contribute ideas, for working collaboratively, or for turning in work by the deadline, we believe that these skills are important in life and that a grade should reflect performance in these skills. If we instead prioritize that students learn the academic content, perhaps we deemphasize or exclude those “soft skills” from the grade. If we want students to learn responsibility, we allocate a large portion of the grade to students’ homework. If we believe that our grades are an important way to distinguish the top students, we grade on a curve. Teachers can even disagree on what makes a grade “fair.” Most teachers believe that students who try should not fail regardless of whether they actually learn (Brookhart et al., 2016), but other teachers believe the opposite: that fairness is honestly reporting academic performance regardless of effort. Because each teacher’s grading system is virtually unregulated and unconstrained, a teacher’s grading policies and practices reveal how she defines and envisions her relationship to students, what she predicts best prepares them for success, her beliefs about students, and her self-concept as a teacher. That’s why challenges to our grading practices don’t just offend our professional judgment; they can invoke an emotional and psychological threat.

If we're all making different choices, it literally is arbitrary. That is the definition of arbitrary. You literally defined arbitrary. I hate this so much.

As I researched and learned more about the equitable practices in this book, I had the same experience as Jillian: feelings of guilt, shame, and anger. How could I have not seen the faults in our traditional system, the ways many of our current grading and assessment practices harm the most vulnerable students? Throughout my teaching career, I created the best curriculum I could, built the most positive relationships with students possible, but were my efforts compromised, or even undermined, when I graded? That can’t be, can it?

Why are you asking a useful question ("How could I have not seen the faults in our traditional system?") and then running as far as you can get from actually answering it? Reform the traditional system is a shitty answer; it's not even critically engaging with the system. It's just assuming the system is correct (it's not), but we've done it wrong.

With each new piece of evidence and information that contradicts a belief, we have to make more significant changes to our expanded web of belief, each time rejecting the new information or accepting it while limiting its validity so that it impacts our web as little as possible.

Okay, so he'll talk about webs of belief but won't apply this to himself. He does it with regards to "extra credit," but he's still operating under the assumption that "grades are necessary."

Which means he's run into evidence showing that grades are harmful and has discarded it in favour of a system that still unnecessarily ranks and orders students and is still arbitrary (because the criteria, even if "agreed upon" by everyone in a school, will be arbitrarily determined).

In the face of persuasive and nearly incontrovertible evidence that our current grading practices are harmful and ineffective and that other practices are more accurate, equitable, and motivational, you may dismiss or marginalize that evidence.

Joe, why is it that you're focusing on equity when that concept doesn't imply justice or liberation? Also, all grading is still harmful.

Finally, with the stubborn persistence of the achievement gap, we can no longer implement equitable practices in some areas of our schools—responsive classrooms, alternative disciplinary procedures, diverse curriculum—but meanwhile preserve our inequitable grading. Although a handful of authors have addressed grading, there hasn’t been discussion of grading through an equity lens—how grading is a critical element to affirmatively promote equity, to stop rewarding students because of their wealth, privilege, environment, or caregivers’ education and to prevent us from punishing students for their poverty, gaps in education, or environment. Traditional grading practices perpetuate our achievement and opportunity gaps and improved grading practices promote objective assessment of academic mastery, transparent expectations, growth mindsets, a focus on learning instead of points, and student agency—all key ingredients to serve diverse learners and create culturally responsive classrooms.

Losing my mind here. Grading is still going to perpetuate injustice, even if you "make it more equitable" (whatever the fuck that means). The criteria selected are still going to reflect either the hegemonic culture or the openness of the hegemonic culture to "accepted" cultural practices of everyone else. It will still rank skills based on importance; it will still incorporate patriarchy and whiteness in the systems. It'll still be ableist and marginalised disabled people.

Like... there is nothing you can do to retain grading in any way because it is a harmful practice. It will continue to uphold systems but do so under "nice" framing.

Chapter 2: A Brief History of Grading

Grading is part of the “grammar of schools” (Tyack & Cuban, 1995), a concept so embedded in our idea of what a school is that it seems silly to question it. What seems more foundational to everyone’s school experience than getting grades?

Literally should be an indicator to start questioning the entirety of grading rather than reasons for reforming it. But we're not going to be doing that, it seems.

Teachers have always given feedback to students about their learning, all the way back to Socrates and his pupil Plato (as well as God to Abraham). But the introduction of our current grading system is a relatively recent phenomenon, borne out of a particular American political, economic, and social context.

This is a fun way to justify that some form of grading should exist because it is "feedback." Grading isn't feedback. It doesn't provide any avenue for learning and determining how to improve; you also can't sufficiently fight back against grades because they have no real standards or criteria to adhere to.

Because they're arbitrary.

We’ll begin our history at the end of the 1800s. Prior to that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the family was primarily responsible for educating children, with schools serving a relatively small role. Relatively few children attended any formalized school—around half of white children ages fifteen to nineteen, and far fewer children of color for both legal and nonlegal reasons—and the school year averaged only seventy-eight days (Snyder, 1993).

Which half of the white children? Because what you'll notice is that it was overwhelmingly a space for white boys and no one else. You can't just say "white children" when it's clearly not true.

Overwhelmingly, this guy isn't actually asking questions to any of the assumptions he presents. He's acting as if he is, but it's all just a list with extra details. Anyway, he starts off by listing the five trends of what changed schools (does not highlight any pushback that most certainly took place and does not question the fact that business owners and politicians were lobbying for these changes. The five trends are:

1. The rise of manufacturing
2. Progressive educators (but only mentions John Dewey, the crown prince of teaching programs everywhere, ugh)
3. Migration and immigration (no mention of how this was also associated with eugenics)
4. Intelligence testing and categorization (no mention of this was also associated with eugenics either)
5. Behaviorism (which includes a discussion about Little Albert and only says it "would be prohibited today" and not that the experiment conducted was child abuse)

Now that schools served many more students with a much wider diversity of backgrounds, languages, ethnicities, and incomes, there were two fundamental shifts in the purposes and design of schools. First, whereas schools had always been responsible for acculturating students, the one-room schools had served a relatively homogenous group of students from families deeply rooted in the community. Now, schools were expected to “Americanize” the diverse, unruly mass of immigrants, rural transplants, and the poor by preparing them with the discipline and habits that factories prized in its assembly-line laborers.

Why does he use the phrase "unruly mass of immigrants?" If he's attempting sarcasm, it's inappropriate; if he's not, it makes it sound as if he agrees that migrants "need to be civilised" or "need to be assimilated" instead of actively supporting a genuinely multicultural society.

By the way, schools cannot do that in the ways that we "allow" them to.

Secondly, charged with preparing students to meet the needs of the industrial and commercial world, schools could do so most efficiently if they matched each student with the appropriate curriculum based on the student’s ability—the Progressives’ vision of schools-as-training-ground. Equipping each student with the skills most appropriate to their intellectual ability would create the smoothest and most successful transition into the work world, and this would lead to economic success for the country.

Hey, Progressives? Want to deal with the inherent eugenics structures apparent in your history? No?

If a student did not possess the intellectual capacity to succeed in a more rigorous academic track, then to not match that student with a vocational track would be a waste of school resources and would frustrate the child, perhaps leading to dropping out and depriving the commercial world of the student’s contribution.

This guy just states stuff as fact without commentary. It's really annoying.

It’s also important to keep in mind that schools’ new commitment to evaluating students and sorting them occurred alongside a legal sorting out of many African American students, who were constitutionally mandated to attend separate and unequal schools.

This is true but... If you only saw the segregation of Black and white schools? You missed a lot. Because there were schools for the "feebleminded" (which often targeted poor migrants) and residential schools. They were trying to segregate all of the people that they saw as undesirable.

It’s easy to see how these ideas—schools as sorting and acculturating mechanisms in service to efficient and appropriate preparation for workforce employment—remain pervasive 100 years later. Tracking in our schools persists despite evidence of uneven pedagogical benefit and its discriminatory result. Students of low income, black and brown ethnicity, and those with special education needs are disproportionately placed in vocational and lower track classes, and those classes have been consistently found to have lower academic expectations and more traditional and less engaging pedagogy. In addition, the largest industries (currently, computer technology) constantly exert pressure on schools to provide more appropriately trained employees for entry and lower-skilled positions. Schools continue to serve as assimilating and socializing agents, and though twenty-first century industries often demand more advanced skills than the assembly-line factory owners a century ago, in many classrooms, we continue to place a premium on punctuality, quiet attention, and following directions, the same behaviors desired of students over a century ago.

First, "black and brown ethnicity?" Feels really off because it's conflating ethnicity and race.

Second, all of the state-supported pedagogies have little choice but to be "less engaging." Children in vocational tracks can be engaged in those tracks because they genuinely enjoy something in it; they're not inherently bad, but the fact that they segregate students into vocational or academic is. (This pairs well with my disdain for segregating subjects.)

As we mentioned earlier, prior to the turn of the century, before the large influx of families to urban centers and the rise of large schools to accommodate their children, the one-room school served few students and the teacher was a familiar member of the tight-knit community. It therefore should come as no surprise that communicating student progress looked very different than today. In most cases, the teacher would present oral reports or written narratives to families, perhaps during a visit to a student’s home, to describe how students were performing in certain skills like penmanship, reading, or arithmetic (Guskey & Bailey, 2001). These reports helped to determine areas for the teacher’s further instruction for the student, readiness for apprenticeships, or eligibility for higher education (Craig, 2011).

Is there a reason that we're acting like this is an impossibility? Is there a reason that we're acting like grading was given to us as something "easy to use" and "easy to communicate" complex information? We act as if this is an old technique, but it's something we can still do today and often are still made to do: parent-teacher conferences. I would rather communicate with parents more frequently than be like "Here's a paper and it says your student has an A."

Are you not going to ask the question you should be asking? "Were grades utilised to perpetuate alienation among members in a school, isolating people and breaking down local community connections?" Because that's what I'd be asking based on the history you're presenting.

With compulsory education laws, larger schools, and the emphasis on efficiency, schools had to develop more succinct and simplified descriptions of student progress. No longer could educators use the clumsy “unscientific” narrative reporting—it was time consuming and too unstandardized. Instead, there was pressure to identify a standardized system of communicating student achievement, not only for bureaucratic ease within the school for sorting purposes, but also for external audiences—colleges or employers. Letter grades (A-F) had already been in place in some colleges and universities since the early 1900s to signify a student’s achievement in a course relative to others in the course—called “norm-referenced grading”—and secondary schools began to use the letters well (Cronbach, 1975, cited in Schneider, 2014). Because, as the thinking went, intelligence is distributed across a population with a normal distribution (more familiarly known as a “bell curve”) just like height or weight, then grades are more objective when they reflect that curve within any population. Schools therefore superimposed the normal distribution across a student group and labeled them by letter according to that distribution. By the mid-1900s, a majority of secondary schools used A-F grading and assigned grades according to the normal curve distribution.

Part II: The Case for Change

Chapter 3: How Traditional Grading Stifles Risk-Taking and Supports the “Commodity of Grades”

And yet, twenty-first century classrooms continue to use the grading systems of the early twentieth century even though, as Marzano (2000) writes, there is “no meaningful research reports to support it.”

Interesting that Feldman fails to acknowledge that grading as a whole has very little support, and it doesn't really matter if you grade "more equitably." It's still an extrinsic motivator that most people do not like and feel stifled by, regardless of if it's "nice" grading or not. (I, personally, have always had loose grading policies! No punishments for late work, a lot of space for mistakes... and still it sets children up for failure and frustration. However, in places where I could drop the grades (like scouts or tutoring), children I worked with were far more likely to engage in deeper learning.

Because they weren't worried about a fucking grade of any sort. Feedback meant a lot more to them.

Chapter 4: Traditional Grading Hides Information, Invites Biases, and Provides Misleading Information

We can see that each category captures a range of information about students. The Tests and Projects category might describe what the student has learned about the academic content of the class—whether she has learned to use the FOIL method to multiply binomials or understands the water cycle or can analyze and critique a rhetorical argument. Evaluating this type of student performance is relatively objective and straightforward: A student either knows the water cycle or she doesn’t. By contrast, categories like Class Activities and Participation are more subjective and undefined. Although some subjectivity may exist in evaluating academic categories like Tests and Projects, it is nothing compared to the significant subjectivity of evaluating these nonacademic categories. What is the right way for students to behave in a class? What does it mean to show sufficient “respect”? How much listening is good enough? Each teacher likely has her own unique definition and criteria of how these categories are evaluated and entered into the grade.

This is a lot all at once, and the part that he takes as being objective isn't. So, let's start:

First, "Tests and Projects" are not entirely objective aspects of grading. In an economics course, there is rarely a "correct" answer (and any economist who says there is really should be questioned highly). There are justifications for answers, but a lot of economics teachers will often grade by the "correct" answers in books rather than considering whether or not the student built a cohesive case.

Which is also somewhat subjective. The same thing can be true of history. When people ask for "causes," what we can give them are often best guesses followed by justifications. Some answers are more correct than others (based on available evidence), but there are also history teachers who will enable Bad Versions of History (e.g., States Rights history instead of a focus on slavery). How does this impact students who actually engage with the topic? They will be marked down.

I've also seen English classes run by teachers using misogynist methods. Grading (assumed) girls down on their work because they view it as inherently inferior. Tests and projects are not sufficient.

Second, while he's correct on the subjective nature on Participation, this doesn't take into consideration any of the reasons why teachers end up tacking it on there. Same goes for "Class Activities." I have literally been given absurd rules on how much I had to grade. Sometimes those categories get tacked on to meet the absurd quotas we're given.

Chapter 5: Traditional Grading Demotivates and Disempowers

Our final perspective on the impact of traditional grading is how those practices harm students not because of a mathematical calculation or variances from teacher to teacher, but because of how students psychologically understand and react to their grades. Like all of us, our students want to accomplish those challenges we put in front of them, to feel confident and competent, and to be motivated for the next academic challenge. How does traditional grading support or erode these traits in our students? How does our inherited approach make those dispositions harder for students to sustain and more difficult for us to support?

These are all good questions and should be the minimum starting point for anyone discussing schooling.

Third, when each teacher has a different system of grading, students don’t know whether any given teacher’s system will benefit them or be fair. Imagine getting a new job and being told that you will be evaluated on every task and expectation, by different supervisors with different approaches, and that evaluation scores will be combined in complex formulae unique to each supervisor. And on top of that, you’ll be responsible to understand and remember each supervisor’s unique approaches, and if you forget or confuse those distinct expectations you’ll be penalized. It’s as if we wanted to create for our students the most stressful, disempowering, and least desirable work environments imaginable!

There's less math involved, but I definitely remember working at a big department store where that was literally what happened. The whole structure of school (in this capacity) is precisely the same shit that managers will do. You can do something brilliantly and someone will still punish you for it. Because work isn't about doing well (and neither is school); it's about following instructions and orders and obeying.

Carol Dweck’s (2006) “growth mindset”

Note to self: Come back to this point on its own.

Chapter 6: A New Vision of Grading

Based on how traditional grading undermines our best hopes, the most obvious conclusion is that we shouldn’t have single-letter grades, and maybe no grades at all. They add uncertainty, hide our expectations, confuse everyone involved, fragment a school’s expectations, add stress, and pull attention away from true learning. But for most of us, the reality is that grades are not going to be eliminated. Our society’s understanding of school and the decisions our institutions need to make mean that we will continue to rely on grades in much the same manner as the institutions of the Industrial Revolution: as efficient ways to describe student performance.

So if we can't do the thing that would be best (no grades!) in the place where it would be best to do it because society understands the system differently... then... What is the point of "reimagining grading?" I really don't understand how you can have a "new vision" while you're basically saying that we shouldn't put the effort into undoing the harmful system we've been using.

It's really bizarre. And considering this book was written by someone who worked in charters... which could actually do far more to 'revolutionise' the grading scene (if they weren't so hellbent on being centers of social disadvantage, redistribution of resources from the poor to the wealthy, and overt corruption, in many cases). Why not be part of that movement?

Probably because it wouldn't sell books and charter programs (and professional development courses!).

Part III: Equitable Grading Practices

Chapter 7: Practices That Are Mathematically Accurate

Pillar I: Accuracy

This is the topic of this chapter, and whew. It's going to be a joy because I hate people who talk about "pillars" in education, which is largely because everyone I've ever met who talked this way and worked in schools? Complete piece of shit who didn't know what they were talking about, so it really makes me hesitant immediately. Anyway.

But behind this quest for finely tuned accuracy, there’s an even deeper assumption, perhaps even a hope: The more math we use to arrive at a grade, the more objective it will be. For many of us, more math = more fair, and so we imbue our grade book with mathematical authority. We believe that the math of our grading software purges our grades of any unfairness, cleanses our grades of the potential stains of subjectivity or bias, and shields them (and us) against criticism from students, caregivers, and administrators. When asked why a student got a certain grade, we can respond simply, “That’s just how the math worked out,” as if the grade was out of our hands. We feel a comfort and a relief knowing that we’re just entering student data; it’s the grading program that awards the grades.

Never have I heard that justification from a teacher. Ever. The justification is always backwards and attributed to student ability and motivation, never math. Did he ever talk to the teachers at the charters he worked at? Or did he enjoy building up all the strawmen to destroy? I'd be curious to hear from them.

There’s no research that finds that failing grades motivate students, and plenty of research that has found the opposite—that a student who receives 0s and Fs becomes less motivated, not more motivated.

True, but is there research on achieving passing grades? And how was that research, if done, framed? Did it look at whether or not the students cared about the A? Or other external factors? Genuinely curious.

Starch, D. (1913). Reliability and distribution of grades. Science, 38(983), 630–636.

Starch, D. (1915). Can the variability of marks be reduced? School and Society, 2(33), 242–243.

These two things get referenced a bit, and I'm curious.

Chapter 8: Practices That Are Mathematically Accurate (Continued)

Most of what I'm getting out of this book is the failure to acknowledge eugenics in schools, an inability to understand what underlies a grading system, and a conflation of "accuracy" with "makes people feel better."

Overall, this whole thing is an argument to stop grading, but he doesn't get that.

--

Quotes from this book:

Chapter 1: Farewell to Humanity's Childhood

This is of little consequence to most people, since most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway. They don’t have much reason to. Insofar as the question comes up at all, it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly – the reasons for war, greed, exploitation, systematic indifference to others’ suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?

It is basically a theological debate. Essentially the question is: are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

As the reader can probably detect from our tone, we don’t much like the choice between these two alternatives. Our objections can be classified into three broad categories. As accounts of the general course of human history, they:

1. simply aren’t true;
2. have dire political implications;
3. make the past needlessly dull.

To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators.

To make that shift means retracing some of the initial steps that led to our modern notion of social evolution: the idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of development, each with their own characteristic technologies and forms of organization (hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on). As we will see, such notions have their roots in a conservative backlash against critiques of European civilization, which began to gain ground in the early decades of the eighteenth century.

There are, certainly, tendencies in history. Some are powerful; currents so strong that they are very difficult to swim against (though there always seem to be some who manage to do it anyway). But the only ‘laws’ are those we make up ourselves.

After all, imagine we framed the problem differently, the way it might have been fifty or 100 years ago: as the concentration of capital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, a word like ‘inequality’ sounds like it’s practically designed to encourage half-measures and compromise. It’s possible to imagine overthrowing

capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve ‘eliminated inequality’?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.

Debating inequality allows one to tinker with the numbers, argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (‘Can you imagine? The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population own 44 per cent of the world’s wealth!’) – but it also allows one to do all this without addressing any of the factors that people actually object to about such ‘unequal’ social arrangements: for instance, that some manage to turn their wealth into power over others; or that other people end up being told their needs are not important, and their lives have no intrinsic worth. The last, we are supposed to believe, is just the inevitable effect of inequality; and inequality, the inevitable result of living in any large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated society. Presumably it will always be with us. It’s just a matter of degree.

When we first embarked on this book, our intention was to seek new answers to questions about the origins of social inequality. It didn’t take long before we realized this simply wasn’t a very good approach. Framing human history in this way – which necessarily means assuming humanity once existed in an idyllic state, and that a specific point can be identified at which everything started to go wrong – made it almost impossible to ask any of the questions we felt were genuinely interesting. It felt like almost everyone else seemed to be caught in the same trap. Specialists were refusing to generalize.

Ever since Adam Smith, those trying to prove that contemporary forms of competitive market exchange are rooted in human nature have pointed to the existence of what they call ‘primitive trade’. Already tens of thousands of years ago, one can find evidence of objects – very often precious stones, shells or other items of adornment – being moved around over enormous distances. Often these were just the sort of objects that anthropologists would later find being used as ‘primitive currencies’ all over the world. Surely this must prove capitalism in some form or another has always existed?

All such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about. But lack of imagination is not itself an argument. It’s almost as if these writers are afraid to suggest anything that seems original, or, if they do, feel obliged to use vaguely scientific-sounding language (‘trans-regional interaction spheres’, ‘multi-scalar networks of exchange’) to avoid having to speculate about what precisely those things might be. In fact, anthropology provides endless illustrations of how valuable objects might travel long distances in the absence of anything that remotely resembles a market economy.

Barter does occur: different groups may take on specialities – one is famous for its feather-work, another provides salt, in a third all women are potters – to acquire things they cannot produce themselves; sometimes one group will specialize in the very business of moving people and things around. But we often find such regional networks developing largely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having an excuse to visit one another from time to time; and there are plenty of other possibilities that in no way resemble ‘trade’.

When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to, we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky – in a word, far less human than what was likely going on.

Chapter 2: Wicked Liberty: The Indigenous Critique and the Myth of Progress

Intellectual historians have never really abandoned the Great Man theory of history. They often write as if all important ideas in a given age can be traced back to one or other extraordinary individual – whether Plato, Confucius, Adam Smith or Karl Marx – rather than seeing such authors’ writings as particularly brilliant interventions in debates that were already going on in taverns or dinner parties or public gardens (or, for that matter, lecture rooms), but which otherwise might never have been written down. It’s a bit like pretending William Shakespeare had somehow invented the English language. In fact, many of Shakespeare’s most brilliant turns of phrase turn out to have been common expressions of the day, which any Elizabethan Englishman or woman would be likely to have thrown into casual conversation, and whose authors remain as obscure as those of knock-knock jokes – even if, were it not for Shakespeare, they’d probably have passed out of use and been forgotten long ago.

Not only are we taught to think of intellectual history as something largely produced by individuals writing great books or thinking great thoughts, but these ‘great thinkers’ are assumed to perform both these activities almost exclusively with reference to each other. As a result, even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft), there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else that when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas these weren’t really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.

A certain folk egalitarianism already existed in the Middle Ages, coming to the fore during popular festivals like carnival, May Day or Christmas, when much of society revelled in the idea of a ‘world turned upside down’, where all powers and authorities were knocked to the ground or made a mockery of. Often the celebrations were framed as a return to some primordial ‘age of equality’ – the Age of Cronus, or Saturn, or the land of Cockaygne. Sometimes, too, these ideals were invoked in popular revolts.

True, it’s never entirely clear how far such egalitarian ideals are merely a side effect of hierarchical social arrangements that obtained at ordinary times. Our notion that everyone is equal before the law, for instance, originally traces back to the idea that everyone is equal before the king, or emperor: since if one man is invested with absolute power, then obviously everyone else is equal in comparison. Early Christianity similarly insisted that all believers were (in some ultimate sense) equal in relation to God, whom they referred to as ‘the Lord’. As this illustrates, the overarching power under which ordinary mortals are all de facto equals need not be a real flesh-and-blood human; one of the whole points of creating a ‘carnival king’ or ‘May queen’ is that they exist in order to be dethroned.

After expanding on how scandalous it was that even murderers should get off scot-free, the good father did admit that, when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective. Actually, it worked surprisingly well. Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control. ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’ If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance that they might take’.

This is something that we've seen a resurgence in as of late, particularly in societies that are trying to separate themselves from the State (or in community-oriented discussions for those that try to operate within the confines of the State but to remove elements of State control from their spaces).

Wendat ‘captains’, as Lallemant then goes on to describe, ‘urge their subjects to provide what is needed; no one is compelled to it, but those who are willing bring publicly what they wish to contribute; it seems as if they vied with one another according to the amount of their wealth, and as the desire of glory and of appearing solicitous for the public welfare urges them to do on like occasions.’ More remarkable still, he concedes: ‘this form of justice restrains all these peoples, and seems more effectually to repress disorders than the personal punishment of criminals does in France,’ despite being ‘a very mild proceeding, which leaves individuals in such a spirit of liberty that they never submit to any Laws and obey no other impulse than that of their own will’.

Jesuits, then, clearly recognized and acknowledged an intrinsic relation between refusal of arbitrary power, open and inclusive political debate and a taste for reasoned argument. It’s true that Native American political leaders, who in most cases had no means to compel anyone to do anything they had not agreed to do, were famous for their rhetorical powers. Even hardened European generals pursuing genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples often reported themselves reduced to tears by their powers of eloquence. Still, persuasiveness need not take the form of logical argumentation; it can just as easily involve appeal to sentiment, whipping up passions, deploying poetic metaphors, appealing to myth or proverbial wisdom, employing irony and indirection, humour, insult, or appeals to prophecy or revelation; and the degree to which one privileges any of these has everything to do with the rhetorical tradition to which the speaker belongs, and the presumed dispositions of their audience.

Do you seriously imagine, he says, that I would be happy to live like one of the inhabitants of Paris, to take two hours every morning just to put on my shirt and make-up, to bow and scrape before every obnoxious galoot I meet on the street who happened to have been born with an inheritance? Do you really imagine I could carry a purse full of coins and not immediately hand them over to people who are hungry; that I would carry a sword but not immediately draw it on the first band of thugs I see rounding up the destitute to press them into naval service?

Delisle de la Drevetière’s comedy L’Arlequin sauvage: the story of a Wendat brought to France by a young sea captain, featuring a long series of indignant monologues in which the hero ‘attributes the ills of [French] society to private property, to money, and in particular to the monstrous inequality which makes the poor the slaves of the rich’.

...

Delisle de la Drevetière’s comedy L’Arlequin sauvage: the story of a Wendat brought to France by a young sea captain, featuring a long series of indignant monologues in which the hero ‘attributes the ills of [French] society to private property, to money, and in particular to the monstrous inequality which makes the poor the slaves of the rich’

Something to go back to because this seems like an interesting line of exploration.

The book is considered a feminist landmark, in that it may well be the first European novel about a woman which does not end with the protagonist either marrying or dying. Graffigny’s Inca heroine, Zilia, is as critical of the vanities and absurdities of European society as she is of patriarchy. By the nineteenth century, the novel was remembered in some quarters as the first work to introduce the notion of state socialism to the general public, Zilia wondering why the French king, despite levying all sorts of heavy taxes, cannot simply redistribute the wealth in the same manner as the Sapa Inca.

In 1751, preparing a second edition of her book, Madame de Graffigny sent letters to a variety of friends asking for suggested changes. One of these correspondents was a twenty-three-year-old seminary student and budding economist, A. R. J. Turgot, and we happen to have a copy of his reply – which was long and highly (if constructively) critical. Turgot’s text could hardly be more important, since it marks a key moment in his own intellectual development: the point where he began to turn his most lasting contribution to human thought – the idea of material economic progress – into a general theory of history.

Yes, Turgot acknowledged, ‘we all love the idea of freedom and equality’ – in principle. But we must consider a larger context. In reality, he ventured, the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority; it’s a sign of inferiority, since it is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient and, therefore, where everyone is equally poor. As societies evolve, Turgot reasoned, technology advances. Natural differences in talents and capacities between individuals (which have always existed) become more significant, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labour. We progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex ‘commercial civilization’, in which the poverty and dispossession of some – however lamentable it may be – is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole.

There is no avoiding such inequality, concluded Turgot in his reply to Madame de Graffigny. The only alternative, according to him, would be massive, Inca-style state intervention to create a uniformity of social conditions: an enforced equality which could only have the effect of crushing all initiative and, therefore, result in economic and social catastrophe. In light of all this, Turgot suggested Madame de Graffigny rewrite her novel in such a way as to have Zilia realize these terrible implications at the end of the book.

Unsurprisingly, Graffigny ignored his advice.

A few years later, Turgot would elaborate these same ideas in a series of lectures on world history. He had already been arguing – for some years – for the primacy of technological progress as a driver for overall social improvement. In these lectures, he developed this argument into an explicit theory of stages of economic development: social evolution, he reasoned, always begins with hunters, then moves on to a stage of pastoralism, then farming, and only then finally passes to the contemporary stage of urban commercial civilization. Those who still remain hunters, shepherds or simple farmers are best understood as vestiges of our own previous stages of social development.

Observers who had previously considered the modes of subsistence and division of labour in North American societies to be trivial matters, or of at best secondary importance, now began assuming that they were the only thing that really mattered. Everyone was to be sorted along the same grand evolutionary ladder, depending on their primary mode of acquiring food. ‘Egalitarian’ societies were banished to the bottom of this ladder, where at best they could provide some insight on how our distant ancestors might have lived; but certainly could no longer be imagined as equal parties to a dialogue about how the inhabitants of wealthy and powerful societies should conduct themselves in the present.

The Discourse on the Origins of Social Inequality has been taught, debated and picked apart in a thousand classrooms – which is odd, because in many ways it is very much an eccentric outlier, even by the standards of its time.

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Almost all the examples in this Discourse on the Arts and Sciences are taken from classical Greek and Roman sources – but in his footnotes, Rousseau hints at other sources of inspiration...

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As for Rousseau, he spent much of the next several years writing well-publicized responses to criticisms of the piece (as well as using his new fame to produce a comic opera, The Village Soothsayer, which became popular at the French court).

Also an interesting line of inquiry to explore.

What needs to be investigated, instead, might better be called the ‘myth of the myth of the noble savage’: why is it that certain Europeans began attributing such a naive position to others? The answer isn’t pretty. The phrase ‘noble savage’ was in fact popularized a century or so after Rousseau, as a term of ridicule and abuse. It was deployed by a clique of outright racists, who in 1859 – as the British Empire reached its height of power – took over the British Ethnological Society and called for the extermination of inferior peoples.

Chapter 3: Unfreezing the Ice Age

The problem is that prehistory turns out to be an extremely long period of time: more than 3 million years, during which we know our ancestors were, at least sometimes, using stone tools. For most of this period, evidence is extremely limited. There are phases of literally thousands of years for which the only evidence of hominin activity we possess is a single tooth, and perhaps a handful of pieces of shaped flint. While the technology we are capable of bringing to bear on such remote periods improves dramatically each decade, there’s only so much you can do with sparse material. As a result, it’s difficult to resist the temptation to fill in the gaps, to claim we know more than we really do. When scientists do this the results often bear a suspicious resemblance to those very biblical narratives modern science is supposed to have cast aside.

Perhaps the only thing we can say with real certainty is that, in terms of ancestry, we are all Africans.

I hate this phrase. I know it's harkening back to Richard Dawkins and his bullshit, but it usually just rubs me the wrong way.

In the 1980s and 1990s it was widely assumed that something profound happened, some kind of sudden creative efflorescence, around 45,000 years ago, variously referred to in the literature as the ‘Upper Palaeolithic Revolution’ or even the ‘Human Revolution’. But in the last two decades it has become increasingly clear to researchers that this is most likely an illusion, created by biases in our evidence.

Here’s why. Much of the evidence for this ‘revolution’ is restricted to a single part of the world: Europe, where it is associated with replacement of Neanderthals by Homo sapiens around 40,000 BC. It includes more advanced toolkits for hunting and handicrafts, the first clear evidence for the making of images in bone, ivory and clay – including the famous sculpted ‘female figurines’, dense clusters of carved and painted animal figures in caves, often observed with breathtaking accuracy; more elaborate ways of clothing and decorating the human body; the first attested use of musical instruments like bone flutes; regular exchange of raw materials over great distances, and also what are usually taken as the earliest proofs of social inequality, in the form of grand burials.

All this is impressive, and gives the impression of a lack of synchrony between the ticking of our genetic and cultural clocks. It seems to ask the question: why do so many tens of thousands of years stand between the biological origins of humanity and the widespread appearance of typically human forms of behaviour; between when we became capable of creating culture and when we finally got round to doing it? What were we actually doing in the interim? Many researchers have puzzled over this and have even coined a phrase for it: ‘the sapient paradox’. A few go so far as to postulate some late mutation in the human brain to explain the apparently superior cultural capacities of Upper Palaeolithic Europeans, but such views can no longer be taken seriously.

In fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the whole problem is a mirage. The reason archaeological evidence from Europe is so rich is that European governments tend to be rich; and that European professional institutions, learned societies and university departments have been pursuing prehistory far longer on their own doorstep than in other parts of the world. With each year that passes, new evidence accumulates for early behavioural complexity elsewhere: not just Africa, but also the Arabian Peninsula, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Even as we write, a cave site on the coast of Kenya called Panga ya Saidi is yielding evidence of shell beads and worked pigments stretching back 60,000 years; and research on the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi is opening vistas on to an unsuspected world of cave art, many thousands of years older than the famous images of Lascaux and Altamira, on the other side of Eurasia. No doubt still earlier examples of complex pictorial art will one day be found somewhere on the continent of Africa.

This, he concludes, is the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another. In this sense, one could say Aristotle was right when he described human beings as ‘political animals’ – since this is precisely what other primates never do, at least not to our knowledge.

So, according to Boehm, for about 200,000 years political animals all chose to live just one way; then, of course, they began to rush headlong into their chains, and ape-like dominance patterns re-emerged. The solution to the battle between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’ turns out to be: our genetic nature is Hobbesian, but our political history is pretty much exactly as described by Rousseau. The result? An odd insistence that for many tens of thousands of years, nothing happened. This is an unsettling conclusion, especially when we consider some of the actual archaeological evidence for the existence of ‘Palaeolithic politics’.