Threads: 'Grading for Equity' Sucks, Chapter 2

These threads were originally posted on Twitter as live-responses to reading the book Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman. If you haven't read threads for chapter 1, you probably should start there. You can also read threads for...

Thursday, 06 January 2022

I hate this book (Grading for Equity), but I'm going to be live-tweeting my frustrations with it. So here goes Chapter 2. *inhales and screams internally*

There's more detailed information following this, but my biggest issue with this section is that its entire purpose is to conflate feedback with grading.

Grades are not feedback. Feedback provides people with a concrete understanding of how another understands.

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. While what follows is not intended to be a definitive history of grading and the broader history of schools, if we’re going to understand our grading, question it, and find ways to improve it, particularly for vulnerable student populations, we need a basic understanding of its genealogy and its evolution. That understanding begins with contextualizing grading within changes in American K-12 schools in the last century.

When I provide feedback, it usually highlights a few things:
- What I find interesting and engaging with the work a student has created;
- Where I find issues (and prompting my student to respond to it in some way);
- How I'm engaging with their work.

Grades don't do this.

It really frustrates me that a lot of teachers are prone to conflating feedback with grading.

If you're one of those people, please explain to me the difference between each grade level and why we use subjective terms like "sufficient knowledge."

(Note: When I received assignments back, I didn't know what to improve upon when the only information I saw was "8/10." Nor did I ever know which comment written was associated with the two missing points. That's not feedback; that's confusion.)

Oh good, we've already met my favourite "progressive" educator: John Dewey. It really is true that we can't discuss education without mentioning him, and it would be nice if more people would look at his work more critically.

Instead of as some Educator God.

I'm going to look into the source mentioned, but it's interesting that he says "half of white children."

Which half, mate. Because I can venture a guess, since you want to flatten the history.

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 halfof white children ages fifteen to nineteen, and far fewer children of color for both legalland nonlegal reasons—and the school year averaged only seventy- eight days (Snyder, 1993).

Fun. It's probably because the source itself flattens that information without actually exploring it (or providing useful sourcing to go back and check their statistics). Good job, 1993 US DOE.

Taking a break to hunt down some of this information to unflatten(?) the information provided and actually get a better history of what US schools (maybe others) looked like in the 19th century.

Here's an interesting article by Jurgen Herbst, though.

It's interesting that an EduCeleb with a fairly popular and liberal US-school podcast is quoted repeatedly in this book. It's almost as if that educator can be used for justification of every point of view because he's completely incoherent in how he talks about schools. 🙃

Sorry, maybe to be more pointed in my vague tweet.

I should've said a popular "education historian" who loves to ignore huge chunks of history in order to make a case for why schools should continue to exist and that they "support democracy."

Anyway, putting the hunt for stats on the backburner but writing it down to come back to after I finish reading Chapter 2.

Author of book is listing things that prompted change in the early 20th century. I'm going to wait to see if he asks questions about them.

1. The rise of manufacturing. While in the early 1800s, most people earned a living through agriculture or as craftsmen, by the turn of the twentieth century, American productivity exploded and factories became the primary employers. In 1860, the United States lagged behind England, France, and Germany in its industrial output, but by 1900, it led the world and produced nearly as much value as those three countries combined (Tyack, 1974). Owners of factories needed workers, and they put pressure on school boards and city leaders to create schools that prepared their future employees. There was also a cultural veneration for the power and productivity of factories, which persuaded policymakers to incorporate characteristics of industry— specialization, chain of command, timed routines, and efficiencies— into public institutions, including schools.

I guess I'll be waiting a while for him to question any of this, since we're just regurgitating the "common knowledge" among every person I've ever met who has subjected themselves to a university teaching program.

2. Progressive educators. John Dewey and others envisioned that the realization of our still emerging democracy depended on an education that was “universal,” that integrated students from all backgrounds, that provided opportunities to elevate one’s social and economic position, and that supported one’s moral development. While many Progressives advocated for making school attendance compulsory and more standardized—a “common school” in which all students would be offered the same curriculum— others believed that education would address and accommodate the specialization of work in factories. In the end, although Dewey’s vision of schools-as- democratic-engine provided overarching rhetoric about schools, it was often eclipsed by the vision of schools-as-training-ground.

In the end, the role of education as capitalist expansion and the integration of new workers into the wage-labor system came to dominate the potential role of schooling as the great equalizer and the instrument of full human development. (p. 181)

No comments on why people would increase schools for migrants?

Also, no comments on how schools used the children of migrants to forcefully assimilate migrant communities? And still do? Maybe he'll say it later. (Probably not.)

3. Migration and immigration. The lure of cities’ manufacturing jobs and the modernized services (including water and sewage), along with a stronger railroad system, pulled people from their rural towns to the urban cities. While in 1820 there were only four U.S. cities of populations over 25,000 people, four decades later, thirty-five cities had populations of over 25,000, with nine cities of over 100,000 (Tyack, 1974). In addition, a massive wave of immigrants from ‘Western Europe, and then Eastern Europe, came to the United States for jobs, and at the same time, cheap U.S. grain imports drove them out of employment in their home countries. By 1910, 40 percent of the entire U.S. population had foreign-born parents (Bowles, 1976), and at around the same time, 58 percent of students had fathers who were ‘born outside the United States, from over fifty countries (Tyack, 1974). Clearly, the radical changes in the student population couldn’t help but profoundly affect schools.

This is at least a tolerable overview of how intelligence was implemented, but it neglects the development of societies for the "feeble-minded" that were part of schools.

If you want a good article on that, here's Osgood on Indiana.

4. Intelligence testing and categorization. By the turn of the twentieth century, scientists had been exploring and theorizing about “natural intelligence”—the idea that one’s mental ability was innate, immutable, and could be quantified by a range of assessments including those based on phrenology, the study of how a person’s intellect and other characteristics are correlated to the physical shape of the skull. The use of intelligence testing, stemming from Alfred Binet’s tests in the early 1900s, expanded dramatically in World War I when there was a need to quickly assign roles to the millions of enlisting servicemen. Scores on these tests soon became viewed as a reliable description of one’s intellectual capacity, character, and disposition, and provided seemingly scientific explanations and justification for racist beliefs.

When African Americans and immigrants groups from southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean scored lower, their scores were ascribed to weaknesses in intellectual capacity, character, and upbringing among the groups, rather than to the cultural biases of the tests or to the idea that those trends reflected gross social inequities associated with poverty or oppression. Higher scores among white, wealthy Protestants and lower scores among immigrant groups and African Americans were used both to affirm the idea of the United States as a meritocracy and to reinforce the validity of the existing hierarchy.

(Both of the articles I've recommended, btw, were available before this book was written. So it's amusing to me how limited the exploration these liberal white educators who want to reform equity into schools really can be.)

Love how people will mention "Little Albert" today and just be like "it would be prohibited today."

Yes, because it's unethical and child abuse. Just say that. It's not going to detract from your list of "impacts on changes to 20th century schooling."

5. Behaviorism. The first half of the twentieth century saw the popularity of behaviorism—the strand of psychology that argues that all human and animal behavior is the result of external physics stimuli, responses, learning histories, and reinforcements. It drew on Pavlov’s findings from the 1890’s that external stimuli could cause a reflexive effect: Dogs salivate when they see food, but if you introduce the stimulus of ringing a bell each time you show food, the dogs will be conditioned to salivate when you just ring the bell. John Watson built on Pavlov’s ideas to argue that, similar to animals, humans are profoundly affected by their environment. Watson’s most famous experiment, although it would be prohibited today, was with nine-month-old “Little Albert” in 1920. Every time little Albert was presented with a white rat, Watson would loudly bang an iron rod, scaring the infant and making him cry.

Although Little Albert had not been initially afraid of the white rat, after multiple presentations of banging the rod when showing the rat, Watson “taught” Little Albert to be scared and cry when he saw the rat. B. F. Skinner took behaviorism one step further and identified “operant conditioning.” With his “Skinner box™ experiments in the 1920s and 1930s, in which he taught rats to pull a lever by giving them food, he argued that one could increase or decrease a subject’s voluntary behaviors through associated stimuli. This theory of learning—that humans could be taught to act in certain ways through extrinsic reinforcement or consequences—became wildly popular in schools and factories.

If this is an attempt to critique the use of schools to "Americanise" a population and to act as a homogenising force, it uh... I don't think it comes across well?

Like, I really am trying to be charitable, but it seems an odd to use "unruly mass of immigrants."

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. In a document signed by seventy-seven college presidents and city and school superintendents of schools in 1874, the authors endorsed that schools should teach obedience and very specific skills:

Great stress is laid upon (1) punctuality, (2) regularity, (3) attention, and (4) silence, as habits necessary through life for successful combination with one’s fellow-men in an industrial and commercial civilization. (Harris & Doty as cited in Tyack, 1974, p. 50)

At this time, I'd like to highlight some of the labour education that was taking place in the early 20th century? Because this guy keeps highlighting the quotes of business and isn't critiquing them. From AJ Muste's "What Price Labor Education?" in a copy of Labor Age from 1928:

In that case you will feel very strongly that labor must do some tall thinking, that labor needs education, and must develop its own educational program and system, since it would seem as silly to let your enemy run your mind as to let him run your union—in fact, it would appear obvious that if he runs your mind, he certainly will run your union too, whether your mind realizes it or not?

There was actually a fairly large push for labour education and schools associated with unions (both in the US and the UK) in the early 1900s.

The Rand School of Social Science was one of these.

And they were targeted by the NY's Lusk Committee.

The AFL (before it became the AFL-CIO) had a lot of people who were pretty pro-business and fairly conservative; many of them had their sights on positions as politicians (or in government agencies). They attacked both the Workers' Education Bureau and Brookwood Labor College.

The reason I bring them up is because this guy? Is acting like there's only one education history and ignoring that people were trying to act against the fact that businesses and their owners were influencing the design of schools.

I find that infuriating.

This is the first time the guy even presents any form of criticism of the grading structure (and its origins). Like, at all. And it's pretty fucking basic and the most obvious.

He, however, neglects to use a word we really need to use: EUGENICS.

Tracking students to situate them for specific roles in the economic hierarchy helped to replicate the existing social and racial hierarchy, and to provide

Tracking is an inherently eugenicist policy. If you cannot say that, if you refuse to admit that, you have failed to even provide any form of relevant critique of grading. You're just rehashing reform garbage that does nothing to change anything.

Genuine question: Am I right in feeling that "black and brown ethnicity" is a rather... off phrase because it's conflating ethnicity and race?

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.

Anyway, there's a lot of discussion in this section where he's like "vocational or lower tracks." First, this is an assumption that topics learned in "vocational tracks" are inherently less difficult or unimportant.

I have many issues with this.

First: The framing of "vocational vs. academic" is garbage, and he's not even addressing the fact that we do this. He's just privileging "academic" subjects over "vocational" subjects.

Why not create a space for people to do both?

Second: "Less engaging pedagogy" is an interesting way to frame the issue of students being seen as less capable and not ensuring people have access to spaces that are appropriately challenging according to their needs/desires and in ways *they* feel are best for them.

It's also an interesting way to frame the problem of *forcefully* putting students who are determined to "be incapable" in spaces that treat them as if they're barely human. And neglecting their actual needs and interests.

Third: State-supported pedagogies are inherently "less engaging" as a whole.

If individual teachers are able to be engaging and create an environment that encourages genuine learning, that's largely because they are *individually* doing what they can to work against that fact.

Fourth: All of this pairs well with my disgust for the fact that we put in crowbar separations between subjects, obscuring how they're related (and often have to rebuild and sneak into our own classes because the state-supported pedagogies maintain those boundaries).

I'm not surprised he didn't ask this question, but based on the information he presents before this (about how grades were encouraged by those who sought to push industrialisation and further create compliant workers)?

I'd have another question (see next)...

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).

How was grading used to further alienate members of the school from each other?

If I communicate with students, families and other community members (as a teacher)? I'm more capable of building solid connections with the people around me.

Isolation is a narrative he's missing.

As I finish the chapter, he ends it with the unironically asked:

"Is our best thinking about effective teaching and learning thwarted by our century-old grading?"

In further chapters, he'll be arguing for keeping grading. So... yes. It is. Your book proves that.

The one thing I really hate about this book is that it's trying to make a case for grading by presenting a very flat history of grading. It highlights things and then doesn't even bother to write a sentence of commentary on them. See the bell curve mention here:

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

To be fair, this is a critique I have with a lot of academic texts. Just stating things as fact is absolutely pointless. And heartless. And distant.

If you care about a thing, why do you act as if it "just happened?"

Anyway, finished Chapter 2. Need a break.