The Weaponization of Grades
Whatever else they might do, grades punish students who can’t, won’t, or for whatever reason, don’t comply with teachers’ instructions.
From 2014 to 2018, I worked with men incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison to develop and teach a GED prep class. Together, we wrote curriculum, co-taught lessons, and examined students’ work. Unlike my high school English classes, which the law requires students 16 and under to attend, our GED students showed up voluntarily, but still, we had a hard time getting students to complete and turn in their classwork and homework. At school, I spend a lot of time talking with students about points — how to earn them, why they lost them — because I rely heavily on the points system in my persuasion practices. Do this, it’s worth a lot of points! Don’t want to do that? What if I give you some points? Even so, many kids do opt-out, righteously or not, forfeiting their points and taking the F. It struck me as very obviously absurd to take made up points away from grown men who live in cages, though, and when I returned to teaching in public high school, my cognitive dissonance around grading persisted and worsened.
Whatever else they might do, grades punish students who can’t, won’t, or for whatever reason, don’t comply with teachers’ instructions. Missing assignments get zeroes. Zeroes tank averages. Bad grades lead to lost opportunities — and even cost (scholarship) money. When their bad grades make them ineligible for sports and other extracurricular activities, students miss the sense of belonging that is often their biggest motivation to come to school (not to mention potential points of access to college).
Grades-based punishments extend into kids’ home lives, too. Parents take teachers’ word for the grades we give and act accordingly, often reinforcing our judgments with their own systems of rewards and punishments. Our grades have the power to lower the quality of everyday conversations between parents and their children, starting arguments, straining relationships. A friend and colleague who is also the single mother of an 11th grader recently wondered aloud with me why she nags her child over grades. In the last year, their family has experienced major loss and drastic change that the kid has managed with remarkable grace and wisdom. So when she’s getting a 78% C+ in Algebra II, yes, she could make up those two percentage points for a B-, but if she doesn’t, … who cares? My friend, a teacher herself, sees talk about points and grades as a waste of the precious little time she and her kid have together.
Many of my high school students point to grades as their most significant stressor. Some work earnestly to win points; others recognize and resent the arbitrary rules and begrudgingly play along, and far too many opt out of the points game and drop out. Too often, students internalize their teachers’ ill-wrought judgments of their academic performance. Once, I attended a seminar on Black English at San Quentin State Prison, given by a linguist from Stanford. Toward the end, Glenn, an elder African-American man, offered a poignant personal narrative starting with his childhood humiliation when a White teacher scolded him for his “broken” speech. She was woefully uninformed , as the visiting professor’s lecture had illuminated, but Glenn narrated the subsequent sequence of events: He learned to hide beneath a “bad student” identity, linked up with the other “bad kids,” dropped out, inflicted significant harm on his community, and ultimately became imprisoned for life. Having recently earned his GED in his late 60s, Glenn lamented a lifetime wasted thinking he wasn’t smart.
Are grades so essential an educational tool that they’re worth the damage they can do to a child’s relationship with their parents? Worth the damage they can do to a child’s sense of their own character and potential? These questions are not theoretical. Millions of students receive failing grades every quarter, every semester, multiplied by the number of classes they’re taking. Some fail because, try as they might, they can’t figure out how to meet the bar the teacher sets; this happens a lot to students with learning disabilities whose teachers, for whatever reason, don’t have the expertise or capacity (with 150+ kids on their rosters) to accommodate their individual needs.
Of course, many other students fail because they aren’t trying their best — because they’re chronically hungry and/or traumatized, and/or hopeless, and/or, and/or. Any basic psychology class would include Maslow’s hierarchy of needs [1], explaining that humans need stable sources of food, water, shelter, and safety before they can self-actualize. Nonetheless, teachers and parents stay on kids’ backs about their failing grades, when actually, a vast system of local, state, and national decision-makers has failed to ensure that all children’s basic human needs are met, doubling-down on the well-worn tracks of our racialized caste system with the idea that the access to more education is somehow a finite resource. Thus, grades contribute to our collective default acceptance of punishment as a central tool for regulating behavior and relationships.
Even for teachers like myself who work hard to develop culturally sustaining, equitable curriculum and instruction, the implicit weaponization of grades is central to most behavior management plans. Why should my students do anything I tell them to do? Because I’m the giver of the points. Teachers enforce behavioral expectations by assigning participation points, taking points off for lateness, giving extra credit for whatever we want, making judgment calls about borderline grades, and any number of other points-based maneuvers that help us maintain order. Theoretically, any kid can get an A if they work hard enough, and we tell them incessantly that grades predict something important about their future “in the real world.” When a kid isn’t working hard, there’s not much time to figure out why not before a judgment gets recorded in the grade book. At the schools where I’ve taught, we’ve been asked to record at least two grades a week. We enter the zeroes, and we move on. It has to stop.
We have to stop prioritizing grades over learning. We have to stop using grades to deflect our responsibility to get kids learning. When a human opts out of an opportunity to learn and grow, something’s up, and if our default response is to judge and punish them for not learning, we’re misdiagnosing and mistreating the problem. It’s educational malpractice. It’s stupid and it’s dangerous.
This is the third essay in a series I’m writing on grades. Here are the first and second.
[1] Dear reader, because White supremacy is so predictable, I wonder if it will even surprise you to learn, like I did when a friend read an earlier draft of this essay, that Maslow learned “his” career-defining insights from an indigenous community, the Blackfoot Nation, and must have forgotten to cite his sources.
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