grading parents

A teacher in California now grades parents on their attendance at schools since schools are in charge of the family and can blackmail them about their kid's education.  Make no mistake about it, however well-intentioned it may be: this teacher is blackmailing parents by threatening to punish their child with a grade.  And taxpayers actually pay for this privilege.

My daughter attended a public high school and this manipulation of grades is common.  There were zero grades given for classes that did not divulge the name of the student who messed up a desk, there were grades offered/withheld for expensive, last-minute projects.  There were threatening notes/class introductions that needed signed.

At first my daughter, homeschooled until high school when she decided to try the local school, would cry when hearing such things.  She was scared to get a zero grade and she didn't even know which student had caused the issue.  But she has gotten used to such tactics:  group punishments and threats like this are very common.

For a look at an activist teacher who abolished grading and the manipulations it invoked, see Joe Bower's blog. And perhaps this post will help some teachers out there under ever-greater pressure to perform.

We do not need to start grading families and parents,
and we do not need to start paying for test performance,
we do not need a better, tighter assembly-line with more enforcement:

we need to free teachers from this ranking and enforcement role and start employing both subject-specialists as well as coaches, coordinators, and adults who enjoy working and sharing with young people and their families. We need schools to be a social service provided for families instead of families being compelled to provide their children for the people with jobs in the schools.

hiring practices at Zoho

(Updated: 6/22/13 New link at Zoho, old one was down)
Zoho's blog has a post up Grades Measure Test-Taking Skills and Interviews Measure Interviewing Skills that discusses their positive experiences hiring people without college degrees.  Sridhar explains:

Our company in India always faced trouble recruiting, because most college graduates, particularly from well-known colleges, would prefer big-brand-name firms. Simply out of sheer necessity, we started to disregard the kind of college a person graduated from, and the grades they obtained. In India, that task was made even easier, because much of the Indian industry is boringly conventional, and job advertisements that specify things like "Must have a minimum of 80% average in college" are fairly common (so if you got only 79%, don't bother to apply). As a result, we get a lot of the arbitrarily-cut-off category applicants. What we found over time was that there is a lot of really good talent in that pool, which the industry had overlooked. Based on a few years of observation, we noticed that there was little or no correlation between academic performance, as measured by grades & the type of college a person attended, and their real on-the-job performance. That was a genuine surprise, particularly for me, as I grew up thinking grades really mattered.

He then explains how they expanded their hiring to deliberately pick students who were not going to college and train them and how these people were virtually indistinguishable from other employees. To their credit, Zoho continues this practice.

for love of learning

Joe Bower has a good blog with many good ideas up (but no RSS feed) so I am linking to his blog, for the love of learning, here instead of in the sidebar.  I saw the video below at Joe Bower's blog but the first thing that caught my eye was his Abolish Grading section, an issue I think is central to school change.  Grading is anti-social and destructive and elitist.