School System Scrapping Grades

So now they've scrapped the term "Objectives Based Education" and are replacing it with "Benchmarking."

Typical liberals. If your plan is rejected the first time around, put a new coat of paint on the same old dilapidated structure and call it "a new plan."

Fools!

This totally removes teacher accountability.

In a game with no scores there are no winners.

What were all those crazy educators thinking for the last few hundred years?

I'm pricing private schools for my kids in the DC area. It's disturbing to see they cost more than I've ever paid for a car. Nevertheless, I'm not letting these freaks experiment with my kids! I can see 12 more years of beat up used cars in my future.

Home School is the only real alternative

And just as important, you can't reject the losers.

The new system will tell them the "area's that need improvement". Well nothing says it better than an F.

The new system "will clearly show where the strengths are, as well as the areas that need improvement,"

I thought that good and bad grades did that.

Pretty funny, actually :-)

Anyone still sending their children to the cesspool that is public education in most large cities is a candidate for a Darwin Award.

Nice. I suppose students now will get a star just for showing up. Are grades "offensive"? Is it bigoted to make a value judgement about a student's capacity to master subject matter taught for years? Blaming lowered expectations on someone else has been called dumbing down.

HOW FREAKING PATHETIC!!!!!

>The new system "will clearly show where the strengths are, as well as the areas that need improvement,"

I thought that good and bad grades did that.

Yeah, but bad grades might make some of the lazier students feel bad and it might make students with learning disabilities feel left out. Once that happens you get parents squawking at the school board for failing their child, because it's obviously the school's responsibility to make sure the students pay attention and do homework.

I was not aware of any "losers" being rejected when real schools used real grades.

It seems to me that the teachers used the grades to locate the "squeaky wheels" and make sure they got some extra help with their difficulties.

Without a way of measuring a student's progress, the student becomes "just another brick in the wall" (with all due respect to Pink Floyd)

Garbage...

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Schools take first step in eliminating grades
By HAROLD McNEIL
News Niagara Bureau
11/5/01

NIAGARA FALLS - In a radical method of measuring student performance, the Niagara Falls School District is moving toward eliminating grades.

When elementary and middle school reports cards are mailed this month, parents won't see any grades in math and language arts. Instead, they'll see a list of specific skills in those subject areas and indications of whether their child mastered the skills. If not, there will be suggestions for remediation.

And the district isn't stopping there; eventually, school officials say, they plan to do away with grade levels altogether, so there no longer would be a first, second or third grade. Students of different ages would work together at their own rate.

A team of district educators, headed by curriculum specialist Maureen Ingham, began crafting the new evaluation process about seven years ago. School officials say their aim is to boost student achievement by taking the focus off grades and offering each student an individualized learning plan.

More traditional methods have failed to boost pupil test scores on the state's math and language arts proficiency exams, said School Superintendent Carmen A. Granto. Niagara Falls schools scored below average in the state's "report card" for schools.

"The problem is, we've been locked into a system that was created years and years ago and doesn't work today," said Granto. "The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results."

The process is being implemented incrementally by subject, beginning with language arts and math, and only on the elementary and middle school levels.

Student progress is measured not by a test score, but whether a student has reached a series of benchmarks that clearly demonstrates he or she has mastered a specific skill, such as being able to divide fractions or recognize the parts of speech.

"When you just give a child a B average, it doesn't give parents any real idea where the gaps in learning are," said Kathleen Maher, principal at 79th Street Elementary School. "These new report cards will clearly show where the strengths are, as well as areas that need improvement."

The state Department of Education says that benchmarking is not a completely new idea but that very few schools have used the idea on report cards.

"It's not a unique way of grading, but not a lot of school districts do it," said William Hirschen, a department spokesman. "We don't monitor it in any way."

School officials want to ensure that pupils currently in the district's elementary and middle grades master critical math and English language arts skills well before they reach high school.

"They were entering (high school) with teachers saying they're not ready and then graduating with the community saying they're not prepared," Ingham said. "So we knew we had to stop fast and take a look at what we were and weren't doing with our students to get them ready."

Other local school districts have flirted with the idea of using benchmarks. Orchard Park Central School District officials considered employing some limited use of the concept a few years ago.

"Parents here did not want it. "In fact, our teachers didn't want it either," said Superintendent Charles Stoddart.

As an assessment tool for reaching state standards, Stoddart said benchmarks may work better in some city school districts than suburban districts, where a higher percentage of pupils already meet state standards.

Benchmarking "is a fine and good practice but it does have its limitations," Stoddart said. Linda Cimusz, assistant superintendent for instruction in the Williamsville Central School District, agreed.

"I applaud them for specifically laying out the skills on report cards, but I think most parents will also want to know how their child is doing compared to everybody else in the class," Cimusz said.

But Niagara Falls school officials say benchmarking is the right thing at the right time for their district.

Benchmarking, they say provides an objective gauge of what a child knows. Grading, on the other hand, is subjective and does not incorporate uniform standards, said Christopher Murgia, a fifth-grade teacher at 79th Street Elementary School.

"Under the old system, we had no way of measuring whether a B was the same from classroom to classroom," he said. "Also it reduces the focus on achieving a certain grade when the more important thing is to have children understand the material."

Murgia was part of a district-wide committee of parents and teachers that designed the new report cards.

While he endorses benchmarking, not every teacher in the district is sold on the concept. Nancy Andrews, an eighth-grade teacher at Niagara Middle School, said assigning grades places a value on pupils' work and motivates them to succeed.

"If they don't see grades, they're not going to want to do the work," Andrews said.

Cathy Gardner has three children attending elementary schools in the district. Another attends Niagara Middle School, and the oldest is a senior at Niagara Falls High School. Gardner said she would be more comfortable seeing grades on report cards.

"Right now, I'm attending college again, and if they told me they were just going to evaluate me and not give me a grade, I wouldn't like that idea at all," she said.

School Board member Joseph Giarizzo also has a son attending middle school in the district, and he wholeheartedly endorses benchmarking because the new system tells him exactly what he wants to know about his child's progress.

"Sometimes an 85 doesn't tell me how my kid is doing," he said. "Does it mean he knows only 85 percent of the work, or 100 percent of some portion of it and zero percent of another skill? Sure, some of the adults will get lost with this new system because they're used to something different, but the children don't have a frame of reference; they only know what their parents tell them. But if a kid sees a list of skills with boxes next to them and they're checked off, he's happy."

School officials recognize that they have their work cut out for them in convincing parents that this is the way to go. When the district first introduced the idea of benchmarking in middle school language arts two years ago, parents balked, and officials adopted a dual system that incorporated both grading and benchmarking.

"When we look back, we feel maybe we hadn't done our homework well enough with the parents because they really didn't understand the concept," said Ingham. "We're not going to give up on the benchmark because we still believe it provides useful information, but until we get everybody on board, we're going to have this dual system."

The dual system in middle school language arts will end in June and full benchmarking will start in September, she said.

School official argue that benchmarking tells children and parents exactly where a pupil is at any particular point in his or her education and offers prescriptions for moving them forward. As different children progress at different rates, educators are even questioning the value of placing children in grades based largely on their chronological age.

"Education is the only place where we move people along based on their age and not what they know or what their experience level is like anything else in life," said Giarizzo.

And, more importantly, it allows bad teachers a chance to hide their lack of teaching abilities. The teacher's unions should really love this. Where once it was difficult to remove a bad teacher, now it's just about impossible as they will remain undetected by the grades of their students.

You just forgot the /sarcasm tag didnt you?

No, I wasn't being sarcastic; that's one of the primary causes/excuses for the dumbing-down of public schools.

Thay mite as well eliminate gradez. With the grade inflayshun at most publik skewls, I'd get an A in speling.

Wait until these kids apply for college and the universities send back notices that they have no reference points for which they can objectively evaluate the students GPA for entrance qualifications. Sorry our school has better applicants.