No Zero Grading?

There seems to be a new push coming out of the education establishment and it is spreading across the nation like a wildfire.

No Zeros.

A student does not do his work, refuses to do it and teachers are told to record a “50” in the gradebook instead of a “0”. 

A student “Christmas Trees” the answers to an important class final exam, because he hates school, does not care, and does not want to be there—scoring a “20”--- and yet he receives a “50”.

Meanwhile, other students that try and earn 70, 80, or 85 legitimately after studying diligently and working earnestly to finish their tests get no upward bump.  This is like a liberal engineered, reverse bell-curve designed to totally dumb down education in our country even further than it is being dumbed down already rewarding those that don’t “do” while simultaneously punishing those students who “do”. 

We all know teachers should have latitude in grading.  A student ends the semester, after working his guts out and never missing class and working hard, and the teacher allows such a student to do an extra credit paper to raise his 69.4% to  a 70%.  Yeah—everybody gets that.  That is called caring about kids.

But what if a “everybody gets no lower than a “50” scheme is dictated to all teachers from Educrats, thus unfairly engineering winners while simultaneously diminishing teacher discretion?  Uh, YES, this is problematic.

Is this sort of a scheme fair to students who actually work and do their assignments?  Wouldn't this scheme serve to disincentivize everyone? Isn’t this just a glorified way to make everyone feel like a winner, and isn't this a blatant example of social promotion?

Of course it is.  It is a disaster and it does students no favors in the long run.  But it makes schools appear as if they are improving, particularly the bottom quartile of struggling students.  So, of course the Educrats EMBRACE this scheme

It is for this reason that this scheme is particularly abundant in struggling urban school districts.  A fascinating blog post on this subject, written by a Chicago public school teacher subjected to this policy, provides an illuminating read. 

  Read For students’ sake, say no to ‘No-Zero Policy’ on grading

“After our first year, our principal proposed that we move to what is called a “no-zero policy,” because a zero could bring a student’s grade down so far that recovery was not an option.  She had us read an article that argued that the traditional grading scale of 90-100 for an A, 80-89 for a B, 70-79 for a C, 69-60 for a D, and 59-0 as an F unfairly penalized students because the range for an ‘F’ was 59 points while the other grades spanned only 10 points.  The principal’s proposal was quickly put to a vote, and teachers had the notion that we could always change the policy if we thought it wasn’t working.  The majority of teachers voted in favor of the policy, which meant that if a student did not complete an assignment, he or she would receive a 50 percent.   Many students continued to fall into similar categories--the students who didn’t do homework still didn’t do it, those who didn’t do much class work still didn’t do much class work, and a few opted out of an exam.  But

 there was one major change: The kids who once worked hard to pass by attending tutoring sessions instead decided to forego the sessions and do other things. In fact, even though both batches of freshmen were similar academically, our on-track rate rose from 59 percent to 87 percent.  Since few students were truly failing, hardly anyone thought they needed to work hard to improve. With 87 percent of our freshmen considered on-track, one would expect that those in the second group would have much higher standardized test scores. But in fact, the ACT scores of both groups were nearly the same, and equally abysmal—a 15.1 for those with a 59 percent on-track rate, and a 15.4 for the group with 87 percent on-track.”

Along with the way we have totally dumbed down discipline in schools lately, it would not surprise me at all if this is not the “next big plan” to improve education locally.

 

I will be strident, vocal, and determined against any such plan here locally if it is suggested in Escambia County.