Achievement

A few months back I took a class that was a book study of A Repair Kit for Grading.  The premise was that grading should be strictly performance based.  Grades should then be categorized by standards that indicate the desired knowledge/skills to be acquired.  The author's "fixes" include no academic penalties for cheating, no extra-credit, no late penalties, including only the most recent evidence in a grade, no behavioral considerations (participation points) in grades, etc.  Overall I felt the book was not well written and lacked a consistent philosophical thread (which I think is the main thing I look for in educational writing because applications will always be rife with contingencies).  But there was a fair amount of food for thought and a handful of things that I agreed with.  I like the idea of categorizing grades by content (waves, energy, forces) rather than assessment type (tests, quizzes, homework) simply because I think it communicates more information to the student.  Logistically it could by tricky at first, but I might give it a try.

These ideas were on my mind when I attended an end of the year kindergarten award assembly for Dallin.  Awards were given for most improved, hardest working, and attendance (On a side note, I'd prefer an award for missing 2-4 days a year rather than perfect attendance.  There should be a few days each year when you're either too sick for school or have something more important to do.). It struck me that all of these things that were being recognized were behaviors.  While hard work is likely correlated with achievement, they are not synonymous.  What if instead they recognized the highest performers?  "Here are our top three readers, math students, etc."  This would be out of the ordinary and would certainly ruffle a lot of feathers, but I couldn't quite put my finger on why.

By singling out some, you're necessarily excluding all the rest.  But we're fine doing that with sports.  Maybe it's the young age of the students.  But there are All-Stars and the like at pretty young ages (granted not in t-ball).  And other than having a top 10 when you graduate, even older students are rarely recognized for performance.  Because of the way we grade, even the top 10 in a graduating class aren't likely the 10 most intelligent students in the class, they're the 10 who were most successful at the system.

Maybe our lack of recognition for academic achievement (basically until applying to college) stems from the desire to have equality in education.  Recognition is a type of sorting that can lead to tracking, etc.  But does this have negative effects on our country's competitive edge?  If it does, is it worth it anyway?