writinginthewild.com

SEATTLE — Is it time to move beyond grades? That was the question considered — largely in the affirmative — at a workshop Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. It may seem counterintuitive to think that this is a time for colleges to consider giving up grades. Many college administrators feel that accreditors are breathing down their necks, demanding more and more evidence of student learning. With the economy falling apart, parents want to be assured that their children are learning something. And the vast majority of colleges award grades.

But when organizers of the workshop had audience members describe their experiences with grading, the closest they came to a fan was an associate provost who admitted that he saw grade inflation as completely out of control and said that for more students at his and similar institutions, the grade-point average range is around 3.4 to 3.8. It seemed that everyone else in the room had been motivated to attend by their sense that the system isn’t working: Other academic administrators who said grades had become meaningless. A registrar who said that she was struggling to understand the apparent inconsistencies in faculty members’ grades. A professor who tells his students that “grades are the death of composition.” Another said: “Grades create a facade of coherence.”

Inside Higher Ed, “Imagining College Without Grades,” Scott Jaschik

I am always fascinated by discussions about grades because they are often laced with revelatory contradictions. There’s a certain sort of academic (who probably is simply saying out loud what most think) that will tell students, “grades don’t matter; what matters is learning.” Interestingly, these same academics often protest the loudest about grade inflation and are the most resistant to new assessment methodologies. Grade matter because they have exchange value.

You can use them for all sorts of things from getting out of going to school (in High School) to getting into a good college. They are a form of cultural capital that can often be directly converted into financial capital in the form of scholarships, grants, and loans. Like everything else that has exchange value in our culture, grades can benefit anyone but in practice they benefit the already privileged most.

Grades help to limit and shape access to educational resources of all kinds; like all forms of capital, the more you have, the easier it is to accumulate. Eliminating grades, then, could potentially open up these resources to more people. It’s not hard to imagine a college admissions system, for example, without standardized tests and grades, in which schools would try to create the most heterogeneous and so productive learning community possible.

You can be sure that the community would include students who once would have been excluded because they got bad grades. If qualitative assessments– portfolios, essentially, in one form or the other– were ubiquitous enough and ‘fine-grained’ they could be used to create classes in which a variety of learning styles and achievements reinforced and amplified each other. It sounds Utopian, but I don’t think that makes it impossible.

Despite rising unemployment and a cratering economy, the GOP has placed a hold on the nomination of President Obama’s choice for Secretary of Labor, the pro-worker Hilda Solis. The issue at stake is the Employee Free Choice Act, which aims to give workers a level playing field by allowing workers to choose a majority sign-up approach, dubbed “card check” by anti-union flacks, for selecting a union — rather than keeping that option in the hands of employers.

But the original Wagner Act in the 1930s gave workers the right to use a majority sign-up process if they so choose, rather than the current election system that allows widespread intimidation by employers.

Studies of hundreds of organizing campaigns have found that a fifth of all pro-union activists are fired during a campaign, half of all employers threaten to shut down their plant and roughly 80% of employers hire unionbusting consultants. Employers are still free under the proposed Employee Free Choice Act to hold intimidating one-on-one “sweat” sessions to legally discourage workers from joining a union. And, as I found out while going undercover to a unionbusting seminar, it’s equally legal for employers to just lie about the dire consequences facing workers if they join a union, from closed plants to somehow losing seniority and benefits. That’s the system the Employee Free Choice Act was designed to reform, by increasing penalties for corporate lawbreaking, allowing employees to choose the majority sign-up approach but still retaining the employees’ rights to hold a secret-ballot NLRB election if they want.

Art Levine, Posted January 24, 2009

The inauguration of President Obama was breathtaking, there’s no doubt about it. We’ve done something unprescedented in the developed world– elected a member of a historically oppressed minority as president. President Morales, of course, who’s Indian, was elected a few years ago in Bolivia. Still, this is one of those turning points that happen only once in a lifetime.

On the other hand, unlike President Morales, President Obama may not be fully what at least some expected. He’s begun the process of shutting down the base at Guantanamo, for example, and the so-called secret CIA bases, but he wants the military to use an interrogation standard that may be just as bad as the old policy, which endorsed torture. His economic team, too, includes people who’ve demonstrated a freakish love of the market.

And Noam Chomsky, among others, can’t see much difference yet between Obama’s position and the Bush position in Gaza. All this seems very healthy to me. As Naomi Klein says, “free your base, and the rest will follow.” That’s why we need the Employee Free Choice Act. But we should give credit where credit is due– the Bush family planning policy had to end– but if progressive people don’t push back, nothing good will come of all of this.

CAN COMPUTERS TEACH CHILDREN TO write better? Michael Jenkins,who teaches language arts at Estancia Middle School in central New Mexico, tells the story of Maria (a pseudonym), who so struggled to put her ideas on paper that she used to cry whenever he gave the class a writing assignment. That was before Jenkins began using writing-instruction software that provides feedback on students’ essays and offers suggestions on how to improve them, all within seconds. By the end of the school year, Maria had more confidence in her writing abilities—and passed the writing portion of the state assessment test. “It’s not a cure-all, but what a difference it’s made in what the kids have shown they can do,” says Jenkins, who began using the software last year.

Greg Miller, www.sciencemag.org, January 19, 2009

Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ’sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, famously argued that mechanical reproduction fundamentally changed the work of art by transforming our sense of originality. The unique, singular object, with its “aura of originality” was superseded by the “transitoriness” of infinite reproducibility. The painting is replaced by photography and the film.

You see the very same tension in the emergence of software designed to asses student writing, a fear that the machine will strip out the individuality, the unique aura of individual expressiveness that was supposedly the goal of composition instruction. Benjamin argued, I think, that there was no going back; you can’t unscramble the egg.

Who’d want a culture without film and photography anyway? And painting has survived just fine. That might be a good way to think about this software too. It can assist students in those aspects of writing, most associated with our shared ethos of written communication. It can help much less with those ineffable qualities of writing that mark individual style.

The real question is economic and political, as Benjamin suggested. Will we be willing to invest our time and money, in other words, both individually and socially, in this complex set of tensions and desires, sharp concision and sloppy art, both irreconcilable and both necessary? Or will we use the machine to make excuses for denaturing education.