...but also completely disingenuous.
Student X is an only child, has educated and well paid parents who instill work ethic and have the means, time and ability to commit to helping X get the best grades, including hiring tutors for things they can't or don't have time to teach. X lives in a safe, affluent area and associates with similar peers.
Student Y is one of n siblings to an illegal immigrant single mom with little to no formal education who works two minimum wage jobs so has no time to help her kids even though she desperately wants to. Y might even be working too just to enable the family to get by, leaving no time for studies at home or homework. (effectively having more work ethic than X, just not for school) Y lives in a dangerous area with sirens blaring and dogs barking all hours of the night and many of his peers are involved with gangs.
Granted, these are obviously exaggerated and hypothetical stereotypes, which I don't really want to contribute to perpetuating, but they illustrate a point. You don't exactly have to be some kind of bleeding heart social justice activist to see how unfair it is to Z to be "objectively graded" as lacking "performance" when compared to X.
A common objection is "well how are we going to indicate who is the best candidate for a given university admission or job if we don't have grades or other objective measure to filter out the best people!??!???"
But... that's the point we're trying to make: current grades and other "objective measures" DON'T filter out the "best". To an overwhelming degree, they're just proxies for other things. Surely universities and employers can and will find better ways to assess candidates. (or, if that's what they want to insist on continuing to do, filter out underprivileged people, just like they do now)
TLDR the delusion that grades are some kind of objective meritocracy is ridiculous the sooner it's done away with the better.
I don't think that it follows from this that it's unfair for Y/Z to have a lower grade. They did worse. The grade can reflect that. That doesn't mean they're a worse person / student. It means they demonstrated worse performance in the class. How you interpret that later on is a different question, and interpreting Y's lower performance in the context of the environment that caused it is fair.
Trying to change the scale leads to the measurement being meaningless, and worse, can lead to bringing back biases that were tried to be balanced for: in evaluating a student for a job who looked like Y and another who looked like X and got the same GPA, which one is the better student? If you believe that the grades were more lenient toward Y, picking applicant X as an employer just makes sense.
In another context: we report the times of runners running the 100m dash in seconds and hundredths of seconds, regardless of if they're in the 100M final of the Olympics or at a local high school track meet. Is 10.8 seconds a good time? In the Olympic 100m mens final? no. In the US collegiate championships for women? definitely.
The unfairness is pretty obvious, if you don't see it I don't know what to tell you.
> That doesn't mean they're a worse person / student > How you interpret that later on is a different question
This is pointless semantics - we all know exactly how it will be interpreted and what it will mean for Y's prospects to have the worse grades.
> Trying to change the scale leads to the measurement being meaningless
This is literally the exact point I preemptively addressed at the end of my reply.
Your analogy with athletes is nonsensical. We're not talking about comparing the best of the best who are consensually opting into competing against each other. We're talking about disadvantaged people who are subjected to (whether they want to be in it or not) an unjust "grading" system that only highlights and perpetuates their "underperformance"... But sure, we can use your analogy:
Take the top 10 100m dash competitors,
put some of them in all inclusive athletic villages with access to world class facilities, coaches, nutrition etc and let them focus all their time and energy on training
put others in a low income country shantytown with no access to any facilities, coaches, with poor nutrition and no time or energy to train because they have to engage in subsistence agriculture to just survive
then, let them race! It's fair because tHe tiMeKeEpiNg is oBjEcTiVe
When we actually do do that, we seem to get world-beating Kenyan and Ethiopian athletes.
Not so many affluent, well-fed Swiss ones though.
To be clear, schools can't fix all the worlds injustices. Life is unfair and realistically we may never be able to fix that. But we can stop doing this that are making it blatantly more unfair than it has to be...
Would you rather undergo surgery by a doctor who learned his craft well or by a someone who has a kind soul and has endured hardships in his childhood?
Using math as an example, you can't master it without a lot of practice, and that practice is homework. Albert Einstein wrote that he was practicing mathematics often and at length from an early age.
Same. For me, though, it took going back and becoming a teacher to see how privileged I was. Mom was a teacher, both parents at home and contributed to my education from an early age (like, doing math as soon as I could talk "How many people are in the car? What if your grandparents were here? Your uncle? What if we took the grandparents away?", etc), etc. My friend group was all in the same situation. Two parents at home, etc. It wasn't until I came back to the school that I realized how insulated I had been and how it wasn't me that was the reason I did so well (Valedictorian), but the support I had behind me that enabled me to do it.
If you wanted to help kids from a disadvantaged background, probably the best way would be to make it harder for them to get good grades. Make them work twice as hard as the other kids for the same grade, that will really make up for their background and place them in the lead.
1. Y is worse than X. If you give both of them a math task ("how should I launch this rocket so that it lands safely"), then X is more likely to get it right. The reason why is irrelevant; results are relevant.
2. In contrast to what people like you usually think, performance and context are two different variables. If you measure performance objectively, that gives you a chance to influence context and see which interventions make sense! Maybe giving poor kids' families money doesn't help as much as sending the kids to boarding schools, or enrolling them in extracurricular activities. How could you know? By measuring it! Bottom line, objective measurements are THE BEST way of achieving positive social change (assuming it's your goal... it is mine).
I'm also a teacher and, although you can teach college without knowing any formal pedagogical methods, I've at least looked into the works of people like Louis Benezet (setup a middle school without formal arithmetic) and Ranciere (The Ignorant Schoolmaster). And I've come to the conclusion that backing away from homogenized curricula most hurts 1) bad teachers and 2) textbook companies.
Sadly, no. I hate to sound like one of those 'gifted' people, but a lot of it just came naturally. I never learned how to study; university was a rude awakening, though I still didn't really learn until after graduating there when I started self-studying things.
> Realistically, people like you and I who had a stable upbringing probably would be successful in any reasonable system.
Exactly. I'm thinking now to all my classmates and what they did after. The ones who didn't struggle in school (not necessarily excelled, but they didn't struggle), were all those who had stable households. As far as I'm aware, minus a few who got into opioids (rural America!), most are doing well for themselves. It really does impact a lot.
> I personally attended a poor middle school and didn't learn algebra until 9th grade, but still managed to end up as a mathematics postdoc at a very nice place.
Awesome! Mathematics is what I've started self-studying (I did physics, now dong a physics/applied mathematics masters), and it's super interesting. Just proving stuff is so much fun.
> I cannot wrap my brain around the reluctance to make changes to the system in the face of statistics like the one I mentioned elsewhere and have observed with my own eyes (that is, there are very, very few African American PhDs in mathematics).
Exactly! Part of me thinks it's because it forces us to look behind the curtain, so to speak. If we look at why, we realize it's because of the socioeconomic factors, and then we have to look at what caused that, etc.
> although you can teach college without knowing any formal pedagogical methods,
Sadly, I sometimes wonder the validity of education research. Formal pedagogical methods certainly helped me (I did a MAT while teaching, and there was a noticeable difference), but I really didn't become a decent (wouldn't say I'm good yet) teacher until I had a coworker who really was great and took and interest in explaining things and working with me. It really changed my whole outlook on teaching.
> And I've come to the conclusion that backing away from homogenized curricula most hurts 1) bad teachers and 2) textbook companies.
Absolutely. I'm a huge proponent of public schools, but part of me has really wanted to start a charter school. There would be one major requirement when hiring: the teachers have studied the subject. So your math teachers all have math degrees, English teachers have literature degrees, etc. I think this would really work for lower levels, as you get teachers who are interested in it (instead of being taught math by a teacher who isn't a 'math person', which rubs off on the kids), but because they also understand it at a deeper level and can hopefully find new approaches to it. No textbooks, either. Hopefully it'd be small enough that they wouldn't be needed. Also, at least at a younger level, no homework and let the kids actually be kids and play. I'd argue at least an hour or more recess a day, and a long lunch.
I'd certainly be interested to hear some of your ideas for moving away from the homogenized curricula, and will be looking into those two you mentioned. Thank you!
Analogies with surgeons are nonsensical. With surgeons and surgeries we're talking about people who consensually opt in to a field where there's very good reason to have extreme filters in place to screen out anyone who isn't the best of the best.
But we're not talking about surgeons entrusted with peoples lives on a daily basis, ffs, we're talking about school children who are subjected to (whether they want to be in it or not) an unjust "grading" system that only highlights and perpetuates their "underperformance"...
It also raises the question, how many kids who would otherwise have made excellent surgeons never get a chance because they're filtered out from an early age?
what about the kids who, instead of doing the homework, have to do actual minimum wage work and house chores and help raise their siblings? They probably put in a lot more work than you, but it doesn't show in their grades.
No one is saying "let's teach them less".
> If you wanted to help kids from a disadvantaged background, probably the best way would be to make it harder for them to get good grades
Oh wow I see now there's no point even trying to reply
Note that this isn't really exactly what grades measure much of the time. In an ideal world they measure mastery-- but they often measure a whole lot of classroom conduct, who's able to spend extra time on assignments at home, details of information presentation, etc.
My students who I'd judge most likely to get a critical problem right aren't always at the top of the gradebook. Sometimes they're near the bottom. And this is despite me weighing demonstrated capability and mastery very highly.