From Neal Boortz.

OK .. Your child brings home a report card. It’s all “A”s. That’s good, right? His sister brings home all “D”s. That’s not so good, is it? For as long as most of us can remember that’s the way it has been. But no longer. Government schools across the nation have been working to find ways to tinker with the grading system so as to mask how their inmates are really doing. Some schools have done away with red ink for grading papers. It upsets the students. Others have moved from the A,B,C,D,F system to one involving symbols … triangles, squares, circles.

Well … we have to give the prize to the infamous Gwinnett County Government Schools in Georgia. They have completely turned the grading system on its head.

Every single week Gwinnett “teachers” in grades K through 5 send home something called the “Weekly Folder” with each student. This document is supposed to grade the student’s behavior in class for every day of the week. Each student is graded for each day with either an A, B, C or D. Sounds normal so far, doesn’t it. But … oh you’re just going to love this … here’s the good part. D is the best grade you can get! A? Well, an A is the absolute worst grade! Right there at the bottom of the grading sheet you will find “D=Exceeds Standards C=Meets Standards B=Does Not Meet Standards A=Significantly Does Not Meet Standards

A parent writes that the school excuses this grading system by assigning words to the letters. Hold your breath … here we go:

* A = Anarchy
* B = Bothers
* C= Cooperative
* D = Democracy

So .. what do we have here. These kids go through their first five years of school thinking that Ds are good and As are bad. Now that really sets them up for the reality of government education when the learnin’ gets serious, doesn’t it?

This is even more ridiculous than the grading scale where my wife taught in Maryland.  They were more conventional there; A’s, B’,s C’s, and D’s all meant the same as they do in the rest of the country.  But they didn’t want to hurt the feelings of any kids by giving them an F, so the letter used to denote a failing grade was E.  All they will accomplish is shifting the stigma of being a failure to another letter.  Whether it is an F, E, A, or a triangle the letter symbol used to represent failure will always carry with it negative connotations - as it should as encouragement for the child to do better.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 4:21 pm and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.