John Gatto Against Grading System

The American public school system has always faced some criticism. Now more than ever people are disappointed by the results of compulsory school. There have been several publications about the problems of public schooling. John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School” argues that the American school system is so distorted it needs to be completely abandoned. However, the answer may not be so severe. Instead, there might be a way to do a reformation of the school system. While teaching in Manhattan, Gatto learned that boredom was a monster that plagued the schools. Not only did the students suffer from boredom, the teachers did as well. The children would complain of material that was bland, repetitive, and seemed to have little value in the real …show more content…
Simple, literally, grades are an easy way for us to quantifiably calculate a student’s academic progress. Which then is easy to average over the years and give the student a number value for their intelligence. There are two traditional forms of grading, norm-referenced and criterion-referenced. With norm-referenced grading, a.k.a. grading on a bell curve, students are set against each other. This filters out a few students for the few jobs in that field. Criterion-referenced grading is the traditional letter grade system used in the United States. This type of system puts high-stakes on tests, which hold a lot of weight in a student’s grade. This grading system creates an environment where students find cheating to be necessary. Finally, elementary and middle schools say they use grades to prepare for high school. High schools say they are using grades to prepare for college. College admissions officials are starting to turn away from grades as part of their application criteria based on the little information grades …show more content…
They are worried about what will motivate the children to do well. Alfie Kohn, a writer and high school teacher, noticed that when he had removed grades from his class kids focused more on their learning. This change was not instant. There was some adjustment time were kids found it unbelievable that there work was not going to be judged and rewarded with some alphabetical symbol. Though happy with the results, Kohn admits that he could have taken it a step farther and turned the assessing of work into part of the class’s learning experience. Kohn challenges future teachers to find a way to do so and make school completely about learning. What then, will replace grades as an academic record? The Narrative Evaluation System (NES) is a new way of recording grades through short narratives about the student’s abilities and growth. With these narratives more information is given about the student than ever. Such as, home background, character strengths, and noteworthy performance. This new system also forces the teacher to look at the students more individually and less as a