Yeah, Right, Whatever

When I was a kid, I got paid for my grades. It was my job, my report card was my performance review, and I was paid accordingly. (Yeah, yeah... I know... that's baaaad. Oh, well. Thank heavens I was born before all this touchy feely stuff took over.) I don't remember the pay scale (Dad... help here?) but I remember getting paid x for Bs and 2x for As. It was a subtle encouragement to do my best (along with plenty of positive reinforcement at home). And, if my GPA was any indication, it worked, and worked well.

I guess grade school kids in Florida don't have that option anymore.

Elementary-school principals in a Florida school district have tossed out the traditional letter grade system in favor of using numbers to report on students' progress.

Beginning in September, elementary students in Palm Beach County will see only a 1, 2 or 3 grade for each subject and skill, the Palm Beach Post reported.

So... they match up somehow, right? A=something and B=something else, right? Uh... no.

According to the report, a 1 means the student is working a year or more below grade level, a 2 indicates the student is working less than a year below grade level, and a 3 means he or she is working at or above grade level.

"Somehow, people believe that when they see an A, B, C, D or F, they have all kinds of information about a child's progress," Bill Thompson, principal of Forest Park Elementary told the paper. When As, Bs and Cs were chosen decades ago to rate students' work, "there was no such thing as grade-level expectations, the Sunshine State Standards or No Child Left Behind."

OK... this "1, 2, 3" business also tells me nothing about a child's progress. If a student gets a "3", they might be at level. Or they might be far above level. Same with a "2". I think we can all agree that a "1" is an "F".

When the boys were in the lower grade school grades, instead of grades, they had a bar graph, with certain goals for the year on it. As they accomplished the goal, the bar graph was colored in. That made sense. You knew exactly how much progress they were making during the year. Now, that they're older, they don't get letter grades- they get a percentage grade, which I think is actually better than letter grades. An "A" might be a 100%, or it could be a 91%. I like the school district's system (so far).

There was one other little tidbit in the article that I almost missed. This... stunned me.

Last fall, the Montgomery County public schools implemented a new grading policy that requires students be given no less than 50 percent credit for work that was never submitted. One teacher who computed for the Washington Post what difference the policy made in his students' grades reported 15 percent of his pupils received a higher grade for the fall semester because they received 50 percent credit for work they didn't do.

Uh... NO! You get a big fat "0" for work not turned in. That is insane! We wonder why we have kids graduating who can't read or write or do simple math? Maybe it's because teachers have to give Johnny LazyBones a 50% for work he never bothered turning in.

We are raising a generation of citizens who have learned nothing about responsibility or personal accomplishment or competition or... or... No wonder so many parents are opting to pull their kids out of the public school system to either put them in private schools or, better yet, homeschool. I fear for the future of our nation if this is the best we can do for our kids.