Guaranteeing Illiteracy
Schools That Grade Only On Content
By Daniel Muniz

Quite a few years ago, a friend of mine paid a visit to his daughter’s elementary school. His little girl had just started the first grade so he wanted to see the campus for himself as well as to personally meet the faculty and staff. He felt that parental involvement would be very important in his child’s education so he really wanted to do his part to ensure that his daughter started off her education on the right foot.

As he strolled down a hallway in a building of the campus, he noticed a bulletin board comprised of numerous handwritten essays authored by the students. He naturally assumed that they must have been written by the younger children, perhaps the second or third graders.

My buddy was horrified to discover that it was actually the fifth graders who wrote the essays. They were the sloppiest, most incoherent stories he ever saw. The grammar was bad, the punctuation was way off, and just about everything was misspelled. He was unable to fathom that not only could this garbage be passed off as being acceptable, but that the school would actually showcase them to the public.

He told me that he wasn’t expecting to read Pulitzer Prize winning literature but he also felt that by the fifth grade, the students should have at least mastered some of the basics of writing but by the looks of things, these kids were on their way to becoming functionally illiterate adults if something didn’t change somewhere down the road.

Of course his daughter’s teacher had absolutely no comment about the essays since she didn’t teach that particular grade. Other teachers were reluctant to discuss the subject with him since his daughter was not in their classes. About the only thing he could find out was that the reason that the essays were displayed on the bulletin board was because they were selected as the best material from that entire grade. Consequently, he wondered if that was the best they got, then he could only imagine what the worst might look like.

But what bothered my buddy the most about this situation was that nobody was willing to admit that something was terribly wrong. Granted, my friend only had a high school diploma so he did not have the academic background of the school’s faculty but he knew something was not right.
 

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He told me that when he was kid, there was no way that he could ever hand in work as shoddy as what he had seen in that school. In addition, he also explained to me that his parents (both of which only had high school diplomas) would have been totally embarrassed if he would have turned in anything like that as a fifth grader. His folks were the result of a generation that had a far more rigorous public school education that would never have tolerated such nonsense.

It wasn’t long thereafter that my friend had pulled his daughter out of that elementary school and enrolled her in a private school. He wasn’t exactly thrilled about paying money for a private education since he didn’t have much in discretionary income and he also didn’t have the freedom of choice to put his daughter in a different public school. But overall, he just wasn’t about to allow his children to grow up to be functionally illiterate since it was apparent that that school and its district was not going to focus on the fundamentals.

After a while, I personally recounted my friend’s experience to a number of elementary school teachers who taught at different school districts. One particular educator was totally frustrated about the whole incident. Her school, which was a low income Hispanic area, had also implemented the same program in which she was only allowed to grade on content and not on anything else except in very specific circumstances. And she hated it.

She too came from an impoverished Hispanic neighborhood so she could foresee a whole generation of kids only having the most rudimentary education. She also explained to me that some of her fellow educators were also tired of the numerous excuses to why education was so watered down.

Perhaps what surprised me the most was when I mentioned this incident to many of my co-workers at the large mortgage bank that I had worked at during that time frame. A number of degreed professionals actually agreed with the concept of only grading for content even if it was in an English class. They didn’t seem to mind that watering down a curriculum could mean that a kid would end up having sloppy writing skills as well as having very poor reading comprehension. Hardly any of my colleagues saw it as being such a big deal.

But the reason I personally saw such an attitude as being so ironic was because I had just sat in at a meeting that consisted of a high level manager. The manager explained a new bonus program that we could participate in for recruiting additional workers to the company. There was a department that was in need of entry-level employees in which a high school diploma was a prerequisite but that the applicant also had to have good reading and writing skills. Most of the people who applied could barely understand semi-complex instructions and they were not even able write a coherent sentence.

Although the pay was not all that great because it was entry-level, the benefits were decent like good health insurance, a 401k program, profit sharing, tuition reimbursement and even stock incentives (all of which I personally enjoyed). It would have been a great start for someone who graduated from high school but overall, it was a shame that so few people were actually considered for the jobs.

Using a grading methodology that only grades on content may sound like a dynamite idea to boost grades and reduce the number of failing students. It might also give the impression that a particular school has kids who make awesome grades but in reality, it merely diminishes the value of an education because the students are not learning what they really need to know for the future. And if such a mentality is extended throughout all the years of public education, especially in high school, then what kind of writing and reading skills is a kid going to have as an adult?

Yes, a student will have graduated high school but such a diploma will be worthless if someone can barely write a sentence or comprehend basic reading material. One of the biggest gripes that certain employers have is that too many high school graduates can barely read or write and this type of education doesn’t help it any.

Unfortunately, there are people who feel that only content should be graded outside of an English class regardless of grade. The problem I have with that philosophy is that good writing and good proofreading skills should be a habit for any class at any grade level. It is too easy to get into a bad habit as a kid and then grow up with it as an adult. Perhaps outside of an English class, such errors should not be as harshly reprimanded but it still has to be penalized and identified as being wrong even if it is to a lesser degree.

And besides, an adult who writes anything that is incomprehensible in the workforce is going to greatly reduce his marketing value as an employee. It is absolutely essential that every worker in the workplace becomes fully capable of being able to effectively communicate with his or her co-workers as well as with their managers.

But perhaps what bothers some teachers the most is that such a grading methodology makes them look less intelligent and more like idiots to other professionals. Ultimately, a shenanigan like this gives the appearance that teachers are incapable of providing a real education to our children. Unfortunately, an educator may not have a choice if he or she wants to keep a job which is what makes this whole situation so tragic. And this guilt by association also contributes to the bad image that some people have of teachers even though many of them despise this sort of tomfoolery.

In summary, there is an urgent need for parents to take an active participation in their children’s education in order to gauge whether or not a solid curriculum is actually being taught. There are parents who may love a system like this because it ensures that their child’s schoolwork is easy but it is simply robbing kids out of the skills that they will need for the future.

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