Grades don’t matter…there, I said it. As a teacher, I am not supposed to tell you this, but it’s true…OK, I will concede that grades are a necessary evil, but I promise you they don’t matter as much as you think they do.

Grades, as I said, are a necessary evil. They are a requirement to not only judge a student’s progress, but to help administration and tie wearing number crunchers see how students- and teachers- are performing in the classroom. Grades are a statistical tool that is blown way out of proportion. As far as true educators are concerned, grades were never intended to be the say all ends all red letter that magically tells you if your child “gets it” or not. Grades were certainly not intended to be stuck onto entire schools and districts as an arbitrary measure of how many students in said schools and district perform on standardized testing.

Grades were intended to be one step in ongoing evaluations that provided concrete information that informal evaluations- such as portfolios, and narrative assessment- simply cannot provide. However, it’s gotten out of hand. Grades are not completely unbiased. Sure, there are rubrics for writing, and multiple choice questions and fill in the blank seem pretty cut and dry, but they aren’t. I promise. For example, I-as a teacher- want to see everyone succeed. As a true educator I understand that some of us simply don’t take test as well as others. So, I decide to take a grade on something we’ve done together in class to give everyone a boost. This grade, this indicator of mysterious knowledge, did not in fact tell me anything. Can this work tell me something? Sure. I can see that Susie wasn’t paying attention and was unable to copy the answers down because she was too concerned about the lip gloss she was hiding in her desk. I can tell Johnny copied the same ridiculous answers from Susie. I can also tell that Jimmy is too tired to even stay away. However, the grade had nothing to do with it. Furthermore, the grades gave me no answers, simply tidbits of information that need to be further investigated. This is true for most grades. I’ve seen multiple choice tests that could be answered correctly by some test takers even if they had never seen the material before. Seriously, we all know that the square root of 9 is not football. That same test can be completely overwhelming for an not yet diagnosed dyslexic because the answers don’t stay in the same place. With no accommodations in place, Billy is defeated before he begins and simply fills in answers. Orally, Billy could have aced the material.

Take my children for example. My son’s grades are either A’s or F’s. There are no in-between grades. Sure, they hopefully average out to Cs, but he is either on or off. It is not because he is stupid. He is , as I often remind him, a freaking genius. It only takes a few minutes of discussing Science with him to know this. Reading is especially hard. His reading grades are low because he has difficulty reading (he is dyslexic as well). I understand when an oral reading grade comes home low, but not when a reading comprehension test comes back low. He can comprehend almost any story. I mean, he discusses physics theories and parallel universes and whether they are probable or not for fun. He can’t read the questions that ask about the comprehension. It’s not a fair assessment. Necessary for our current system, yes…fair, not at all. He once made an “F” on a paper because he couldn’t get pass the fact that bears don’t actually dress for different weather. Instead of doing whatever skill he was supposed to do, he spend time coloring over all the pictures ranting about bears not wearing clothes. My youngest is an average to good student. They want to please the teachers, a problem their older brother never experienced. They do, however, struggle to focus on any classroom engagement because the anxiety of being wrong is overwhelming. There are hundreds of examples for all children. Even about children – like me- who aced almost every test without even opening books. How? I’m a good test taker. I can read answers and pick out key words that we aren’t supposed to see. I am a killer essay writer…can BS my way through almost any topic in essay form. Is this fair? No. I had great grades and KNEW very little. My kids have eh grades and KNOW a lot more than I do even now. Both of my children are unquestionably smarter than me, it just doesn’t translate in our current system.

The current education system is terribly biased. It is biased towards white native English speakers and those who read well. Reading is terribly important, I get it. I have long been a true literacy advocate. I tutor sixth graders who cannot read on a preschool level…I get it. We need to know how to read. However, reading is not the only judge of knowledge out there, it doesn’t even make the top three. My ability to read well should not mean I am suddenly able to make good grades in all of my subjects. Grades should be used as one tool in a plethora of assessments. As teachers, it is our job to reach every child. As students, we should be given the common courtesy to be taught in multiple ways. I am not speaking as just the mother of a children with special needs, but as someone who believes that our education system is in need of more people who actually care about children learning and growing educationally and socially. Whole children enter school buildings, not just their academic brains. No one can perform when they are not getting fed, worried about their parents, dealing with medical issues, etc. The hierarchy of needs is real and must be recognized by the school system. Grades are simply a check mark on our ability to teach what schools systems have paid big curriculum money for us to use.

A class of people who have good grades are supposed to give us warm fuzzies. The warm fuzzies don’t count when the test was made to be easy. I was horrible about giving an easy test when I knew we’d talked about a subject and I had seen that the kids KNOW the material. There is enough stress put on kids with standardized testing (don’t get me started, that is a whole other post!) that we are creating little academic robots worried only with getting good numbers on paper. As a society, we have sucked all the fun out of the classroom. Teachers are afraid of losing jobs because they aren’t performing well. When the teacher is worried, that worry is transferred to the children. We all lose. There are no winners in this high stakes game of finger pointing. When teachers are more worried about providing proof as to why their kids aren’t learning material than actually teaching the material, there is a problem.

Tests are necessary, grades are necessary. We need to know if little Timmy can spell “cat.” It is not okay to not be able to spell “cat” in tenth grade. 2+2 will always equal 4. We need to know that Jenny understands this. Not just through memorization but through showing me how. Timmy needs to be able to tell me c-a-t spells cat because of the phonetic sounds each of those letters make. Some things must be memorized, but not all things. We cannot simply drill information into the heads of children. We must SHOW them the information. Until we experience learning, we will only spit out facts.

As an education system, we need to get back to multiple forms of assessment. We need to talk to children about what they know. As parents we need to have an open dialog about what is going on in the classroom. My son’s favorite part of preschool and kindergarten was coming home and experiencing the stories and foods from places he was learning about. We researched and played games from those places. We talked about children his age and how their lives were similar and different. We immersed ourselves in the material. Would he have passed a test asking about dates and names? Probably not, but talk to him and he could tell you and show you he understands.

Until a change is made, we must live in this world of red marks and letters that are supposed to single-handedly tell us whether or not our child is “getting it.” Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. We won’t know unless we talk about it. I’m not worried as some are that red marks will hurt my kid’s self-esteem, that only happens when we place emphasis on those red marks. We won’t get everything right, children need to understand that. What I am worried about is over reacting to a grade that was poorly taken.

When a child brings home a grade, ask about the test, how the material was taught. Strike up a conversation to see what they do and do not know. Maybe there was drilling going on outside of the classroom that made it impossible to concentrate. Maybe the teacher used vocabulary to describe the events that wasn’t used in teaching the material. Maybe a teacher in the deep south used a blizzard as an example and your child had no frame of reference. Perhaps it was a just a crappy day. Whatever the reason, it is okay! Don’t assume your “A” student knows all the materials, and don’t assume your “F” student is a lost cause. Question the system. Deal with the system because we must, but don’t let the system cause you to question intelligence. You WILL NOT find the sum of your child’s written in the top right hand corner of their Friday tests. Rather than obsess about grades, get out there and help teach material that will be truly learned and help work to change the system. It is in the moments of change and insight that we will chase the true warm fuzzies down.