LETTER – Armchair Mayor’s comments on demise of letter grades aren’t helpful

Re: EDITORIAL – Decision to do away with student letter grades gets a big Fail

Your column on letter grades is dissapointing and shows a lack of understanding of assessment and education policy generally.

You are opposing policy set by the Ministry of Education without any actual evidence other than your own anecdotal evidence of your own academic past. Referencing your own poor marks is entirely unhelpful and deflects from your lack of any reference to any assessment research or theories suggesting that letter grades improves student’s performance, social well being, further educational opportunities or vocational potential or performance, etc….

You are overly dismissive of an entire field of research and the entire Ministry of Education. The inclusion of the phrase well-meaning progressive educators suggests you think that education policy, and by implication, education research, is a political matter and that an educator is not capable of being a policy expert in their own field or a researcher.

You end your column with a rhetorical question asking what do you know compared to highly paid experts with ideas based on nothing. That is an inflammatory way to describe policy makers and adds nothing to an informed policy debate.

You clealry have ideas that, while based on your own academic history, might as well be based on nothing. You ask another rhetorical question earlier in the column suggesting you don’t know what emerging, developing, proficient or extending means.

I am glad you took the time to look into the meaning before diving in with a public opinion. Even if the question was laced with sarcasm, it implies you didn’t go beyond a cursory glance at the meaning of the new terms and did not look at any research as to why those terms would be used.

You also thought including that question, rather than an explanation of those terms, was a better way to inform your readers of this policy change. That type of language suggests that you have a political opinion rather than a policy position. At the end of the day, are you helping anyone be informed or are you stoking outrage? Are you happy with your answer to that question?

Your reference to open classrooms is a reference to something unconnected to the actual topic you are writing about and whether you are correct on that or not, doesn’t mean anything with respect to assessment polciy. The reference to learning how to spell and read also betrays a lack of understanding of how reading and spelling is learned. You seem to have incorrectly used reading and spelling interchangeably.

As for the gist of your argument, you are seemingly implying that there is some inherent benefit to letter grades without an explanation of why or a cogent argument supporting your position. Letter grades can be a relative measure so if you are in a poor performing classroom or school you may attain a higher mark, or vice versa, or you could attend a school with grade inflation where every student receives high grades.

On its face and without any reference to research, it is not obvious why that system is better than the new system. Would I rather know if I was developing or if I was a B student?

Language such as developing seems to imply some objective measurement of performance where, without context, a B means nothing.

We are left to believe that your history with letter grades didn’t harm you because you pulled up your socks. That one person self reports that they were not harmed by letter grades is not a persuasive policy argument. What if someone self-reported had a different experience? Would we be stuck with a dead lock?

Perhaps, some of those well-meaning progressive educators have already researched the question of what would be the best assessment practice, have found the answer and are implementing the best practice?

I don’t know, but I do know your column doesn’t help anyone in this discussion.

HAROLD HICKS