Monday's "City Life" Show will be on the air again on Saturday morning. The first half hour featured Ms Linda King and a discussion of Lowell's Sixth Conference on Ending Homelessness, this time focusing on Veterans. The conference was today and it was a success, in that it helped share experiences and spread the word. It is not surprising to me, but it is saddening, that social welfare systems in this Commonwealth and these United States are so complicated that even experts sometimes are confused about what is available to help the less fortunate and how that help can be applied for.
The other interesting thing on the show was a discussion of the Lowell School Committee's meeting the previous week and the question of class ranking. One of the guests on the show was Mr Dave Conway, who is a member of the Lowell School Committee. He provided us with the details of the issue.
The thrust of the issue is if using class ranking, rather than GPA, is detrimental to the chances of students applying to relatively selective colleges and universities. To cartoon the issue, there is evidence that some higher education admissions officers use class rank as a first cut instrument to determine which of the many folders they face they will actually open and look at.
My own experience with this attitude was in high school when I asked the guidance councillor's secretary to send my transcript to the Air Force Academy. I had no reason to think she even knew who I was (Graduating Class of over 700), but her quick, sharp, response was "I wouldn't hold my breath waiting, if I were you." You see, I was in the bottom half of the class, class rank wise.
It has been suggested that Lowell High School should follow the example of other communities in the area and of private schools, in dropping class rank and going strictly to GPA in ranking students. For Lowell High School this is particularly valuable in that it is a way to ameliorate the problems of the Latin Lyceum,♠ where class rank distorts the accomplishments of the Lyceum students, and not to their advantage. The Lyceum students take rigorous classes and then their grades are mixed in with those taking less rigorous classes to form a composite class rank. Doesn't seem fair to me.
So, the School Committee took action, and that is good. What concerns me is that the execution by the School Superintendent seems painfully slow. She is going to take three months to come up with a plan of execution. Those three months will be 12.5% of the sitting time of this School Committee and, in fact, the report will come out with 25% of the term already gone. For what seems like a simple change this seems like a long time. If General George Patton had waited three months for his staff to come up with a plan to change the movement of his SEVENTH ARMY during the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans might have made it clean to the channel ports.♥
But, more concerning to me is that it was suggested that this change would be implemented in 2016, for the Freshman Class entering this fall. That is the middle of a School Committee term two removed from the current one. A more cynical person might ask if this School Committee was being slow rolled.
If changing from class rank to GPA is a good idea for the Class of 2016, then it would appear to be a good idea for the Class of 2013 (the Class of 2012 being close to graduation and the damage of class rank having already been inflicted, we can write them off, except that in future requests for transcripts we could drop the class rank). Are the students of the Classes of 2013, 2014 and 2015 less worthy of consideration?
The argument could be made that the students of the Class of 2013 have already built their academic efforts around the idea of class rank, rather than GPA. Perhaps, although I expect that is a small number, balanced by the Latin Lyceum students who couldn't do that without denying the ethos of the Latin Lyceum. No, the idea of delaying until the Class of 2016 is the worst kind of bureaucrat fudgery, or perhaps merely log rolling.
One senses that the School Committee may be seen, in some quarters, as an impediment to the smooth operation of the Lowell School System.
Regards — Cliff
♠ Incidentally, there appears to be an HTML formatting error on the web page.
♥ Not really, but I am trying to make the point that Old Blood and Guts had a staff that knew how to turn on a dime and make things happen. That staff was a key to his success.
Can't help but think that the object of education is to become educated, not to be graded or ranked, and that we certainly live with a sorry situation in that we apparently have not learned to discern true education except via grades and rank. I know it's a very tricky problem, and that grades and ranks are a shortcut to some caricature of the truth, but somewhere somehow I wish we could recognize talent without someone else's somewhat arbitrary numerical designation for such.
ReplyDeleteI tell my kids to worry about learning something, not their grades, and that 99% of what you earn is not based on what someone else gives to you, or allows you--it's based on what you earn.
I agree. One should never let school interfere with one's education. But, one needs to do well enough to be able to move to the next level.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere I have, but have misplaced, a book Victoria Falhberg made me read that talks about grading and how it is not done well by the teaching profession. I will find it and blog about it.
Regards — Cliff
Hi Cliff, I think you should e-mail this to Dave Conway he has the superintendent's ear. The point of taking three months to study something in this electronic age is unacceptable. We will using blacksmith methods to teach our public school children until the Charter Schools take off. I see a new Charter School coming that will use today's technology to teach our Lowellians, there will be a line to get in and perhaps then the School Committee will demand we move to current technology. Competition is a good thing and so can be Charter Schools.
ReplyDeleteIt was a great show
Thanks
John L McDonough
thanks, Cliff, for your comments. After watching the school committee meeting last Wednesday, I became concerned that Dave Conway (and by extension Robert Gignac) were more worried about the college admissions officers than they were about our students.
ReplyDeleteHe stated that college admissions officers don't like the practice, and he is absolutely correct.
See NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/education/05rank.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
They don't like the system because they cannot reduce the student to a number - they are forced to open the file and get to know the student. The article also talks about the "context" of the grades, yet LHS has never been concerned with colleges understanding the context of the GPA of Lyceum students in relation to other students.
Lyceum aside, the GPA distribution system is so much better for ALL students. It won't penalize those at the very top, but it WILL help to incentivize those in the middle and at the bottom. Instead of viewing oneself as a number and thinking about what a loser you are, students see themselves in a group with other students who have a very, very similar class rank, in which there is little if any statistical difference. While they may know that they could never become one of the top ten, with a GPA distribution they will be able to see that with just a little extra effort, they can move into the next category. It gives them a reason to try harder.
Take the student who is 400/750. Schools will likely never bother to read the essay, which could describe their struggle to keep up with classes while needing to work and care for younger siblings while their single mother works. This is not an unusual story in Lowell, and doesn't mean that such a student would not succeed in college. It simply means that they did not have the advantages of other students such that they could devote their energies primarily to their studies.
My hope is that as the school committee continues to think about moving towards a GPA distribution, that they will consider what is best for the STUDENTS not what is best for the college admissions officers - isn't that what we elected them to do?
I also agree, Cliff, that what is good for some students is good for all, and if it is good for the class of 2016, it is good for the class of 2013. Yes, there are issues to consider: does the weighting system get changed? With this system is doesn't need to change anything; how do we do class valedictorian? Perhaps for the next year we continue to honor numbers 1 and 2 (even though there is no statistical difference between them, actually). But wouldn't it be better if we honor ALL THOSE STUDENTS AT THE TOP who fall into the top distribution? Don't they all deserve that??? Let Paul Schlictman determine where the statistical difference ends, and honor ALL OF THEM. GIVE THEM ALL CARNEY MEDALS because they all deserve them.
These are details that can easily be worked out, if there is a willingness to do so, and people intelligent enough to come up with some reasonable solutions.
At any rate, I hope the school committee will demonstrate that they care more about the students than the college admissions officers. That's what they should be thinking about.
Victoria
thanks, Cliff, for your comments. After watching the school committee meeting last Wednesday, I became concerned that Dave Conway (and by extension Robert Gignac) were more worried about the college admissions officers than they were about our students.
ReplyDeleteHe stated that college admissions officers don't like the practice, and he is absolutely correct.
See NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/education/05rank.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
They don't like the system because they cannot reduce the student to a number - they are forced to open the file and get to know the student. The article also talks about the "context" of the grades, yet LHS has never been concerned with colleges understanding the context of the GPA of Lyceum students in relation to other students.
Lyceum aside, the GPA distribution system is so much better for ALL students. It won't penalize those at the very top, but it WILL help to incentivize those in the middle and at the bottom. Instead of viewing oneself as a number and thinking about what a loser you are, students see themselves in a group with other students who have a very, very similar class rank, in which there is little if any statistical difference. While they may know that they could never become one of the top ten, with a GPA distribution they will be able to see that with just a little extra effort, they can move into the next category. It gives them a reason to try harder.
Take the student who is 400/750. Schools will likely never bother to read the essay, which could describe their struggle to keep up with classes while needing to work and care for younger siblings while their single mother works. This is not an unusual story in Lowell, and doesn't mean that such a student would not succeed in college. It simply means that they did not have the advantages of other students such that they could devote their energies primarily to their studies.
My hope is that as the school committee continues to think about moving towards a GPA distribution, that they will consider what is best for the STUDENTS not what is best for the college admissions officers - isn't that what we elected them to do?
I also agree, Cliff, that what is good for some students is good for all, and if it is good for the class of 2016, it is good for the class of 2013. Yes, there are issues to consider: does the weighting system get changed? With this system is doesn't need to change anything; how do we do class valedictorian? Perhaps for the next year we continue to honor numbers 1 and 2 (even though there is no statistical difference between them, actually). But wouldn't it be better if we honor ALL THOSE STUDENTS AT THE TOP who fall into the top distribution? Don't they all deserve that??? Let Paul Schlictman determine where the statistical difference ends, and honor ALL OF THEM. GIVE THEM ALL CARNEY MEDALS because they all deserve them.
These are details that can easily be worked out, if there is a willingness to do so, and people intelligent enough to come up with some reasonable solutions.
At any rate, I hope the school committee will demonstrate that they care more about the students than the college admissions officers. That's what they should be thinking about.
Victoria
I can understand the problem with class rank, particularly when the classes the students are taking have a wide range of difficulty.
ReplyDeleteBut let's look at two high schools, one whose policy is to mark high, and the other having very stringent marking. When comparing GPA of students from the two schools, we may find that the "easy-marking" school with an average student beats the more stringent school's top students.
So to some degree class rank mitigates the discrepancy between schools. That may be important to admission officers.
Three months is too long for a reactionary answer, but may be required to get the best answer.