Franklin Roosevelt reportedly promised Americans “a chicken in every pot.” Nowadays it seems that educationists are promising students an “honors” mark in every report card.

An article on Monday in the Sun Journal showed that kids graduating from high school in Maine are almost certain to graduate at some “honors” level. At Cape Elizabeth High, 86 percent of graduates average B or A. At Greely High in Cumberland, it’s 83 percent.

In Portland, the two large high schools were 70 percent (Portland High) and 68 percent (Deering). Lowest among the six in the article was 58 percent at Standish (Bonny Eagle). The Bonny Eagle and Portland numbers are more comfortable for me, but still too high. Is four-sevenths (Bonny Eagle) or two-thirds (Portland, Deering) still not out of whack?

Do two-thirds of all students really perform at an “honors” level?

This comes down to an old truth. When everybody receives a prize, the prize means nothing. Maybe that’s why Frito-Lay quit putting “prizes” in each box of Cracker Jack. When everyone gets a prize, the only real winners are the trophy makers. And a few soccer moms and soccer dads whose kids won’t grow up to be Pele or Mia Hamm.

The meaninglessness that comes from everyone getting top grades (read prizes) may have contributed to Maine’s implementing the proficiency-based education standards. They are intended to emphasize what students actually learn and learn how to do, and the system is coming in for criticism and damnation now that its debut impends. The fooferaw over proficiency-based standards seems to focus on the difficult idea of asking us to think of grades as 1, 2, 3, 4 rather than A, B, C, D, F.

I don’t believe that’s the real issue, but it’s what people complain about most. The real issue is how to assess a student’s progress. How do we assess her readiness to move on to the next level of work? How do we assess her preparation for becoming a grownup, a citizen, a participant in society? Do we certify that she has completed each step, or do we measure seat time and “effort” and add points so she can get into “a good college?”

In general, teachers can be respected by their students or they can be liked. Not both. As a teacher in college (Miami University of Ohio, University of Maine, UMF), I was known by journalism students as a “hard ass” grader. I wore the title with neither pride nor chagrin. It was accurate. Some classes, no student earned an A. Usually, most earned Cs. In the all-senior class in editorial writing at Miami, though, eight of the 13 earned As, three earned Bs, two had Cs. So, I was not formulaic, just hard-assed.

I thought my responsibility was to train students to be ready to work when they walk into a newsroom, so I opted for respect. Still, I am blessed to have become friends with some students who took courses I taught. I have attended their weddings, their parents’ funerals. At least three came to my wife’s funeral last June, two others sent condolences. Seems that in opting for respect, I also earned friendship. At least from some.

We’re not going to go back to the objective notion of answer all the questions correctly and you get 100. That works in algebra, not so much in writing courses.

One alternative is grading on the curve. Performances are grouped, with, say, the top 10 percent getting As, the next 20 percent getting Bs, the middle 40 getting Cs, the next 20 getting Ds and the bottom 10 percent getting Fs. This distribution on a graph looks like a bell, narrow at the edges, thick in the middle, and is often called the bell curve. Students are compared only against their own class.

As a professor, I never graded on the curve. It seemed unfair for two reasons. First, when those kids went into the job market, they were competing against graduates from all over the country, not from their college class. A kid with a C from UMaine may well have got more from a course than a kid with an A from, say, the University of Tennessee.

Second, I rebelled against automatically failing one kid in 10. I almost never gave an F grade, partly because I worked with the kid to bring up her performance and, at UMaine, partly because of a course called “newspaper lab,” in which the students published a daily newspaper. Other students helped the fallen-behind students. It’s called teamwork. They all knew they had to get the pages to Bangor by 11 p.m. so the Bangor Daily News could get them to the Ellsworth American in time to print the papers to come back to Orono on a BDN truck. They were working furiously, just as in a real newsroom, even though most of them would probably earn Cs for the effort.

I don’t like grading on the curve, but at least the grade has some relevance to something.

At UMaine, our journalism department’s seven professors had 450 declared or intended majors. Nearly one in 20 students at UMaine in 1980-83 wanted to be in journalism. But there were not 450 jobs in journalism in the entire state of Maine. Because we had so many majors and so few profs, the unlucky kids in the class of ’83 had to take as many as seven classes that I taught. There goes the GPA. Mom.

Clearly, a great many of those majors would never be reporters, editors, ad execs or broadcasters. Of those whose careers I have followed, their careers as they approach the end of their working years run a gamut from heading the state chamber of commerce to running the Maine State Golf Association to environmental consulting and lobbying to lawyering to teaching to being a town manager. Some work in newspapers, including this one, and in magazines and broadcasting. Many earned Cs in their journalism classes.

If schools don’t move ahead to more honest assessments of student performance, there will come a time when there is no point in assessing student work at all. Can it be long before all the kids in kindergarten get “honors?” Is that what educationists want?

Bob Neal studied at two high schools and six colleges and universities. He has taught at three universities. None of that guarantees that he knows a thing or two.

Bob Neal

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