Seeds of Destruction

It’s back to school and as usual we begin the year with several days of professional development. This is generally a good way to get teacher heads back in the game after a rejuvenating summer. The focus this year is on that double edged sword we commonly refer to as technology, aka educational technology or edtech. I consider it a happy thing from my point of view as the school librarian who is responsible for teaching information technology. I was the person who planned and set up most of the day’s activities with the edtech themes of collaboration and communication. I arranged sessions on digital storytelling, video production, the SmartBoard, our school’s class web pages and on collaborating on projects with schools around the country and around the world. But there was one rather long session that I was not responsible for setting up. The one on using our district’s new gradebook program from Pearson. And that is the one that made it clear to me that what we were doing was sowing the seeds of our own destruction. We are building and implementing systems that will ultimately further decay our influence, power, and professional stature. The way it is happening is exploitative and sneaky.

My school has been implementing a system of standards based grading for the last four years. When this process was initiated by our principal, I was an early adopter of the concept. In fact I had begun doing something very similar in a Math class I was teaching 8 years ago, before it was even on the principal’s radar. I was trying to make a grading system that was more fair and focused on each specific skill that I was teaching. My support for the principal’s initiative was based on my own experience creating a more accurate grading system but further because it was also a move toward my actual preferred pass/fail system. Standards based grading is a way to remain conscious of removing behavioral issues from academic grading, which I also support. But if technology is a double edged sword, the same can be said of standards based grading. There is a notion of equity on one edge but the other edge has been tempered by corporate America and the realization struck me during the training how that is so.

We are learning to use Pearson’s new addition to their gradebook of a standards based grading option, which two schools in the district are piloting, mine and one other. Both the incorporation of the use of technology in the classroom and the implementation of standards based grading promise a leveling of the playing field which will help eliminate the “achievement gap”. Yes, both have the potential to help educators achieve that goal but simultaneously both further the agenda of corporate education reformers and pave the way for a more streamlined, cost effective system that can generate profit. This is how the demonic brilliance of our capitalist system works. Corporate managers have very long time lines with distant event horizons well plotted. They have time to watch the workforce produce goods and services and they don’t even have to limit their scope to their own employees because any independently developed idea can ultimately be bought (or back engineered). So all of the work that we as teachers do to implement standards based grading ultimately becomes an asset of Pearson.

Here’s a bit of what the gradebook program looks like. When a teacher creates an assignment it is entered into the program by selecting which CCSS standard will be learned by the students. These are all preloaded into the system and there are complex algorithms that weigh scores and average all of the student’s work over the quarter. These programs can differentiate ad infinitum and are capable of tying directly into the standards based Smarter Balance testing that is being put into place this year. But here is the troubling part and I can easily envision this coming down the road. Once the dust settles in a few years and the entire district is on the system, cost cutting initiatives like using software to teach the standards will be sold as a way to personalize education while quietly resulting in a reduction in the teacher force.

As these systems form and gel, opportunities will arise to increase profit by cutting labor costs. It is naive at this point in time to think that this is not the ultimate goal of the corporations behind ed reform. Neoliberal front-men who push ideas like standards based grading are largely unconscious of their complicity with these corporate goals, having been suckered into believing that they are working toward equity when in fact they are helping to increase and solidify the stratification of our society and the implementation of a profit driven education system. All of the work teachers put into creating this system of standards based grading is done out of sincerity and I admit it is oh so easy to be swayed by the hype. Claims of equalizing access to a rigorous education are superficial, they seem to make sense and I don’t want to blame teachers for going along to get along but there is a point when things get ridiculous. Except it won’t be funny when teaching jobs are turned over to Pearson’s machines.