An “E” For Effort

Some kids are smarter than others. Some kids work harder to learn than others. Some kids have the benefit of parents who read to them, make them study, help them to learn and instill in their children the value of education and knowledge. And schools have long used a grading system to distinguish between those who achieve competence, those who achieve mastery and those who don’t. The former rise to the top of their class. The latter become judges find other ways to fulfill their dreams.

Is that fair to the kids who fail?

The Department of Education wants to lessen the impact of grades on class ranking amid the COVID-19 pandemic in favor of factors like “motivation” and “integrity.”

As part of new guidelines issued late last month, the DOE is encouraging principals to change the process that determines valedictorians and other academic honors.

Class rank has traditionally been established through grade point average with some additional weights for advanced coursework.

But citing the hardships on students imposed by the coronavirus, the DOE wants administrators to rethink that system and instead use other measures.

While the guidelines are, at the moment, meant to deal with Covid by excluding measures such as lateness and showing up at all, this has long been part of a larger scheme to end the oppression of grading that keeps some students down just for being dumber and less motivated than other students. Grade inflation has been quietly happening for years, but handing out A’s for coloring within the lines didn’t expand the universe of marginalized Ph.D.s in Lesbian Interpretive Dance sufficiently to fix the problem. It’s time to get to the core issue.

White language supremacy in writing classrooms is due to the uneven and diverse linguistic legacies that everyone inherits, and the racialized white discourses that are used as standards, which give privilege to those students who embody those habits of white language already.

This was the argument made by Arizona State University professor of rhetoric and composition, Asao Inoue. Rephrasing this in cogent words, he’s saying kids who grow up in families, neighborhoods and schools where people speak standard “white” English are going to speak and write better than those who do not if standard “white” English is the measure of accomplishment in the classroom.

Inoue added that White supremacy culture “makes up the culture and normal practices of our classrooms and disciplines.” To combat the issues, Inoue suggested implementing labor-based grading, which “redistributes power in ways that allow for more diverse habits of language to circulate.” He has also coined the phrase, “Habits of White Language,” used to describe the common way teachers and professors grade papers.

Not only does Inoue raise the problem, but he has a solution, labor-based grading.

Labor-based grading would mean weighing assignments based on how much “labor” students put into their work, and not assigning grades based on grammar or quality of work.

“Labor-based grading structurally changes everyone’s relationship to dominant standards of English that come from elite, masculine, heteronormative, ableist, white racial groups of speakers.”

If your first reaction is that Inoue begs the question, since schools either teach a language or don’t, you would have a point. After all, if students were unconstrained by rules of grammar, spelling, syntax, etc., then they aren’t being taught much of anything. There are languages that involve tongue clicking, and I suppose they’re perfectly fine languages, but they aren’t our language, no matter how many descriptors you put in front of “English.”

A point was raised by someone who seemed to claim possession of linguistic knowledge that AAVE had “internally consistant [sic] grammar and native speakers” and was therefore a “language” from a linguistics perspective. Then he added, “but no one has ever suggested teaching AAVE to anyone.” While the contention that AAVE has internally consistent grammar and native speakers reflects someone who hasn’t spend much time above 125th Street. But  while AAVE has not been taught to students, it has been used as a teaching tool for students. And now it’s being proposed as an alternative to the “dominant standard” of white English, because the Tower of Babel is only a fairy tale.

But Inoue’s solution bears consideration notwithstanding his soft racism of low expectations. While there may be a tendency to a knee-jerk reaction of disdain for any system of grading that rejects quality in favor of effort, why be so dismissive of “motivation” and “integrity”? Some jobs are brain surgery. A brain surgeon, for example. Others are not, lawyer for example, and aren’t necessarily best performed by our best and brightest. Indeed, sometimes our best and brightest don’t perform functions very well at all, or are so internally enamored with their brilliance that they blow it big time.

It’s not that these things are mutually exclusive. One can be smart and highly motivated. A student can put in great effort to achieve and push the limits of his natural intelligence to their extreme. Is this a bad thing? Not at all, and it may be as much of a quality as being able to do quadratic equations in one’s head.

While the notion that competence and mastery are some elitist scam to keep the marginalized down, so too is effort. Ever meet a smart kid who doesn’t try very hard? He’s got the goods, but can’t be bothered. Maybe he shows up or maybe not. Maybe he does the task or maybe he uses his intellect to make up excuses for not doing so. Is it better to be brilliant or to show up?

This isn’t to suggest that teaching “white” English should give way to grading AAVE as an acceptable substitute, or that the kid who can’t add two plus two should be admitted to medical school, but that effort, the personal responsibility to try one’s hardest and do one’s best, is an underappreciated virtue that deserves to be shown greater respect. It’s not that it demands a new grading paradigm, since education is about academic accomplishment, but it is about who you would want standing next to you when something has to get done, the smartest guy or the guy you could trust to be there and try his best.