Our Public School System Is Not Working.
By Bennett Jester
Your score is not your intelligence.
Schools today are incredibly reliant on grades and tests to evaluate students. This doesn't work, and there are so many ways to prove this fact. Grades are just not working for students - or anyone, for that matter. They trick people into thinking that they are an objective evaluation of intelligence, when in fact they are anything but that.
I'm a student. 14 years old, I just graduated from a Montessori school where I spent my years up until eighth grade. Montessori schools don't use tests and grades until seventh grade. That means that I had the incredible privilege of being brought up in an environment without grades.
In seventh grade, even us Montessori kids began to get grades and tests. People's outlook towards learning shifted. We began writing papers to get a good grade, not to write a good paper. The two things may seem similar at times, but they're very different.
Students today are incredibly disillusioned with school. If you haven't talked to a student recently, consider this, brought to you by Google:
When we tell someone that they are dumb, they will feel dumb.
Grades are not objective. They pretend that they are fair because everyone is measured in the same way.
As you can see, the general feeling about school is terrible. In particular, I'd point you to the autocompletes for 'school makes me feel': the biggest feelings invoked by school are 'dumb', 'stressed', 'sad', and 'anxious'.
Grades are a huge part of causing these feelings. When we tell someone that they are dumb, as a young child as small as five recieving these assessments, they will feel dumb. Stress and anxiousness are a product of the system, where people need to succeed at tests.
And tests are a strange way of measuring intelligence. When I went into seventh grade and began getting tested, a strange thing happened. Where before, everyone was together intellectually, all with our different strengths and weaknesses but nobody meaningfully 'smarter' than another, suddenly some of us were getting consistently higher scores. But it was the same group that, before grades, had all been just... kids.
What I realized is that grades are not objective. They pretend to be, they pretend that they are fair because everyone is measured the same way, and in that very shallow way, I suppose they are 'fair.' But there is a different issue at stake.
Imagine the Olympics. Top athletes in every field come to compete. (This analogy is imperfect, as schools should not be competitive environments, but bear with me.) Everyone arrives, and instead of seeing all of the equipment for their various skills, they see only a track.
They don't understand as they are all put onto the starting blocks. The announcer counts down, and the race is on. Of course, the runners, those who came to the Olympics for this, are first by a wide margin. But everyone else, the swimmers and pole-vaulters and all the other kinds of athletes - they don't do so well.
Of course they don't do so well - they're not being measured in their sport! They're being measured in a way that doesn't allow their positives to show up.
And that, in a nutshell, is what is happening with grading. Everyone is being measured by the same ruler, but it's still not fair, because some people are more suited to that ruler than others. and - this is key - it doesn't mean that the others are dumb!
But we pretend that it is, and that's a huge part of the issue. I think grades are wrong, but we can make a huge, positive change even without taking grades out of the learning environment. We need to realize, as a society, that grades aren't a measurement of intelligence.
I created this website, as well as all of the other activism I'm doing, to raise awareness about grades. I want people to know that there are alternatives out there, but first and foremost, that your score is not your intelligence.
On that note, I invite you - anyone reading this - to take to Twitter and share how grades have affected you. With the hashtag #MyGradingStory, our voices can be heard and we can share our stories with the world.
Take this first step with me, please.
-Bennett Jester
Graduate of Madison Community Montessori School.
If you're interested in talking to me or learning more, you can DM me on Twitter @JesterBennett or check out the further reading page.