School Report Cards, Then and Now

When I was at school some years ago, the teachers had no qualms about telling my parents exactly how I was doing. “Needs to pay attention in class” was a typical comment. My marks were given in percentages, and lest my parents be under any misapprehension about my progress, my ranking in class was given as well. I was usually somewhere in the middle.

In my final year, a new course, geology, was offered in keeping with the emphasis on science in those early Sputnik days. It was taught by an inexperienced university student, who happened to be a very generous marker. I was attracted to this course as an easy alternative to French, and I did very well, boosting my class average considerably. As a result, my report card recorded that I was “second in class”, but to make my status quite clear a comment was added: “Average boosted by high geology mark”. In those days, report cards were not concerned with the child’s self esteem but gave the parents a clear and accurate account of their child’s academic progress.

Not so today. According to an article by Michael Zwaagstra in the Gobe and Mail May 7 entitled “School report cards should be clear, not confusing”, the BC Education Ministry has decreed that that students in grades eight and nine will no longer receive letter grades or percentages on their report cards, but instead be deemed Emerging, Developing, Proficient or Extending. God help the parents hoping to learn how their child is progressing in school! No children should feel that they have failed, of course, so the Emerging category includes “both students at the beginning stages of grade level expectations, as well as those before grade level expectations.” There is no category for the student who is Not Progressing or Regressing.

As the Gobe article points out, the curriculum document is full of “gobbledygook” and “meaningless verbiage”. And the awkward syntax of the quoted extracts reveals the mindset of the curriculum writers who can’t be clear even to themselves. How can a student be at a “stage” of an expectation or “before” an expectation? But of course, we mustn’t say that he or she “fails to meet” an expectation.

Apart from the failure to give a precise account of the student’s progress, there is an another serious consequence of this kind of nonsense. The absurdities on the Left can cause otherwise sensible people to move to the Right. A small percentage of British voters, fed up with the excesses of European regulations and red tape, voted for Brexit. Enough to make the difference. And on our own continent, dangerous leaders on the right who condemn the wokery of the left may attract voters who would normally give them a wide berth.

As a side note, all my life I have regretted abandoning the rather demanding French course for the soft option. Furthermore, encouraged by my inflated geology mark to think that I was better than I was, I went on to complete a science degree majoring in that subject, only to realize that I had chosen the wrong path. Later I spent a year in France wishing that I had continued the language at school.