My comeuppance — after a secondary-school career followed by an undergraduate year focusing on Latin, the classics, Reformation history and learning how to be good at exams — came during my first summer job with a window-cleaning crew.
After reading Virgil, Keats, Woolf and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who could take cleaning windows seriously?
That would have been Bill, the lead hand on the crew. Bill knew what he wanted from me — no excuses, just seriously clean windows.
Not only did Bill have standards as to what a clean window looked like, without saying anything that might have demeaned my self-esteem, he was able to explain how to meet his expectations in a way that, after a time, became my own expectations about how to clean a window properly.
To this day, I do our car windows to Bill’s standards before heading out on a trip of any duration — no smears, corners cleaned out, surface polished to a glossy finish.
Later in life, I’ve met people, nearly all of them non-academic, who, like Bill, not only held to high standards of performance but had no hesitation about communicating those expectations and, even more importantly, leading those for whom they were responsible to success.
I think of those folks as some of the best teachers I’ve ever come across: club managers, musicians, tradespeople, newspaper editors and sports coaches who knew what was needed and how to get it done.
Against this background, it is troubling to read about a trend in public and independent education that undermines the whole notion of assessing student achievement and that misleads students as to what the entire process is all about.
I had dismissed the news from the Cotati-Rohnert Park school district in California as a piece of New Age foolishness. That school district has published a new policy enabling kids to earn a passing grade of C with scores of 20 per cent, in other words, for just showing up.
Now comes further news from Ontario that high-school students in the Toronto Catholic School District can score no lower than 35 per cent on their midterms, no matter what.
The 35 per cent grade minimum was brought in to fulfil a directive from the Ontario Ministry of Education that calls upon school districts to determine lower limits of failing grades in its 2010 Growing Success report.
TCSD spokesman John Yan explained that the lower limit applies only to midterm report cards, not to final grades. “Getting a zero at the midterm, you’re more likely to pack it up than if you’re getting 35 per cent … At the end of the day, it’s about encouraging and supporting students to reach their full potential.”
Ontario Ministry spokesman Gary Wheeler confirmed that the province requires all school districts to “determine the lower limit of the range of percentage marks below 50 per cent that teachers may record on the report cards of students in Grades 9 to 12.”
Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that no teacher worth his or her professional qualification would ever award a zero. If the student has been in class, that zero is a teacher failure, not a student failure.
According to the B.C. Provincial Letter Grades Order, even in circumstances where “the student is not, for a variety of reasons, demonstrating minimally acceptable performance,” an ‘I’ letter grade can be assigned, meaning “in progress” or “incomplete.” Only after every effort has been made to rectify the situation can an F for “fail” be awarded on term or final reports, according to the B.C. Education Ministry.
I am no fan of letter grades; the complexity of the teaching and learning process is diminished by reducing it to a single alphabetic descriptor.
The only thing worse would be for an education system to seek disingenuous ways of avoiding confrontation with kids and their parents by telling comforting lies that misrepresent the fact that a student has not yet met reasonable expectations.
If that sounds a little uncompromising, it is what I learned from Bill, and from a series of band leaders and other bosses who were not in the business of protecting my fragile self-esteem, but were mainly interested in whether I could wash a window properly or play the right notes or just get some job done.
None of those people ever told me 20 per cent or even 35 per cent was good enough.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
