Should District 211 students be docked for truancy?

Should students at Palatine-Schaumburg High School District 211 be docked points from their grades if they don’t attend class?

The way teachers grade students could be in the infancy of a revolution. Schaumburg High School Principal Tim Little said the process in its “first baby steps.”

Little, Hoffman Estates High School Principal Jim Britton and Fremd High School social studies teacher and District 211 teachers union president Jason Spoor made a presentation at Thursday night’s board meeting regarding how grading could change within the district. Their committee on grading has met twice and will meet again in the spring and summer.

“We’re talking about a very emotionally charged topic,” Little said. ‘It’s emotionally charged for kids, it’s emotionally charged for students, it’s a tough topic to open up and talk about.”

Little said some of the ways teachers grade currently might not agree with changing standards of how students are prepared and educated.

Spoor pointed out the difficulty in developing new ways of grading, as most people have a specific idea burned in to what an “A,” “B” or “C” represents. Some schools even place two grades on report cards. One is the traditional grade and another is for effort, for lack of a better word.

“At the very heart of what a grade is, is it’s a tool to communicate,” Spoor said.

He added: “We want to give an authentic and a real communication tool to those universities to really help our students.”

District 211 Superintendent Nancy Robb added that it would be years before students would see the results. But she felt it was the right time to show the board what the group was doing.

The presentation included suggestions on how to make grades more meaningful and helpful to students, colleges and potential employers. There are 15 suggestions, called “fixes,” in the presentation. They include disregarding behavior when grading student. Behaviors that could affect grades currently include attendance in class and turning in work on time. Another was to avoid grading students in groups and to focus on awarding them marks as individuals.

The four major concentrations the group strove for on grading were accuracy, fairness, specificity and timeliness. As for as timeliness, Britton mentioned how students routinely check their grades online on a daily basis.

Teachers and administrators comprise the group, which will break into two later this year.

Other points of debate included whether a teacher should give a student a zero if a student fails to turn in a major project. Spoor said teachers should be careful about what that zero communicates with the students.

The group also suggested eliminating the penalty of students who turn in work late. The thought is students who learn at a slower pace should not be hurt.