I don’t know when grading first happened in schools but I suspect that it was connected in some way to ranking people who wanted to be there, or who in some way cared about the grade, to whom the grade made some kind of sense. In truth, I have neither the time nor the inclination to study the history of grading.
Robert Harrell has addressed the topic here, perhaps in the Primers. In my mind grading as we do it now is pretty much a dinosaur whose existence is accepted even though dinosaurs died out millions of years ago so what is it doing here? Whether it was somehow connected early on to privilege matters little. What matters is that kids are suffering as a result of how we grade them in our schools.
Laura Avila wrote here lately about her student Tommy. What she wrote makes me realize even more, if that were possible since I have always had a huge unspoken problem with it, that grading as it is done now no longer applies in American schools, and hasn’t for some time. There are too many Tommys. Read what Laura wrote and then tell me that we need to grade those Tommy kids using discrete item analysis strategies comparing of them to kids of privilege:
“Tommy” whose father just returned from jail to live in the small trailer with his mother (who works at a convenience store), her boyfriend and little brother, has never had any exposure to a different language or culture. He comes from a family that totally hates school and will probably never do anything with Spanish. However, in class he shows up, looks at the board, at me, gives ideas, etc. etc. Still at the end of the year he cannot remember “he wants”even though he was present in body and mind all along. It would take him probably another entire year to remember “he wants”. Should I assess him with “what he can do” with the language and fail him? Or should I assess him with his effort all year to be an active contributing member of our community? Spanish was the only class he didn’t fail last year and I didn’t just give him his credit, he earned it.