Snowplow Parents Are Ruining Online Grading [ NYTimes ]

The flava:

During the 2011-12 school year, Roxanne Greitz Miller was a professor-in-residence at a California middle school that had just started using an online grade book app that allowed parents and students to see students’ grades as soon as they were posted. I recently spoke to Miller, who is now the dean of the College of Educational Studies at Chapman University, and she said it was clear to her almost immediately that this technology was “game changing” for parents, teachers and students — and not in a good way.

“I’ll never forget the example where there was a student in an English classroom in eighth grade and the teacher said to the student, ‘You need to put your phone away.’ And the student said, ‘I can’t. It’s my mom. You still haven’t posted my makeup work that you graded, and if it’s not posted by this weekend, I’m going to be grounded,’” she told me, highlighting how stress provoking and disruptive to learning the technology could be.

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks talking to teachers about their experiences with online grade books like Schoology and Infinite Campus, and many of their anecdotes were similar to what Miller shared: anxious kids checking their grades throughout the day, snowplow parents berating their children and questioning teachers about every grade they considered unacceptable, and harried middle and high school teachers, some of whom teach more than 100 kids on a given day, dealing with an untenable stream of additional communication.

Article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/opinion/grades-parents-students-teachers.html