Disappointed in the NEA (again)

Any other committed, pro-learning, reform-minded teachers out there frustrated and horrified about the NEA's waffling on grade inflation? The article they just published on NEA Today read like a laundry list of red herrings, ad hominem attacks on all-that-has-worked-in-the-past (the author thinks they're all just right wing talking points), and straw man arguments that confuse the why to grade, with how, and with why we shouldn't bother in the first place. Does anyone else find it disquieting that we should supposedly be worried that apparently, realistic grades will harm our students' mental health, even as we're the ones who supposedly are "upholding standards?" That they can bring up recent, statistical, economic studies that show potential harms of lenient grades to students' growth, yet dismiss them, why? Because Alfie Kohn wrote critically about their effects on intrinsic motivation in 1988? It's remarkable that after 100 years of schools giving grades, the educationalist establishment continues to believe that somehow giving "narrative summaries of student performance" isn't a grade, or that "grades don't measure what students learn," the very definition of misalignment of assessment to outcomes. I'd like to hear from teachers out there interested in the constructive side of this argument: yes, the pressures to inflate grades are real, but yes, they're vital to our social function of sorting students for college admissions, and yes, they can accurately name exactly those markers we actually want to measure and incentivize if we're being conscientious, and no, we're not just trying to stress students out for no reason. Please share your take, especially if you find yourself tempted to dig in your heels even in the face of all this relentlessly opportunistic backsliding!... submitted by /u/paradoxyssentialist [link] [comments]