How the Honor Roll Cheats Students and Divides Schools{no mincing of words, here}

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/174040/how-honor-roll-cheats-students-and-divides-schools

***SNIP

So, let me be the first to say it on the off-chance that nobody else yet has: the honor roll is a shoddy excuse for schooling, a purveyor of tawdry “education,” and an indefensible obstacle to student progress. And that’s being polite.

My junior year of high school, I started getting straight As. When I saw that first report card, I cried. Really. It was monumental. It was probably the first time since the age of nine that grades had made me cry.

I used to not get straight A’s. In seventh grade, I wasn’t on the honor roll. School administrators exploit people like me who ascend the GPA ladder, using us as poster children for their “rags to riches” pedagogy. Not me though—I know what grades really are, what they mean, and whom they help, and if you think for a second that I’d let honor-roll-apologists use my name to propagate that garbage about “working your way up to the honor roll like that guy did,” then you’re out of your mind. That’s because the honor roll’s a joke, a tool, a compilation of hustlers and cheaters, of over-worked disciples, sycophants and snide academic snobs, of miserable minions prepared to regurgitate whatever their educators “teach” them, and of lovely adolescents, like many I know, who desperately avoid the wrath of their high-strung parents by copying off a friend during a math test.

My middle school hosted “Straight A parties” with pizza and games for the “highest achievers.” Hah. I wonder just how many of these students, at the end of the school day, returned to neighborhoods with gangs lining their streets or to homes in which inebriated parents pummeled the living daylights out of each other. About 10 million children witness domestic violence every year, and somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of violent partners also abuse their children. Does anyone honestly believe that many of these victims make it onto their schools’ honor rolls, that all-out domestic brawls are conducive to the “stable study spaces” needed for academic success?

[bemildred]

1. +1. All this "merit" and "metric" stuff is profoundly anti-democratic.

Children are not cattle.

[xchrom]

2. well, i was something of a cow as a child....but i get your point. nt

[bemildred]

4. I think I will refrain from following that line of thought.

It leads to too many unseemly places. And anyway I prefer to think of you as a Princess.

[xchrom]

5. !

[aikoaiko]

3. The author, a high school senior, is full of angst.

Honor rolls are not the reason non-honor roll kids are underperforming. Showing pride in academic success is a good thing.

[Brickbat]

6. Agreed.

I do think that pizza parties and special trips for honor roll kids are over the top, however. A job well done can be its own reward. And you're right; getting rid of honor roll recognition will not somehow make underprivileged kids feel better about themselves in such a way that they will succeed.

[dmallind]

7. More anti intellectual bullshit

What's missing from his list of misfits on the honor roll? Kids who are just intelligent.

Why are screeds like this taken seriously when hardly any school in the country is free from far more pervasive (and hardly ever questioned) deification of kids who just happen to be stronger or faster than their coevals?

Why is it always ok to celebrate physical superiority in US education, but anathema to even accept that such a thing as intellectual superiority even exists? When varsity sports teams and championships become "democratic', maybe then we can think about grades a bit more.

[tritsofme]

8. The young man's age certainly shows

Through his writing.