More than a third of U.S. states assign letter grades to schools based on various formulas that include to one extent or another standardized test scores. This post is about the effects of this policy on one student and teacher in North Carolina, where letter grades are given based entirely on testing data.
The author is Justin Parmenter, who teaches seventh-grade language arts at Waddell Language Academy in Charlotte. An educator for more than 20 years, he started his teaching career “believing that I was going to transform every child,” just as many first-year teachers do when they are placed in schools with high-needs populations. He says he quickly learned how complex teaching is.