Monday, April 26, 2010

The Educated Reporter: Making the grade: story ideas.

The Educated Reporter: Making the grade: story ideas.

Making the grade: story ideas.

Okay, yeah, sorry about the headline. Such an easy fallback title that shows up practically everywhere.

The topic, though: so much there! Over the last five years or so, school districts have taken a hard look at the way students are graded. Efforts to make grades more “meaningful” butt up against efforts to leave no child behind, as a lawsuit in Austin demonstrates. Minimum-grading policies that set a floor of 50 may seem like coddling, but then again, isn’t the 0-100 scale, with a 40-point range of acceptability and 60 points of failing, sort