How do you know who's doing well then? Seems like eliminating quantitative measurements will only make things worse.

How about eliminate grades but only have standardized exams? Standardized exams are less susceptible to the grade fiddling.

Then they spend the whole year “studying” for the standardized test and learn nothing. That’s how it currently is and I don’t see that changing. Standardized exam scores are utilized for funding.

A kid takes a French class. Can he speak French afterwards? Can he read/write in French? I guess that's how you'd know if he learned it. Is that a test? I guess so but I'd like to see grades take a backseat to actual learning. Maybe that's a bad position to take.

I think we have the same idea: stupid grades that don't measure actual results are bad.

Not that I'm salty, but I always had poor grades because I rarely if ever did homework. But I aced the tests, so why bother?

Yup. There should be fast tracks and slow tracks. If I already know the material, I get to advance. No need to hold everyone back.

It's too bad I didn't have the language to debate consequentialist vs deontological ethics with my 6th grade math teacher.

But now nobody can say whether any curriculum is better.

Language curricula are not any more effective (i.e. pretty terrible) at teaching language than they ever have been. So since these data-driven improvements haven't shown up yet, we shouldn't be worried about risking them.

Additional food for thought from a educator's perspective: "I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a cop"

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/i-wanted-to-be-a-teac...

>So if people need some extrinsic motivation to engage in my class, one of two things might be happening. Maybe they’re just not interested in what I have to offer. That’s fine! They should take a different class. More likely, though, the problem is me: I'm somehow subverting people’s natural curiosity. Maybe I’m doing that by inflicting evaluation on my students—rules! points! policies!—instead of just showing them what they came to see.

This paragraph shows the difference between college and other education. This applies to college because everyone there paid to learn. This does not apply to public schools, ESPECIALLY if it's in an area where the culture is bad for education. There are a ton of kids who absolutely do not care at all about anything you have to say if there are no consequences for being apathetic.

Why do we all need to be impacted by the "bad for education" areas?

Maybe kids that are ready can just start going to college earlier or even skip high school altogether. Yes, they'll have to pay but a community college will suffice. They could probably just take the GED test and pass at 14 years old. I can only imagine how dumbed down that test is.

A lot of people in positions of power are currently obsessed with achieving equality of outcomes (aka equity) and dumbing down to the lowest common denominator is an only working way to achieve that goal for large groups of people.

Are we going to see a transition to a pure pass/fail grading system then?

That might not be a bad idea. But it still doesn't solve the problem of some people learning/advancing quicker than others.

Why is that inherently a problem? Some people will always learn/advance quicker than others in just about any are of life for a variety of reasons. The only way to "solve" that problem generally would be some very dystopian form of social control.

I fully support kids being able to advance as quickly as they can or want to. The current system does not support that.

In many ways we're already at an always pass system.

We don't practice equal opportunity in the USA.

What do we practice then? In this country if you work harder/smarter, you are more successful.

I have a thought that GPA as KPI are for teachers and schools, not kids.