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Quick! Go outside and dig yourself a hole. Use a big shovel. Make the hole really deep. Step back and assess your work. Got that hole nice and deep? Good. Now, fill it back in with a teaspoon. You’re probably thinking something like, “There’s no way!” or “That’ll take forever!”
Now you know how a kid who’s dug himself a hole in his grades feels. Just one zero requires two perfect scores to pull the average above failing. When the zeros pile up the student loses hope of ever catching up and the cycle continues. It’s a scenario I’m intimately familiar with; we saw it in our son before he was diagnosed with ADHD. His spectacular grades on tests couldn’t make up for missing and incomplete assignments. I wonder how many students have given up trying to dig themselves out of the failure pit in the last two months of this school year.
The problem is that the tool you dig failure with is big: from zero to sixty-four points in District 204. The tool you use to turn that grade point average around is tiny in comparison. So some schools, like Russell Hawkins Junior High School in Jackson, MO, are taking a radical approach to make it possible for students to turn their failures into success: they’re throwing away the zero.
At first look, a no-zeros grading policy seems to reward irresponsibility. Why, after all, should a student who doesn’t do an assignment get any credit? I agree with educators who counter that a failing grade is a failing grade, whether it’s counted from zero or from 60. Dwight Carter, principal of Gahanna Lincoln High School in Gahanna, OH, explains, “…from a pure ratio standpoint, an F is clearly weighted much heavier than any other grade and has the greatest impact.”
We’ve given failure the equivalent of Thor’s battle hammer. Against those odds, the failing student needs the academic equivalent of a military surgical strike. Here’s a comparison. Say a student gets zeros on two assignments at the beginning of the semester, then buckles down and scores 74, 83 and 91 on subsequent assignments. Her average would be just about 50. Even three perfect assignments won’t get her into passing territory. I’d have trouble motivating myself against those odds; I know it feels impossible to a child. If those two failing assignments were scored at 64, however, her average after buckling down would be about 75. That’s something that starts to look achievable.
I’ve heard it said that giving students zeros prepares them for adult life. “If you don’t do your work, you get fired,” they say. The problem with that argument is a public school isn’t a workplace; we can’t fire our students. Schools are supposed to train students to succeed and we need grading policies that don’t make it impossible for some students to do just that.
