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By Jessica Grose
Opinion Writer
During the 2011-12 school year, Roxanne Greitz Miller was a professor-in-residence at a California middle school that had just implemented an online grade book that allowed parents and students to see students’ grades as soon as they were posted to an app. I recently spoke to Miller, who is now the dean of the College of Educational Studies at Chapman University, and she said it was clear to her almost immediately that this technology was “game changing” for parents, teachers and students — and not in a good way.
“I’ll never forget the example where there was a student in an English classroom in eighth grade, and the teacher said to the student, ‘You need to put your phone away.’ And the student said, ‘I can’t. It’s my mom. You still haven’t posted my makeup work that you graded, and if it’s not posted by this weekend, I’m going to be grounded,’” she told me, highlighting how stress-provoking and disruptive to learning the technology could be.
I’ve spent the past couple of weeks talking to teachers about their experiences with online grade books like Schoology and Infinite Campus, and many of their anecdotes were similar to what Miller shared: anxious kids checking their grades throughout the day, snowplow parents berating their children and questioning teachers about every grade they considered unacceptable, and harried middle and high school teachers, some of whom teach more than 100 kids on a given day, dealing with an untenable stream of additional communication.
Mitch Foss, who was a classroom teacher in Colorado for 19 years, told me that when he posted grades, he would hear from kids almost instantly via email or text. Sometimes they’d be waiting outside his classroom door to talk about their scores. “You might get emails from parents questioning the grade, wanting an explanation, and that’s for every single thing,” even assignments that had little bearing on students’ overall marks, “which can be overwhelming.”
But the bigger problems created by online grade books, Foss said, were that this kind of virtual communication doesn’t help to produce strong bonds between parents and teachers, and that kids become hyper-focused on their grades to the detriment of developing their minds. In the past several years, one of his biggest struggles in the classroom was “an abandonment, really, of learning as a goal.” There were kids, he said, who were “incredibly skilled at gaming the system” — grade grubbing rather than actually achieving anything intellectually.
In 2016, Miller, along with her co-authors John Brady and Jared Izumi, wrote a comprehensive review of online grading practices that was partly informed by her experience embedded at that middle school. In addition to the issues Foss pointed to, they noted that parents could misinterpret data entered in the online grade books. For example, if a student was absent for a day, sometimes an assignment for that day would show up as a zero, which would tank a student’s average, but only temporarily.
They also found that the minority of parents who are “hyperchecking” — contacting teachers each and every time an unsatisfactory grade is posted — aren’t doing their children any favors. They’re stripping their teenagers of the opportunity to develop the agency needed to succeed as adults: High school used to be a time when students were taking more responsibility for their grades and schedules, but for some families, online grade books can shift that.
Many students now rely on both their parents and the technology itself as crutches. Some parents request access to grades for their college-age children, unable, apparently, to relinquish that degree of control. (Parents aren’t automatically granted access at the collegiate level — students need to provide written consent to give them that access.) What’s more, Miller told me:
As a college administrator, I can tell you it is absolutely frustrating to students who now enter college and their professor doesn’t use the online grade book because they are so used to using that to essentially manage their life. Gone are the days where at the end of class, I could just say to students, now remember, read chapter four for Wednesday, and you have to turn in a summary, you have to turn in the outline for your literature review in class on Friday, and where students would write that down and would do it and do it on time. Now, if it doesn’t appear in the online grade book as a pending assignment with a date, you’re not going to get it when you expect it.
I’m a realist, so I accept that there’s probably no turning back from online grade books — in part because their implementation was bolstered by language in the No Child Left Behind Act directing school districts to employ technology in support of parent involvement and parent-teacher communications. And to be clear, not every teacher I spoke to had a negative experience with online grade books. Some said that the technology made their lives easier and improved communication with some parents. Even the teachers who pointed out the unseemly behavior of some parents and students stressed that it wasn’t the majority who abused the system.
Still, I think there are ways that parents, teachers and students can work toward a healthier relationship with this technology. Several people I spoke to compared the compulsive checking of online grade books to the addiction some people have to social media — driven in part by the kind of alerts that we get from other apps on our phones. So a first step that parents and students could take would be to adjust their settings so that they aren’t constantly peppered with notices about newly posted grades.
Miller suggests that parents put some thought into when and where they talk about grades with their kids, so that it can be a discussion rather than an accusation. “Part of executive functioning and personal management is understanding what’s the right time and place to have a conversation versus not. And so students do need to develop that,” she said.
She also said that schools can opt to display updated grades only on certain dates. For example, teachers can enter the grades at any point, but schools can fix the settings of the portal so that new grades only appear once a week at the same time every week, which might cut down on hyperchecking.
I asked Jennifer Breheny Wallace, the author of “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic — and What We Can Do About It,” how parents can have a healthy relationship with online grade books. She expressed a lot of sympathy for uneasy parents, but said that if kids’ grades aren’t where they should be, she recommends that parents “get curious, not furious.” “Children want to do well. The parents just have to know that they want to do well — they want to feel good about themselves,” so if your child isn’t succeeding, she said, try to figure out why. “Is there a learning difference lurking underneath those poor grades? Is the child feeling a lack of belonging and connection with his classmates, which could hijack important cognitive resources in the classroom? Resources that should be spent paying attention are instead sometimes serving the classroom for social threats.”
Wallace said parents shouldn’t be driving a wedge between kids and teachers because it makes children feel as if they’re “in the middle of an acrimonious divorce.” She added that parents shouldn’t want conversations about grades “bleeding into every conversation you have with your kids. That does a disservice to your relationship and it does a disservice to your child.”
At its heart, the issue is that too many parents see their children’s grades as the ultimate reflection on themselves and their parenting. Even though their oversight may be well-meaning, it’s blinding them to the unintended consequences of their hovering. We need to think carefully about the long-term implications, Miller said, “and we need to think about the anxiety, the lack of privacy and the impediments to the development of independent executive functioning that are occurring when we are essentially delegating a portal to manage all of the deadlines and expectations about K-12 work.”
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