Is this the end of the honor roll system?" According to this story, Tennessee parents of students with low grades are fed up with reading the names of other children in the honor roll section of newspapers. They've decided that publishing the Honor Roll is a violation of privacy, because doing so reveals not only those worthy of merit, but, by their exclusion, students incapable of superior performance. I like to think of this affair as the "sequel" to the earlier crisis involving competition in sports--now competition will be banned in academics. Where there are no losers, there will also be no winners.
I must admit that this issue speaks of a general weakening of our society that would require a Nietzsche to overcome.
Playing Devil's Advocate
I wonder if Principal Steven Baum at Julia Green Elementary in Nashville has read Discipline and Punish: "Baum thinks spelling bees and other publicly graded events are leftovers from the days of ranking and sorting students." Maybe if the system of rank is not as palpable, the students who aren't doing as well won't be discursively pigeonholed into the rank of "bad student." ("I'm so happy to be a Beta...") But, then again, it's not as if the system of rank is going to go away, and perhaps if it is not as palpable, it will be even more subtle and powerful, and this is all coming from a person who, as a child, got a little disgusted with parents' clamoring for bragging rights when it came to school and grades.
CultureCat
Ostriches still get grades
I don't find this in the least surprising; it seems clear to me that the Lake Woebegonization of education has been in full swing for quite a while. What I don't understand is otherwise intelligent, well-meaning professionals who assert that if we stop drawing attention to relative merit, we will all be of equal merit, as though that is reasonable or desirable. It's just...fever-dream nutty to think that refusing on principle to praise students who are doing well will have some positive impact on the educational environment.
More disturbing is contemplating the real impact of the kind of frivolous nonsense effected in the name of the district admins' understanding of "privacy". Students can't trade papers?
Unmerited Exclusion
Let's just say, "hypothetically," a child has been in the same school system with some of the same peers since first grade. The school system has its honor roll, which, in recent years has become a more generous, inclusive list. Why? Esteem, morale, good will, bumper sticker proliferation (My kid is on the honor roll), fostering a climate of abundant achievement, etc. The child's classroom teachers in grades three, four and five use a Student of the Week system, and it's generally inclusive. Everyone gets a turn as Student of the Week. For three consecutive years, coincidentally (?), the child--in a class of, say, 34--is selected 34th--the last in his class to be student of the week. And he knows it, year after year, that despite his average grades (by no means the worst in his cohort), he is the _last_ to be honored as Student of the Week. He becomes intimately familiar with his rank among peers (although, on the honor roll, he's unranked--name doesn't appear but once or twice during those years). Is this just bad luck or a wobbly system? Is the merit system--in this example--helping low-rank students during their formative years?
I don't know, guess I'm just playing Devil's Advocate, too.