Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To)

Schooling has become less about learning and more about the scramble for good grades, high test scores, and spotless transcripts. No one is happy about this, least of all students. But what can be done? Off the Mark explains how we got into this predicament, why our reforms haven’t worked, and how we can reorient our system to advance learning.

Table of Contents:
Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction I. Grading, Rating, Ranking: Undermining Learning 1. How Grades Fail 2. This Is a Test 3. Your Permanent Record II. A World of Scores: How We Got Here and Why We’re Stuck 4. Tools of Necessity 5. The Culture of Assessment III. Sustaining Learning: False Starts and Future Prospects 6. It’s a Small World after All 7. Homegrown Experiments 8. Sustaining Learning Conclusion Notes Acknowledgments Index

Review :
A probing history and analysis of our most pervasive but largely unchallenged assessment technologies: grades, tests, and transcripts...everyone would do well to read this book's honest and layered picture of what we're up against. -- Jeremy T. Murphy Teachers College Record A detailed and thoughtful critique of contemporary 'assessment technologies'--grades, tests, and transcripts--and some suggestions for reform. -- Glenn C. Altschuler and David Wippman Pittsburgh Post-Gazette An excellent read for classroom teachers, who will find that it helps them better understand what is happening (and discover that others get it, too). -- Peter Greene Forbes Leaves the reader with a sense of hope...for incremental reforms that might lead to a more humane system of schooling...on the one hand, epic in its ambitions and, on the other hand, accessible in its prose. The authors have synthesized mountains of research and historiography, writing a single volume that is diagnostic of current challenges, historical in its context, and linear in its reform agenda. -- Wade H. Morris History of Education Quarterly If you want to understand how tests, grades, and records of student performance end up eroding classroom learning, Off the Mark is the book to get. A remarkably useful guide for teachers, administrators, parents, and wannabe reformers, it explains not only how tests, grades, and transcripts have chipped away at classroom learning in the past, but also what some schools have done now to curb their effects. -- Larry Cuban, author of Confessions of a School Reformer Visitors from another planet would find themselves bewildered by the crazy-quilt set of assessments currently used in our educational system. The good news: No need to reinvent from scratch. Original and useful, Off the Mark provides food for thought and plans for action. -- Howard Gardner, coauthor of The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be In Off the Mark, Schneider and Hutt offer timely and tangible considerations for re-examining the information we rely on to support and measure success for students and schools. Whether you're a teacher grappling with the question of how to provide effective feedback on learning progress to students and families or a family or community member troubled by the lack of dimension and perspective in our broken school rankings, this book is key to navigating a better way toward equitable, robust, asset-based assessment that will inform and support student success. -- Becky Pringle, President of the National Education Association Off the Mark is a timely account of the uses and misuses of standardized tests, grades, and transcripts. The authors offer several pragmatic ideas about how these deeply embedded measures can be revised to lessen their power. -- Diane Ravitch, author of Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America's Public Schools