Marked Up & Down: The Deployment of a Grade-Machine in United States Schooling

Grades, those little marks used to signify learning, have become integral to schooling. What made this possible? This dissertation investigates the earliest recorded instance of grades to pose problems concerning the roles they play. To do so, the concepts of immanence and abstract machines are employed from the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Immanence is employed as an epistemological framework to direct attention the interrelations of social forces in the historical moment. Within this frame, grades as theorized to work as abstract machines meaning that some bit of knowledge is applied to materials to produce representations. From this comes the idea of grade-machines, a shift that puts the emphasis on what grades do in the social contexts of schooling. In order to proliferate interpretations of the historical event, a range of transcribed historical documents are included in the text as convolutes such that readers can interact directly source materials. The author's narrative is presented following these convolutes. This interpretation examines grades as introduced at Yale College in 1785 where they worked to purge some students from school and create various representations of student learning. Grades are then compared to another machine, the cotton gin, to highlight the machine-like work of grades. Here several problems are posed to older explanations for the introduction of grades, namely that grades were deployed to more efficiently deal with a growing student body. Instead, grades have long served a purging function by marking failure and distinguishing levels of learning. Moreover, the introduction of grades initiated a new set of pedagogical knowledges concerning measuring and representing learning that is still employed today in discourses about assessment, data-driven instruction, and grade inflation. The issues raised in this dissertation suggest that these discussions do not pay sufficient attention to the spaces and context into which grades are used as well as ignore the historical purging function grade-machines continue to perform. Finally, a number of questions are raised bout grades in the present in an effort to engage the reader in the process of creating implication and significance of the study.