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Ridgewood NJ, during the public comment section of the Ridgewood Board of Education meeting on October 2nd a concerned parent brought up the fact the the School district has a policy to not publish class ranking or at least tell seniors their rank which are often necessary for use to access merit scholarships .
Continue reading Ridgewood High School: What Even Happened to the “Tradition of Excellence”
Brian Stack
The movement of schools across the country from a traditional to a standards-based or competency-based grading model is calling into question the age-old practice of asking the valedictorian and the salutatorian to be the speakers at graduation.
New Hampshire’s Concord Monitor recently published a story describing how several New Hampshire high schools have already abandoned this model in favor of one that opens up the privilege of being selected as a graduation speaker to a much broader cohort of deserving students.
The practice of calculating class rank is obsolete in today’s educational environment. In a recent Phi Delta Kappan article, University of Kentucky professor and educational reform author Thomas Guskey explains that “Class Rank Weighs Down True Learning.”
Guskey argues that schools must decide whether their intent is to select or develop talent. Selecting talent, he explains, is indicative of poor teaching, because it is achieved when teachers and schools create the greatest possible variation of assessment scores so they can distinguish between students with greater talent from those with less.