For those who teach LD students in High School. What is your school’s grading policy about LD students at an IEP level but are taking academic and vocational courses?
Our discussion is between having the students receive a number grade to reflect acheivement at this level or to have it criterion referenced and receive a Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory evaluation. I’m interested in schools who have wrestled with the problem and howit was resolved.
Thanks
Re: Grading for HS LD classes
I’ve never seen this resolved in a satisfactory way. If you give grades that are different from everybody else’s, you are in trouble for stigmatizing the LD kids, and they or their parents will complain. If you give numerical grades based on actual performance you get in trouble for marking the LD kids down and discriminating because of their disability (and even if most of these kids achieve well and get good grades, the one who fails will complain). And if you grade on a subjective decision of improvement or based on previous performance and give numerical and letter grades like everyone else, everyone will complain - the LD kids who got lower grades, because they worked hard and deserved an A and it’s all your opinion anyway, and the other non-classified kids who got B’s and who see others get A’s for far less achievement. This is one of the reasons I won’t teach in school systems any more, and one reason a lot of teachers are very bitter about mainstreaming; the harder they work the more black marks they get on their records.
When I taught at the high school level, we graded resource children based on whatever they were working on at the time, according to the IEP goals. They received number grades just as all classes were given.
Janis