Supreme Court ruling

Court OKs Kids Grading Kids in Class

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court’s ruling that lets schools continue allowing pupils to grade each other’s work is a small victory for teachers, but some parents might not consider it such good news.

“I could see where there might be problems with it,” said Jon Ozment, whose three young children attend public schools in the District of Columbia.

On Tuesday, the high court ruled that the long-standing practice of teachers asking students to swap papers and grade them in class does not violate federal privacy law. The ruling came in the case of a learning-disabled Oklahoma boy whose classmates ridiculed his scores.

Ozment said one of his children was once in a class in which students graded each other’s work. Unlike the case in question, his child wasn’t embarrassed by the practice - but like many parents, Ozment questioned why students, not the teacher, graded the papers.

“I didn’t think it was such a good idea,” he said.

Teachers’ and administrators’ groups welcomed the ruling, saying it keeps such decisions local, as they should be.

“Schools and teachers and families can work these issues out,” said David Strom, counsel for the American Federation of Teachers. “There’s always a way for a parent to request special handling for their children.”

The National PTA didn’t take a position on the topic.

The 9-0 ruling upheld the common practice, in which teachers sometimes have students call out the results for recording in a grade book.

“Correcting a classmate’s work can be as much a part of the assignment as taking the test itself,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for himself and seven colleagues.

“It is a way to teach material again in a new context, and it helps show students how to assist and respect fellow pupils,” wrote Kennedy, a former law professor who still teaches several classes a year.

Justice Antonin Scalia filed a separate concurring opinion, but took issue with part of the ruling’s “incurably confusing” reasoning about what constitutes an education record.

The boy’s mother challenged the practice as embarrassing and a violation of a federal law protecting the privacy of student education records, such as a transcript.

Kristja Falvo’s case became a battle between the education establishment and conservative groups interested in promoting parental rights in schools.

Students and teachers should not have the power to reveal another student’s record - in this case a grade or teacher’s note - without a parent’s permission, Falvo and her supporters argued.

Her children’s school, joined by other school districts and the Bush administration, argued that the 1974 privacy law was not meant to be read that way. In passing the law, Congress was concerned about preserving the privacy of the final, institutional records of a school, not the results of one day’s class work, the Bush administration argued.

The Supreme Court agreed, noting that ruling the other way would invite the federal government to make minute decisions about how a classroom is run.

On Tuesday, Kennedy noted that Falvo’s lawyer had seemed to argue “that if a teacher in any of the thousands of covered classrooms in the nation puts a happy face, a gold star or a disapproving remark on a classroom assignment, federal law does not allow other students to see it.”

“We doubt Congress meant to intervene in this drastic fashion,” Kennedy wrote.

Falvo said Tuesday she has been contacted by parents throughout the country who object to the grading practice, and she still hopes to see it end. Congress could ban the practice, or schools could discontinue it on their own, she said.

“Maybe they won’t use it, because sometimes something legal isn’t healthy,” she said.

National School Boards Association counsel Julie Underwood praised the ruling as a commonsense reading of the federal law.

“A contrary ruling could have been fraught with problems and would have turned a widely used practice into a legal nightmare,” she said.

The current case is Owasso Independent School District v. Falvo, 00-1073.