Education consultant stresses importance of grading to Marblehead middle school

MARBLEHEAD – The way schools grade can be crucial.Dr. Douglas Reeves, a nationally-known education consultant, made that point with a reference to the Super Bowl Monday morning.”Maybe we shouldn’t give the Lombardi Trophy to the team that wins the Super Bowl,” he said. “Maybe we should give it to the team that has the highest average score in its games throughout the season. If I said that in New York, the fans would get it. They’d say, ‘Hey, wait a minute.”Grading has to be accurate and fair,” he added. “Kids won’t trust us if we don’t get it right.”It was part of a Marblehead breakfast party Monday, inviting 50 educators, parents and community leaders to the Marblehead Veterans Middle School cafeteria to hear Reeves kick off a Professional Development Day.The theme of his remarks, and his four-hour teacher lecture, was “Connecting Every Level of Leadership from the Board Room to the Classroom.”Reeves, a Swampscott resident, is the founder of The Leadership and Learning Center. His strongest point was the importance of teacher leaders, an idea Superintendent of Schools Paul Dulac is working to implement.Reeves admitted that talks like his were last on the list when teachers were polled on their single greatest day-to-day influence. Memos from administrators were next to last, and education classes weren’t much better. Topping the list by far was the example set by other teachers.Reeves told the group he was glad to be in Marblehead.”It’s a pleasure to talk about what’s going right for a change,” he said, praising the system for what he called a true spirit of collaboration.Non-fiction writing, another idea Dulac wants emphasized, was also praised for helping students to analyze what they learned in math, science and social studies classes.He called for a change in thinking, calling education a revenue source rather than an expense and pointing out the billions of dollars in lifetime costs for school dropouts, pointing out that every dropout story begins with one failed class.Even though Reeves was visiting a town with strong MCAS scores, he made that point and underscored it.”Count your 12th graders and see how many there were in the class in ninth grade and tell me there’s no problem,” he said.One of the battlefields for schools trying to reach students is the eighth grade.”If an eighth-grade student is reading below grade level there’s an 85 percent chance that that student will be below grade level all the way through high school,” he said. “Many students who fail algebra do so because they have a reading problem, not a math problem.”And if we try it and we’re wrong, what is our risk? Over-literate ninth graders?”