But the bigger problems created by online grade books, Foss said, were that this kind of virtual communication doesn’t help to produce strong bonds between parents and teachers, and that kids become hyper-focused on their grades to the detriment of developing their minds. In the past several years, one of his biggest struggles in the classroom was “an abandonment, really, of learning as a goal.” There were kids, he said, who were “incredibly skilled at gaming the system” — grade grubbing rather than actually achieving anything intellectually.
In 2016, Miller, along with her co-authors John Brady and Jared Izumi, wrote a comprehensive review of online grading practices that was partly informed by her experience embedded at that middle school. In addition to the issues Foss pointed to, they noted that parents could misinterpret data entered in the online grade books. For example, if a student was absent for a day, sometimes an assignment for that day would show up as a zero, which would tank a student’s average, but only temporarily.
They also found that the minority of parents who are “hyperchecking” — contacting teachers each and every time an unsatisfactory grade is posted — aren’t doing their children any favors. They’re stripping their teenagers of the opportunity to develop the agency needed to succeed as adults: High school used to be a time when students were taking more responsibility for their grades and schedules, but for some families, online grade books can shift that.
Many students now rely on both their parents and the technology itself as crutches. Some parents request access to grades for their college-age children, unable, apparently, to relinquish that degree of control. (Parents aren’t automatically granted access at the collegiate level — students need to provide written consent to give them that access.) What’s more, Miller told me:
As a college administrator, I can tell you it is absolutely frustrating to students who now enter college and their professor doesn’t use the online grade book because they are so used to using that to essentially manage their life. Gone are the days where at the end of class, I could just say to students, now remember, read chapter four for Wednesday, and you have to turn in a summary, you have to turn in the outline for your literature review in class on Friday, and where students would write that down and would do it and do it on time. Now, if it doesn’t appear in the online grade book as a pending assignment with a date, you’re not going to get it when you expect it.
I’m a realist, so I accept that there’s probably no turning back from online grade books — in part because their implementation was bolstered by language in the No Child Left Behind Act directing school districts to employ technology in support of parent involvement and parent-teacher communications. And to be clear, not every teacher I spoke to had a negative experience with online grade books. Some said that the technology made their lives easier and improved communication with some parents. Even the teachers who pointed out the unseemly behavior of some parents and students stressed that it wasn’t the majority who abused the system.
Still, I think there are ways that parents, teachers and students can work toward a healthier relationship with this technology. Several people I spoke to compared the compulsive checking of online grade books to the addiction some people have to social media — driven in part by the kind of alerts that we get from other apps on our phones. So a first step that parents and students could take would be to adjust their settings so that they aren’t constantly peppered with notices about newly posted grades.