14 ms·

To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays

264 points by gscott 8y ago

seltzered_ 8y ago
Somewhat related, there was another article this week that mentioned kids (and parents) now get notifications sent over the phone of their grades: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/1/10/18174263/anxiety-kids-burnout https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/1/10/18174263/anxiety-... “As the retreat group started to tell me more about why they felt such a collective sense of stress and pressure, a few major themes emerged. All of them said they voluntarily get their grades pushed to their phones through notifications. It took me a minute to realize just how annoying and agonizing that must feel. It means that at any moment, they could find out they bombed a test or missed an assignment. Instead of having the time to mentally prepare to receive a bad grade when a teacher returns an assignment, they receive a notification as soon as the teacher posts their grade to the online portal they all use. Further, their parents sometimes receive the same notifications.”
- legionof7 8y ago
  Yeah, I'm in high school right now and they have this system. They also had the same in middle school. There's no way this instant feedback system is mentally healthy. Also, a lot of times, teachers push a 0 as a placeholder grade and parents aren't in the classroom, so they see that and flip out. Also, with the notification system, both parents and students see each assignment grade in a bubble, so it affects them a lot more than if they saw the whole semester grade (i.e getting an F on a homework assignment isn't a big deal)
  - skandl 8y ago
    this sounds terrible :(
  - Hello71 8y ago
    wouldn't it make more sense to use 1 as a placeholder
    - yogeshlor 8y ago
      how about hyphen -
      - tatami 8y ago
        Which is not an Integer and the whole view crashes after the ConversionError. You know it
        saagarjha 8y ago
        My high school system used to convert those to zeroes, just FYI. Anything that was nonnumeric and not a fixed set of "aliases" (for example, "pass" might mean 100% if the teacher set it up that way) became a zero.
      - nailer 8y ago
        How about using an integer where an integer is needed and false where no grade has been produced, with the teacher and student UI showing 'Not yet graded [x]' rather than using magic numbers?
    - gpvos 8y ago
      Where I live, 1 looks more like an actual grade (the lowest one) than a 0, so that would be a very bad idea.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - gre 8y ago
    Opt out
  - freeflight 8y ago
    > Also, with the notification system, both parents and students see each assignment grade in a bubble, so it affects them a lot more than if they saw the whole semester grade (i.e getting an F on a homework assignment isn't a big deal) Could also show the average grade of the class for each assignment, to give students, parents, and teachers a reference for how well they are actually doing?
    - chrismeller 8y ago
      That's a possible partial fix, but I recall plenty of classes in high school and college that had a weighted grading scale. Done every homework assignment and aced every test all semester but then bomb the midterm or final? You're still in trouble. Also vice versa - if you didn't do any homework all year, but the midterm is going to be worth 90% of your grade anyway. And of course we all know there are teachers that are just notoriously harder than anyone else where no one is going to get an A in the class, so there's also an aspect of how well other people have done on the assignment/in the class as a whole. None of that is new at all, though. The problem is that technology has now calculated out a number and displayed it and we as humans add more importance to that hard number. To me it's similar to the whole "fake news" thing - we're too inclined to glance at what the app on our phone says and not think any further.
    - JeanMarcS 8y ago
      The average grade could be an idea, but being the worse in a upper high good class doesn’t mean you’re bad. And I personally think that grades should show how you progress. If you get better with time it’s good. And also we all agree that one grade out of any context should’nt mean anything
  - ceautery 8y ago
    The system should prevent 0 from being pushed as a notification. Each teacher or school should be forced to deal with 0 in some other way, preferably erring on the side of helping students, rather than punishing them.
    - antsar 8y ago
      Teachers already seem overworked. Wouldn’t they just invent a new magic number, maybe “1”?
      - kijin 8y ago
        101 would be a relatively safe number to use as a placeholder. Since these people aren't programmers, trying to use NULL or NaN or -1 will probably backfire.
        sethammons 8y ago
        Sentry values are a nope. Have the assignment have a is_published check box / flag. An option to select all as published and the ability to toggle/select individual's assignments as published.
        hnuser355 8y ago
        No, there could be extra credit
      - FakeComments 8y ago
        It wouldn’t stop a 0 from being entered as a grade — just not push that notification. This would actually makes teaching easier, as they can use a 0 as a placeholder without having to decide about accidentally pushing a notification. I don’t think the teacher’s goal is to cause a panic with a transient 0 that’s later replaced — so I don’t see why they’d stop using something that better accomplished their goals.
    - Tempest1981 8y ago
      How about a system where grades are published online. If the parent and student don't acknowledge the grade within 7 days, a reminder text is sent. Then later the actual grade. A related issue is that many parents struggle with school website logins/passwords. I bet a significant percentage never log in, all year. But they can't ignore their phones.
  - sroya 8y ago
    Which SIS are you using?
  - paganel 8y ago
    But why send the grades (real or invented, it doesn’t matter) to students’ and parents’ phones? Who does that help? Does it help the students? Apparently not, because it looks like it makes them more anxious. Does it help the parents? It probably only helps those “tiger” moms and dads who are toxic anyway, I honestely think a parent shouldn’t care about the intrinsic details of his kids grades and day-to-day activity at school, it only causes more anxiety for said kids as it makes them even more nervous and risk-averse. And on a more general note, how did we manage to screw this up? (I’m talking about people in my generation, late-20s, 30s, early 40s). Why are our kids anxious? Why do they kill themselves? Why do I hear of a close friend’s niece cutting herself when she’s only 12? We weren’t like that, at least not at this magnitude/level, so the screw-up is on us.
    - legionof7 8y ago
      I think schools just wanted to hop on the latest technology and the easiest way for companies to push that was "instant feedback" or something. They didn't foresee the unintended mental health consequences.
    - idrios 8y ago
      >how did we manage to screw this up? I was a teacher last year and while I can't answer this question fully, I do know that it's a result of perverse incentives and group pressure. Where I taught at school (a private English school in China) we also had an app that shows parents how their student is doing. They'd see test scores as soon as I uploaded the grades, and I'd get complaints from some of the parents if I was more than a day late in uploading those scores. In the case of my school, we were competing with other private English schools. If we stopped or had never started using this app, we would get a few parents complaining "why can't I see my son's grade? [school z] does it, so I'm going to switch to their school!" We would lose some parents -- and for our student-retention team, losing too many parents means a pay for cut the following year. They would do anything to keep those parents so promises get made, and ultimately the school would certainly go back to using the app. Meanwhile the group who built the app gets fabulously wealthy because they've built a (albeit harmful) service that their clients can't possibly get rid of. Depressingly, the only way I see it turning back would be a force of equally-upset parents who removed their students from the school while asking "why do you use this at all? It's fostering anxiety and depression for my kid". People vote with their wallets.
- userbinator 8y ago
  From someone who went through the "old-school" (literally) system, that's something I would've loved to have --- not notifications per se, but the ability to get feedback much faster, to satiate the "how did I do?" feeling I got immediately after submitting anything.
  - PakG1 8y ago
    I think it really depends on the psychology of the student and their perception of their performance for which they are awaiting results.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  From another viewpoint, I spent a significant amount of time in high school reverse engineering and retrofitting grade update notifications onto our school's (well, School Loop's) existing gradebook, which I shipped as part of my app for accessing this system. For privacy reasons, I would not display any grades or scores in the notification itself, opting for something like "your grade in $course has changed". This gave students the chance to wait to see their new score, since they would have to actively tap on the notification.
  - tempestn 8y ago
    I don't know if that's all that much better. As soon as you get the notification you're not going to be able to think of much else until you check.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      Sure, but I see it as similar to the teacher giving you your test back: you get time to talk to your friends, prepare yourself, whatever before you actually see your grade (rather than it just popping up on your screen). In both, you do eventually have to see your grade, and you're not going to be thinking of much else while the teacher is going around passing out the test. Of course, I hadn't considered viewpoint when designing the feature, so it's not perfect, but I think it does a somewhat decent job (also, notifications are off by default, again, not because I had this issue in mind, but because I didn't want the iOS notification permission alert being the first thing that showed up when users launched the app).
      - hyperpape 8y ago
        One is during a specific time at school, one is not. That's a huge difference.
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      But that's no different to the status quo, you know that a grade is coming right from when you sit the test; and IME a teacher will say roughly when the marking will be done, so there's always anticipation. It sounds to me like this is the sort of thing that needs to be fixed by each person (for themselves) at some level. Sure, the provider can give multiple options (message with|without grade, message once a week, no message, etc.) but it's still up to the person to choose. If you're fretting over a grade coming you're going to fret, you need to fix your own notification system. You could get messages sent to a parent/carer instead, block the number and check them once a week, wait for the teacher to tell you, etc.. Just because food is put on your plate doesn't mean you have to eat it.
- MichaelMoser123 8y ago
  we also have a web portal where they notify us of pending homework (well, in reality its the teachers who are not always filling out the reports). When I saw that my reaction was: thanks goodness they didn't have these in my time...
- nmca 8y ago
  It really is horrible to do it that way - at University, our final grades were often released on a particular day but at an unknown time, ruining the day until around 5pm on one occasion.
- aquadrop 8y ago
  But you can disable notifications for the app on the OS level, right?
- nathanlied 8y ago
  Huh, given all the answers here - I guess I might be different from the average, I never considered a different experience. At my Alma Mater, we were always "mass-mailed" when grades were released. The email didn't have our grade specifically, but we could go on the University's portal, navigate to that class, and see whatever grade just got released - tests, exams, projects, anything we could be graded on, really. I loved this system, because the alternative was the grades being released and me not knowing about it, which would result in either having to check every X period of time, or, most likely, coding my own script to do it for me. I've been told by family that my old High School also works similarly nowadays, as well as other high schools and middle schools in the same district. I can't imagine it working any other way, given the increasing integration of technology. I'd like to know, though, isn't it just as anxiety-inducing to go in every morning after an assignment, knowing this could be the day it's delivered? Mine were delivered that way back in HS, sometimes at the beginning of class, others in the middle, sometimes we thought we weren't getting it that day, and the teacher would remember at the very end of class, or be reminded by someone. Is it because it's an "it could come at literally any time" thing, instead of being restricted to the class schedule?
  - nixpulvis 8y ago
    > I can't imagine it working any other way, given the increasing integration of technology. Just wait to release grades until a set time (maybe at the end of class), so students can all check their grades together? It could still be all online and tech savvy.
    - nathanlied 8y ago
      Yeah - I did not mean that line in the sense of "it cannot work any other way", but more that I hadn't imagined people could feel differently than me about that topic, so I didn't conceive of it evolving any other way. This topic opened my eyes a bit - and that feature is definitely something I'd push for, if ever given the opportunity to work in that kind of system.
  - alistairSH 8y ago
    Is it because it's an "it could come at literally any time" thing, instead of being restricted to the class schedule? I think that's exactly the difference. With in-class grade reporting, you know it's coming inside a 6-7 hour block of time. Even more precise if the assignment was for a given class. With real-time grading, you could receive the grades at the breakfast table on a Saturday morning. And the real-time grading is likely tied into how unhealthy other online forums can be. The student could get in the habit of just waiting for the grade (refresh, refresh, refresh if it's a web page). I finished high school before there was any automatic grade reporting (for assignments). And report cards were sent on a known schedule (and received a day or two later in the post). It wasn't stress free, but at least you could mentally prepare for the bad news.
- raarts 8y ago
  Tangential but reading this thread I feel many words have apparently changed meaning. Parent mentions that receiving the notifications are 'agonizing'. Another post in this thread calls it 'horrible' According to the Cambridge dictionary agonizing means: 'causing extreme physical or mental pain' or 'causing extreme worry'. Horrible means 'very bad unpleasant or disgusting'. These are very strong words, when I hear agonizing I think of a crushed leg, or seeing your daughter tortured, I would use horrible for similar circumstances, not a kid getting a bad grade in a notification.. And I personally think learning your kids to grow a thick skin to cope with the adult world is a good thing, so in conclusion I don't really see a problem here and people are way overreacting.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Most people have never had a crushed leg so their scale is limited to what they have experienced. Think back on all the insignificant trauma that seemed so important in high school. Within the range if the average American student, these things are a big deal.
  - profquail 8y ago
    Cambridge English dicctionary has “causing extreme worry” as the 2nd definition of “agonizing”: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/agonizing https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/agonizin... An example they give for this definition of the word is: “She went through an agonizing few weeks waiting for the test results.” — which is how the GP used it.
    - raarts 8y ago
      You are not wrong, but I think the 'test results' in the example refer to medical testing for a serious disease, and not a school test.
  - XMPPwocky 8y ago
    > And I personally think learning your kids to grow a thick skin to cope with the adult world is a good thing, What does this actually mean? My reading of it is- "as adults kids will be stressed, so don't try to keep them from being stressed when they're kids or else they won't be able to deal with stress later." Fair? If so, I have a modest proposal for you. Instead of providing the grades immediately, delay them by a random amount- weeks or months. Then, immediately notify both parent and child, at a random time of day. Perhaps weight it more heavily during mealtimes. Additionally, grade a small fraction of assignments- say, 5%- as zeroes regardless of actual performance- this will ensure that academically gifted children, even those whose parents don't pressure them- are also stressed. Since children are likely to outlive their parents, we should also randomly select some children, tell them their parents have died suddenly, and let them start to come to terms with that loss before it happens. Finally, all shoes and socks must surely be banned, to ensure the proper development of calluses on children's feet. Surely this will help make kids more resilient. Suffering is part of life, so children must suffer early and often or they'll be too weak.
- rubidium 8y ago
  I went to a high school without public course grades. We’d get qualitative feedback often, and quantitative feedback on tests (eg 78/100) but it was never translated into a letter grade. It was great. Letter grades were given at the end of the semester to the parents in a session with the teacher. Up to the parents if they shared that with their kids. Many didn’t.
- filmgirlcw 8y ago
  As someone who was a perfectionist to an unhealthy degree as a kid (and had high anxiety tied to that), this would have been a nightmare. Our grades and weekly averages were posted on a schedule for certain classes, and I would obsessively search the sheet for my student number to make sure I hadn’t fallen below my personal threshold of acceptability (which was often far too high), but at least I knew the date/time grades would be posted. If I was especially freaking out, I could sometime cajole a teacher to grade an exam or something early — but having that “you could find out at any time your world is still spinning or perilously out of balance” would have been awful. And my parents weren’t even part of this —- if anything they actively tried to make me care less —- but plenty of parents when I was in middle/high school were obsessed with kids grades and just the thought that my mom would get a text the same time as me as to my grades is flat-out horrifying.
- Tempest1981 8y ago
  The reason is probably because teachers are frustrated by parents who are too busy to take interest in their child's education, so they overcompensate and over-communicate, thinking it may help. And if done properly, it might.
nkozyra 8y ago
I don't think the actual study[1] takes the kind of correlation=causation approach this snippet does. That said ... > In addition to distributing report cards earlier in the week, schools could consider including messaging to help prevent corporal punishment that crosses the line into abuse. But that’s a sticky issue in Florida, where some counties still allow corporal punishment in public schools. (Florida’s not alone: 19 states still allow schools to hit students, according to the Gundersen Center for Effective Discipline.) This is absolutely insane. It's 2019. I grew up in Florida and remember "the paddle" from my elementary school days but had assumed it had been stricken by now. [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2717779 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...
- gizmo686 8y ago
  Non paywalled https://www.gulfcoastkidshouse.org/cms/_fle/871-71165-71064-682.pdf https://www.gulfcoastkidshouse.org/cms/_fle/871-71165-71064-...
  - knappa 8y ago
    That's a lot of overlap of those confidence intervals in Table 3.
  - educationdata 8y ago
    It is strange that the study does not report raw numbers of instance. How many happened after post card release vs. not after post card release? I can't find the raw numbers of such. Only raw number of breaking down by race. Also, "Of the 167906 calls to the child abuse hotline for children aged 5 to 11 years, 2017 (6.7%) were verified as physical abuse cases". Only 6.7% verified???
    - gizmo686 8y ago
      >Only 6.7% verified??? I have complaints about the quality of the study, but this is not one of them. Keep in mind that anyone in Florida who suspects abuse is required to report it to the hotline. Probably more significant is the more traditional mandated reporters, who are trained to report any suspicion of abuse, out of both an abundance of caution and to protect themselves from liability. By design, such hotlines have a high false positive rate.
daodedickinson 8y ago
>She and her colleagues suspect that the increase is due to children being physically punished for their grades, “but it might be something else we don't know about,” she said. Fucking duh. How could they have this statistic be accurate at all but not have anyone ask any of the kids? We would have told them "FUCKING DUH". Got into a #1 grad program for my major, dropped out because by then my parents chilled out I realized I have ZERO motivation for anything unless someone is going to beat me up if I don't do it. Tried getting a comp sci degree, all the profs told us the degree was useless, profs and students cheated rampantly, and I didn't see a single company in the industry making the world better rather than worse. Now I live in my parents' basement and when they die I will be homeless.
- seasoup 8y ago
  “Now I live in my parents' basement and when they die I will be homeless.” Is that the fate someone else picked out for you? Change it.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    Yes, but it's not that simple. Our daughter was abused, by a relative that we were trying to help. It can take years to (at least somewhat) undo the damage. Yes, the GP needs to get to work - not primarily externally, but on the internal damage. But it's not nearly as simple and easy as you make it sound. daodedickinson: This may be too hard to do alone. There are people who can help. Find them. Stick with it. It's a long road, but worth walking.
- daodedickinson 8y ago
  Not like kids won't get beat on a weekday, but if my mom was mad on a weekend I would have to hide under the bed all weekend and stay silent so she wouldn't be reminded I existed. Glad somebody loves to vote down abused kids here, thanks.
  - dbdjfjrjvebd 8y ago
    I didn't downvote (and wouldn't have). I suspect that you are being downvoted because you are no longer a kid. You are an adult. You do now have agency to make you own decisions. Personally (and I am not a doctor so I could well be totally wrong!) I think it sounds like your lack of drive/ambition could be worth speaking to a doctor about.
xupybd 8y ago
>“It’s sad, but the good news is there's a simple intervention — don't give report cards on Friday.” Yeah that avoids the one instance of child abuse but that's not the big picture here. How is it that there are that many people that struggle to cope that this is common enough to show up in this research. I feel for both the parents and the children here. If something like grades are causing the parents to lash out at the kids it's a sign that the parents are struggling to cope. That makes things horrible for these poor children. But how on earth does this get fixed? How does society change to provide enough support and training to these parents to give them the resources to handle these situations?
- devoply 8y ago
  Schools just sort of happened at the behest of industrialists. There isn't actually that much thought put into the concept of schools much less all that follows from them. They are simply taken as granted despite the fact that they are a relatively recent invention. "The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you." —John Updike, 1963
  - InclinedPlane 8y ago
    See also: the police. (Relevant book: The End of Policing)
  - educationdata 8y ago
    School is not a recent invention. Public school is recent invention. Also, there is much thought put into schooling. Curriculum (what to teach), instruction (how to teach), school administration, etc. I am not saying schools are perfect, but claim schools are the same as jails, education is the same as torture, it's just bullsh*t.
    - devoply 8y ago
      > school is not a recent invention https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/freedom-learn/200808/brief-history-education https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/freedom-learn/200808... In relation to the biological history of our species, schools are very recent institutions. For hundreds of thousands of years, before the advent of agriculture, we lived as hunter-gatherers. In my August 2 posting, I summarized the evidence from anthropology that children in hunter-gatherer cultures learned what they needed to know to become effective adults through their own play and exploration. The strong drives in children to play and explore presumably came about, during our evolution as hunter-gatherers, to serve the needs of education. Adults in hunter-gatherer cultures allowed children almost unlimited freedom to play and explore on their own because they recognized that those activities are children's natural ways of learning. In sum, for several thousand years after the advent of agriculture, the education of children was, to a considerable degree, a matter squashing their willfulness in order to make them good laborers. A good child was an obedient child, who suppressed his or her urge to play and explore and dutifully carried out the orders of adult masters. Such education, fortunately, was never fully successful. The human instincts to play and explore are so powerful that they can never be fully beaten out of a child. But certainly the philosophy of education throughout that period, to the degree that it could be articulated, was the opposite of the philosophy that hunter-gatherers had held for hundreds of thousands of years earlier. With the rise of schooling, people began to think of learning as children's work. The same power-assertive methods that had been used to make children work in fields and factories were quite naturally transferred to the classroom. In recent times, the methods of schooling have become less harsh, but basic assumptions have not changed. Learning continues to be defined as children's work, and power assertive means are used to make children do that work. > schools are the same as jails, education is the same as torture, it's just bullsh*t. Meant in jest. "Don't let schooling interfere with your education." - Mark Twain
rmrfrmrf 8y ago
This is a great example of how contemporary medicine's obsession with measurable outcomes produces interventions that are completely devoid of humanity.
b_tterc_p 8y ago
They had 2,000 data points... so they looked at the proportion of points on a given day when there was a report card released the previous day and when there wasn’t. Assuming Saturday’s accounted for, let’s say 20% of the population (blindly assuming) then they had about 400 data points and got a p value of 0.02. I’m assuming they did something to normalize for the number of days because there’s going to be far fewer report card days... idk. I think their statistics are probably shaky. Their confidence interval places the effect size at (20% to 1100%) if I’m reading correctly. I might believe that report cards increase rates of abuse but the idea that Friday is something special is probably just due to not having enough data for other days.
- beatgammit 8y ago
  Perhaps, but a report card is likely to get more attention on a Friday than another day of the week, and I could see consequences stretching into the weekend, which is supposed to be a time for a child to relax from the school week. That being said, I think we should put far less emphasis on grades and report cards in general, so I'd rather just not give out report cards on a regular basis. Grades and reports cause a ton of stress for kids that just gets in the way of learning. I also think children should be allowed to go at their own pace and have some level of control over what they learn. It's okay if a child lags in one area and excels in another for a year or two. Interests change, and children learn far more rapidly in subjects they're interested in. I agree that just moving report cards may not solve the problem. We need to reexamine why we give report cards and decide if there isn't a better way (and there are a lot of alternative teaching methods that may do better than the way most public schools are run).
  - b_tterc_p 8y ago
    Maybe, but, it’s not especially convincing evidence that this is a widespread problem. This is pure assumption, but if report cards effected rates regardless of day they probably would have mentioned this. We shouldn’t assume it is the case, and then even if it is the case, we should really take a hard look at whether is a meaningfully large number.
- ngcc_hk 8y ago
joshuamcginnis 8y ago
If my years of adolescent beatings for anything less than an A taught me anything, it was: don't bring report cards home on Friday and sign your own progress reports.
- miyhhbftdx 8y ago
  It taught me something else: deal with similar situations for my kids in a better way. Some things I have inculcated as a part of my children's education: 1. Lots of peer interaction and physical playtime. 2. Pomodoro technique: just 10-15 minutes of assured focus to cover exam topics starting several weeks before the exam date. 3. Treat all grades with praise of hardwork! Because they did put in the time and effort. And briefly go over mistakes and skipped questions. 4. Treat the school curriculum as a secondary medium of instruction and push parental instruction as primary without speed limits.
  - Jach 8y ago
    Great points, especially #4 (reminds me of the "No Speed Limit" post from Sivers), but I wonder about #3. It was (maybe still is?) common for lazy nerds to bemoan "Why couldn't I have been praised for effort instead of smarts as a kid?" as if that was the major cause of their laziness. I've suspected that even if they were praised differently it still wouldn't have helped many such lazy nerds because the effort required would still have been very minimal up until they hit their limits where things weren't so easy anymore without working hard (AP classes, college, sometimes all the way to grad school). As far as the effects of praise can shape someone I've figured getting praised for something you didn't do is worse than being praised for a trait, even if being praised for something you did do is better than for a trait.
  - amvalo 8y ago
    > Some things I have inculcated as a part of my children's education: > 1. Lots of peer interaction and physical playtime Also known as being a normal human being...
- ddingus 8y ago
  Bingo. For me, it was different when parents handed out a beating. The school? Just no. My own kids were through school before the portal and notification systems arrived in our schools. In some ways, it is good to know problem areas early. There is time to make changes. As a parent, I would have appreciated that. As a student? Ugh. Many parents are busy and I can see the whole thing suffering from the same "5 star" problem we see in rating systems all over the place. It all gravitates to 5 stars being the constant expectation. Maybe I am glad I didn't have to deal with that mess. Being involved in my kids education was work, maybe more than today. Or maybe not. I wonder how many overcorrects happen due to a kid just having a bad day. Or the stress of just having a bad day amplified?
aerovistae 8y ago
I don't understand why this would help at all. Is it better to be beaten in the middle of the week?
- grzm 8y ago
  From the article: > "After comparing a year’s worth of verified child abuse cases to the dates elementary school report cards were issued, the researchers found a correlation between report cards and child abuse — but only when grades went home on a Friday."
- a1369209993 8y ago
  Actually, yes, for two reasons. Firstly, because you'll be beaten on (say) wednesday night, rather then friday night and potentially also saturday morning, saturday night, sunday morning and sunday night. Secondly, because you'll be beaten less severely, for fear that there might be a teacher who cares enough to notice if you show up thursday with bruises and a limp.
  - mbrumlow 8y ago
    Bruses and limps don't vansish afet Sundays service. Anything requring a doctor to look at is going to last days. I don't think there is any evidence that changing the day will change the outcome. In fact. If you randomized the day schools sent this info then you will probably keep this stat hidden. Seems like the solution is to hold parents who abuse their children accountable.
    - XJOKOLAT 8y ago
      You said abso-fucking-lutely nothing, douchebag. Is what I would have said.
stmfreak 8y ago
Another plea to change the behavior of the many because of the criminal actions of the few. Can we please go after the criminals and not remove a parenting tool from the law abiding?
- tzs 8y ago
  How would sending report cards home on a day other than Friday be removing a parenting tool?
tzjmetron 8y ago
For me, it was quite the reverse problem - get perfect scores, have to sign them myself since parents couldn't be bothered. I would deliberately try to sign it as a completely different person to the point that at one time a teacher asked me if my dad was a doctor (he wasn't).
rblion 8y ago
To protect kids, we could create a new system of grades that involves more data than just numbers and scores. Maybe that could be a long-term solution for a lot of seemingly unrelated problems.
- Tempest1981 8y ago
  Some schools are trying "Standards-Based Grading", where each class has 5-10 semester objectives. Students receive a proficiency rating (4,3,2,1) for each objective. Essentially a more granular report of your skills, vs a single letter. Example: https://www.teacherease.com/standards-based-grading.aspx https://www.teacherease.com/standards-based-grading.aspx
solipsism 8y ago
I'm going to put my money on alcohol being a factor. People drink more on weekends, and of course the link between alcohol and child abuse is strong and incontrovertible.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ddebernardy 8y ago
> 19 states still allow schools to hit students As one living in a country that bans parents from hitting their own children, I find that number shocking. Do they actually hit the kids in practice, or is this some left-over regulation from the past (like the French ban on women wearing trousers in Paris that got formally repelled a few years ago)?
- trevyn 8y ago
  You might be even more shocked if you leave first-world countries. Human brutality runs deep, and you can still find it displayed openly on the majority of Earth’s land mass.
  - ddebernardy 8y ago
    A number of developing countries ban all forms of corporal punishments on children. Swaths of Latin America does so, as do a few African and Asian countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_corporal_punishment_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_corporal_punishment_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment
    - trevyn 8y ago
      All developing countries have ineffective enforcement of laws, as well — that’s one of the defining criteria.
      - moreira 8y ago
        I think there's a significant difference between the practice being banned but there being "ineffective enforcement of laws", and being somewhere where it's still allowed and seen as perfectly acceptable.
  - jakobegger 8y ago
    The US is the only country that has not signed the UN convention on childrens rights. Even developing countries ban corporeal punishment. The US is the outlier.
ngcc_hk 8y ago
Sadly the study is behind paywall. If there are more details and the data is more open ...
nostrebored 8y ago
How many Fridays follow a report card release vs. those which don't? If it is the weekly release schedule that I experienced in Elementary School, then this statement is effectively "people beat their kids less on public holidays" which seems much less surprising. Also, where are schools that do "non-standard" reporting located? This seems like a geographically confounding factor.
burlesona 8y ago
I didn’t see an explanation (or theory) given for why there isn’t a problem on the other days of the week. Did I just miss it? The obvious guess would be people go get drunk on Friday night then come home mad their kid got a bad grade... But I am surprised that it’s somehow not an issue on other weekdays.
hvindin 8y ago
I do wonder if there is any chance that the reason that there is a spike in reports of abuse on the Saturday following report cards coming out on a Friday is because it is more likely to be reported? It's not mentioned anywhere in the article, but if someone said to me that 2 things are true: 1. There is some correlation between report cards being returned and child abuse 2. There is a spike in reports of abuse on Saturdays when report cards are returned on Friday I wouldn't immediately think "cool, lets return report cards earlier. Problem solved" Other than not really solving the problem of abusive parents, this also doesn't actually rule out child abuse happening accross the board but not being reported on weekdays.
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  This isn't something designed to solve the problem. The actual problem is really, really complicated and solving it is difficult. It is unlikely that all the abuse simply shifts to during the week and stops getting reported. What it actually is, however, is a change schools can make to lessen child abuse, even if it is just a little. It isn't something difficult or expensive to do.
dorkwood 8y ago
One possible cause I haven’t seen mentioned is that abusive parents are perhaps more likely to get drunk on a Friday, and the report card provides them a timely justification to beat their kids.
- jakobegger 8y ago
  Yes. I don't think bad grades make parents violent. Alcohol does.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Markoff 8y ago
what is it report card? when i was young we had books with grades we were taking home every day, so parents could follow progress and see our grades every day, nowadays grades are published online do parents can check them whenever they want is this another case of some archaic american technology?
- gizmo686 8y ago
  American schools do that as well to varying degrees. In addition to that, they send out cumulative grades every semester or half semester. In theory, these grades should not be a surprise, but parents don't always follow the daily grades their child gets; particularly those parents which might be abusive.
DeusExMachina 8y ago
> “It’s a pretty astonishing finding,” Is it? I was never abused, but my parents were definitely not pleased by bad school reports. It's not hard to imagine that people who look for excuses to abuse their children, do so after getting a school report. Why is it so astonishing?
vinniejames 8y ago
How is this at all related to programming?
- swebs 8y ago
  This is not a programming website.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
It’s rather simple. Abusers are conscious of what they’re doing. They think if they abuse their child during the week they’re more likely to get caught because the effects of the abuse (physical and emotional) are still fresh the next day. If they do the abusing on Friday night, by Monday they think they have much less likelihood of getting caught. This may actually work a few times. But eventually they go too far.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rexgallorum2 8y ago
This one requires a little lateral thinking. Why not get rid of report cards, or grades, altogether? The use of online platforms where teachers are expected to enter grades in real time sounds like a massive burden on the teachers, not to mention a privacy/security risk. Terrible.

264 points by gscott 8y ago

Somewhat related, there was another article this week that mentioned kids (and parents) now get notifications sent over the phone of their grades: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/1/10/18174263/anxiety-kids-burnout https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/1/10/18174263/anxiety-... “As the retreat group started to tell me more about why they felt such a collective sense of stress and pressure, a few major themes emerged. All of them said they voluntarily get their grades pushed to their phones through notifications. It took me a minute to realize just how annoying and agonizing that must feel. It means that at any moment, they could find out they bombed a test or missed an assignment. Instead of having the time to mentally prepare to receive a bad grade when a teacher returns an assignment, they receive a notification as soon as the teacher posts their grade to the online portal they all use. Further, their parents sometimes receive the same notifications.”

legionof7 8y ago
Yeah, I'm in high school right now and they have this system. They also had the same in middle school. There's no way this instant feedback system is mentally healthy. Also, a lot of times, teachers push a 0 as a placeholder grade and parents aren't in the classroom, so they see that and flip out. Also, with the notification system, both parents and students see each assignment grade in a bubble, so it affects them a lot more than if they saw the whole semester grade (i.e getting an F on a homework assignment isn't a big deal)
- skandl 8y ago
  this sounds terrible :(
- Hello71 8y ago
  wouldn't it make more sense to use 1 as a placeholder
  - yogeshlor 8y ago
    how about hyphen -
    - tatami 8y ago
      Which is not an Integer and the whole view crashes after the ConversionError. You know it
      - saagarjha 8y ago
        My high school system used to convert those to zeroes, just FYI. Anything that was nonnumeric and not a fixed set of "aliases" (for example, "pass" might mean 100% if the teacher set it up that way) became a zero.
    - nailer 8y ago
      How about using an integer where an integer is needed and false where no grade has been produced, with the teacher and student UI showing 'Not yet graded [x]' rather than using magic numbers?
  - gpvos 8y ago
    Where I live, 1 looks more like an actual grade (the lowest one) than a 0, so that would be a very bad idea.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- gre 8y ago
  Opt out
- freeflight 8y ago
  > Also, with the notification system, both parents and students see each assignment grade in a bubble, so it affects them a lot more than if they saw the whole semester grade (i.e getting an F on a homework assignment isn't a big deal) Could also show the average grade of the class for each assignment, to give students, parents, and teachers a reference for how well they are actually doing?
  - chrismeller 8y ago
    That's a possible partial fix, but I recall plenty of classes in high school and college that had a weighted grading scale. Done every homework assignment and aced every test all semester but then bomb the midterm or final? You're still in trouble. Also vice versa - if you didn't do any homework all year, but the midterm is going to be worth 90% of your grade anyway. And of course we all know there are teachers that are just notoriously harder than anyone else where no one is going to get an A in the class, so there's also an aspect of how well other people have done on the assignment/in the class as a whole. None of that is new at all, though. The problem is that technology has now calculated out a number and displayed it and we as humans add more importance to that hard number. To me it's similar to the whole "fake news" thing - we're too inclined to glance at what the app on our phone says and not think any further.
  - JeanMarcS 8y ago
    The average grade could be an idea, but being the worse in a upper high good class doesn’t mean you’re bad. And I personally think that grades should show how you progress. If you get better with time it’s good. And also we all agree that one grade out of any context should’nt mean anything
- ceautery 8y ago
  The system should prevent 0 from being pushed as a notification. Each teacher or school should be forced to deal with 0 in some other way, preferably erring on the side of helping students, rather than punishing them.
  - antsar 8y ago
    Teachers already seem overworked. Wouldn’t they just invent a new magic number, maybe “1”?
    - kijin 8y ago
      101 would be a relatively safe number to use as a placeholder. Since these people aren't programmers, trying to use NULL or NaN or -1 will probably backfire.
      - sethammons 8y ago
        Sentry values are a nope. Have the assignment have a is_published check box / flag. An option to select all as published and the ability to toggle/select individual's assignments as published.
      - hnuser355 8y ago
        No, there could be extra credit
    - FakeComments 8y ago
      It wouldn’t stop a 0 from being entered as a grade — just not push that notification. This would actually makes teaching easier, as they can use a 0 as a placeholder without having to decide about accidentally pushing a notification. I don’t think the teacher’s goal is to cause a panic with a transient 0 that’s later replaced — so I don’t see why they’d stop using something that better accomplished their goals.
  - Tempest1981 8y ago
    How about a system where grades are published online. If the parent and student don't acknowledge the grade within 7 days, a reminder text is sent. Then later the actual grade. A related issue is that many parents struggle with school website logins/passwords. I bet a significant percentage never log in, all year. But they can't ignore their phones.
- sroya 8y ago
  Which SIS are you using?
- paganel 8y ago
  But why send the grades (real or invented, it doesn’t matter) to students’ and parents’ phones? Who does that help? Does it help the students? Apparently not, because it looks like it makes them more anxious. Does it help the parents? It probably only helps those “tiger” moms and dads who are toxic anyway, I honestely think a parent shouldn’t care about the intrinsic details of his kids grades and day-to-day activity at school, it only causes more anxiety for said kids as it makes them even more nervous and risk-averse. And on a more general note, how did we manage to screw this up? (I’m talking about people in my generation, late-20s, 30s, early 40s). Why are our kids anxious? Why do they kill themselves? Why do I hear of a close friend’s niece cutting herself when she’s only 12? We weren’t like that, at least not at this magnitude/level, so the screw-up is on us.
  - legionof7 8y ago
    I think schools just wanted to hop on the latest technology and the easiest way for companies to push that was "instant feedback" or something. They didn't foresee the unintended mental health consequences.
  - idrios 8y ago
    >how did we manage to screw this up? I was a teacher last year and while I can't answer this question fully, I do know that it's a result of perverse incentives and group pressure. Where I taught at school (a private English school in China) we also had an app that shows parents how their student is doing. They'd see test scores as soon as I uploaded the grades, and I'd get complaints from some of the parents if I was more than a day late in uploading those scores. In the case of my school, we were competing with other private English schools. If we stopped or had never started using this app, we would get a few parents complaining "why can't I see my son's grade? [school z] does it, so I'm going to switch to their school!" We would lose some parents -- and for our student-retention team, losing too many parents means a pay for cut the following year. They would do anything to keep those parents so promises get made, and ultimately the school would certainly go back to using the app. Meanwhile the group who built the app gets fabulously wealthy because they've built a (albeit harmful) service that their clients can't possibly get rid of. Depressingly, the only way I see it turning back would be a force of equally-upset parents who removed their students from the school while asking "why do you use this at all? It's fostering anxiety and depression for my kid". People vote with their wallets.
userbinator 8y ago
From someone who went through the "old-school" (literally) system, that's something I would've loved to have --- not notifications per se, but the ability to get feedback much faster, to satiate the "how did I do?" feeling I got immediately after submitting anything.
- PakG1 8y ago
  I think it really depends on the psychology of the student and their perception of their performance for which they are awaiting results.
saagarjha 8y ago
From another viewpoint, I spent a significant amount of time in high school reverse engineering and retrofitting grade update notifications onto our school's (well, School Loop's) existing gradebook, which I shipped as part of my app for accessing this system. For privacy reasons, I would not display any grades or scores in the notification itself, opting for something like "your grade in $course has changed". This gave students the chance to wait to see their new score, since they would have to actively tap on the notification.
- tempestn 8y ago
  I don't know if that's all that much better. As soon as you get the notification you're not going to be able to think of much else until you check.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    Sure, but I see it as similar to the teacher giving you your test back: you get time to talk to your friends, prepare yourself, whatever before you actually see your grade (rather than it just popping up on your screen). In both, you do eventually have to see your grade, and you're not going to be thinking of much else while the teacher is going around passing out the test. Of course, I hadn't considered viewpoint when designing the feature, so it's not perfect, but I think it does a somewhat decent job (also, notifications are off by default, again, not because I had this issue in mind, but because I didn't want the iOS notification permission alert being the first thing that showed up when users launched the app).
    - hyperpape 8y ago
      One is during a specific time at school, one is not. That's a huge difference.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    But that's no different to the status quo, you know that a grade is coming right from when you sit the test; and IME a teacher will say roughly when the marking will be done, so there's always anticipation. It sounds to me like this is the sort of thing that needs to be fixed by each person (for themselves) at some level. Sure, the provider can give multiple options (message with|without grade, message once a week, no message, etc.) but it's still up to the person to choose. If you're fretting over a grade coming you're going to fret, you need to fix your own notification system. You could get messages sent to a parent/carer instead, block the number and check them once a week, wait for the teacher to tell you, etc.. Just because food is put on your plate doesn't mean you have to eat it.
MichaelMoser123 8y ago
we also have a web portal where they notify us of pending homework (well, in reality its the teachers who are not always filling out the reports). When I saw that my reaction was: thanks goodness they didn't have these in my time...
nmca 8y ago
It really is horrible to do it that way - at University, our final grades were often released on a particular day but at an unknown time, ruining the day until around 5pm on one occasion.
aquadrop 8y ago
But you can disable notifications for the app on the OS level, right?
nathanlied 8y ago
Huh, given all the answers here - I guess I might be different from the average, I never considered a different experience. At my Alma Mater, we were always "mass-mailed" when grades were released. The email didn't have our grade specifically, but we could go on the University's portal, navigate to that class, and see whatever grade just got released - tests, exams, projects, anything we could be graded on, really. I loved this system, because the alternative was the grades being released and me not knowing about it, which would result in either having to check every X period of time, or, most likely, coding my own script to do it for me. I've been told by family that my old High School also works similarly nowadays, as well as other high schools and middle schools in the same district. I can't imagine it working any other way, given the increasing integration of technology. I'd like to know, though, isn't it just as anxiety-inducing to go in every morning after an assignment, knowing this could be the day it's delivered? Mine were delivered that way back in HS, sometimes at the beginning of class, others in the middle, sometimes we thought we weren't getting it that day, and the teacher would remember at the very end of class, or be reminded by someone. Is it because it's an "it could come at literally any time" thing, instead of being restricted to the class schedule?
- nixpulvis 8y ago
  > I can't imagine it working any other way, given the increasing integration of technology. Just wait to release grades until a set time (maybe at the end of class), so students can all check their grades together? It could still be all online and tech savvy.
  - nathanlied 8y ago
    Yeah - I did not mean that line in the sense of "it cannot work any other way", but more that I hadn't imagined people could feel differently than me about that topic, so I didn't conceive of it evolving any other way. This topic opened my eyes a bit - and that feature is definitely something I'd push for, if ever given the opportunity to work in that kind of system.
- alistairSH 8y ago
  Is it because it's an "it could come at literally any time" thing, instead of being restricted to the class schedule? I think that's exactly the difference. With in-class grade reporting, you know it's coming inside a 6-7 hour block of time. Even more precise if the assignment was for a given class. With real-time grading, you could receive the grades at the breakfast table on a Saturday morning. And the real-time grading is likely tied into how unhealthy other online forums can be. The student could get in the habit of just waiting for the grade (refresh, refresh, refresh if it's a web page). I finished high school before there was any automatic grade reporting (for assignments). And report cards were sent on a known schedule (and received a day or two later in the post). It wasn't stress free, but at least you could mentally prepare for the bad news.
raarts 8y ago
Tangential but reading this thread I feel many words have apparently changed meaning. Parent mentions that receiving the notifications are 'agonizing'. Another post in this thread calls it 'horrible' According to the Cambridge dictionary agonizing means: 'causing extreme physical or mental pain' or 'causing extreme worry'. Horrible means 'very bad unpleasant or disgusting'. These are very strong words, when I hear agonizing I think of a crushed leg, or seeing your daughter tortured, I would use horrible for similar circumstances, not a kid getting a bad grade in a notification.. And I personally think learning your kids to grow a thick skin to cope with the adult world is a good thing, so in conclusion I don't really see a problem here and people are way overreacting.
- Retric 8y ago
  Most people have never had a crushed leg so their scale is limited to what they have experienced. Think back on all the insignificant trauma that seemed so important in high school. Within the range if the average American student, these things are a big deal.
- profquail 8y ago
  Cambridge English dicctionary has “causing extreme worry” as the 2nd definition of “agonizing”: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/agonizing https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/agonizin... An example they give for this definition of the word is: “She went through an agonizing few weeks waiting for the test results.” — which is how the GP used it.
  - raarts 8y ago
    You are not wrong, but I think the 'test results' in the example refer to medical testing for a serious disease, and not a school test.
- XMPPwocky 8y ago
  > And I personally think learning your kids to grow a thick skin to cope with the adult world is a good thing, What does this actually mean? My reading of it is- "as adults kids will be stressed, so don't try to keep them from being stressed when they're kids or else they won't be able to deal with stress later." Fair? If so, I have a modest proposal for you. Instead of providing the grades immediately, delay them by a random amount- weeks or months. Then, immediately notify both parent and child, at a random time of day. Perhaps weight it more heavily during mealtimes. Additionally, grade a small fraction of assignments- say, 5%- as zeroes regardless of actual performance- this will ensure that academically gifted children, even those whose parents don't pressure them- are also stressed. Since children are likely to outlive their parents, we should also randomly select some children, tell them their parents have died suddenly, and let them start to come to terms with that loss before it happens. Finally, all shoes and socks must surely be banned, to ensure the proper development of calluses on children's feet. Surely this will help make kids more resilient. Suffering is part of life, so children must suffer early and often or they'll be too weak.
rubidium 8y ago
I went to a high school without public course grades. We’d get qualitative feedback often, and quantitative feedback on tests (eg 78/100) but it was never translated into a letter grade. It was great. Letter grades were given at the end of the semester to the parents in a session with the teacher. Up to the parents if they shared that with their kids. Many didn’t.
filmgirlcw 8y ago
As someone who was a perfectionist to an unhealthy degree as a kid (and had high anxiety tied to that), this would have been a nightmare. Our grades and weekly averages were posted on a schedule for certain classes, and I would obsessively search the sheet for my student number to make sure I hadn’t fallen below my personal threshold of acceptability (which was often far too high), but at least I knew the date/time grades would be posted. If I was especially freaking out, I could sometime cajole a teacher to grade an exam or something early — but having that “you could find out at any time your world is still spinning or perilously out of balance” would have been awful. And my parents weren’t even part of this —- if anything they actively tried to make me care less —- but plenty of parents when I was in middle/high school were obsessed with kids grades and just the thought that my mom would get a text the same time as me as to my grades is flat-out horrifying.
Tempest1981 8y ago
The reason is probably because teachers are frustrated by parents who are too busy to take interest in their child's education, so they overcompensate and over-communicate, thinking it may help. And if done properly, it might.

nkozyra 8y ago

I don't think the actual study[1] takes the kind of correlation=causation approach this snippet does. That said ... > In addition to distributing report cards earlier in the week, schools could consider including messaging to help prevent corporal punishment that crosses the line into abuse. But that’s a sticky issue in Florida, where some counties still allow corporal punishment in public schools. (Florida’s not alone: 19 states still allow schools to hit students, according to the Gundersen Center for Effective Discipline.) This is absolutely insane. It's 2019. I grew up in Florida and remember "the paddle" from my elementary school days but had assumed it had been stricken by now. [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2717779 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...

gizmo686 8y ago
Non paywalled https://www.gulfcoastkidshouse.org/cms/_fle/871-71165-71064-682.pdf https://www.gulfcoastkidshouse.org/cms/_fle/871-71165-71064-...
- knappa 8y ago
  That's a lot of overlap of those confidence intervals in Table 3.
- educationdata 8y ago
  It is strange that the study does not report raw numbers of instance. How many happened after post card release vs. not after post card release? I can't find the raw numbers of such. Only raw number of breaking down by race. Also, "Of the 167906 calls to the child abuse hotline for children aged 5 to 11 years, 2017 (6.7%) were verified as physical abuse cases". Only 6.7% verified???
  - gizmo686 8y ago
    >Only 6.7% verified??? I have complaints about the quality of the study, but this is not one of them. Keep in mind that anyone in Florida who suspects abuse is required to report it to the hotline. Probably more significant is the more traditional mandated reporters, who are trained to report any suspicion of abuse, out of both an abundance of caution and to protect themselves from liability. By design, such hotlines have a high false positive rate.

daodedickinson 8y ago

>She and her colleagues suspect that the increase is due to children being physically punished for their grades, “but it might be something else we don't know about,” she said. Fucking duh. How could they have this statistic be accurate at all but not have anyone ask any of the kids? We would have told them "FUCKING DUH". Got into a #1 grad program for my major, dropped out because by then my parents chilled out I realized I have ZERO motivation for anything unless someone is going to beat me up if I don't do it. Tried getting a comp sci degree, all the profs told us the degree was useless, profs and students cheated rampantly, and I didn't see a single company in the industry making the world better rather than worse. Now I live in my parents' basement and when they die I will be homeless.

seasoup 8y ago
“Now I live in my parents' basement and when they die I will be homeless.” Is that the fate someone else picked out for you? Change it.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  Yes, but it's not that simple. Our daughter was abused, by a relative that we were trying to help. It can take years to (at least somewhat) undo the damage. Yes, the GP needs to get to work - not primarily externally, but on the internal damage. But it's not nearly as simple and easy as you make it sound. daodedickinson: This may be too hard to do alone. There are people who can help. Find them. Stick with it. It's a long road, but worth walking.
daodedickinson 8y ago
Not like kids won't get beat on a weekday, but if my mom was mad on a weekend I would have to hide under the bed all weekend and stay silent so she wouldn't be reminded I existed. Glad somebody loves to vote down abused kids here, thanks.
- dbdjfjrjvebd 8y ago
  I didn't downvote (and wouldn't have). I suspect that you are being downvoted because you are no longer a kid. You are an adult. You do now have agency to make you own decisions. Personally (and I am not a doctor so I could well be totally wrong!) I think it sounds like your lack of drive/ambition could be worth speaking to a doctor about.

xupybd 8y ago

>“It’s sad, but the good news is there's a simple intervention — don't give report cards on Friday.” Yeah that avoids the one instance of child abuse but that's not the big picture here. How is it that there are that many people that struggle to cope that this is common enough to show up in this research. I feel for both the parents and the children here. If something like grades are causing the parents to lash out at the kids it's a sign that the parents are struggling to cope. That makes things horrible for these poor children. But how on earth does this get fixed? How does society change to provide enough support and training to these parents to give them the resources to handle these situations?

devoply 8y ago
Schools just sort of happened at the behest of industrialists. There isn't actually that much thought put into the concept of schools much less all that follows from them. They are simply taken as granted despite the fact that they are a relatively recent invention. "The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you." —John Updike, 1963
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  See also: the police. (Relevant book: The End of Policing)
- educationdata 8y ago
  School is not a recent invention. Public school is recent invention. Also, there is much thought put into schooling. Curriculum (what to teach), instruction (how to teach), school administration, etc. I am not saying schools are perfect, but claim schools are the same as jails, education is the same as torture, it's just bullsh*t.
  - devoply 8y ago
    > school is not a recent invention https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/freedom-learn/200808/brief-history-education https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/freedom-learn/200808... In relation to the biological history of our species, schools are very recent institutions. For hundreds of thousands of years, before the advent of agriculture, we lived as hunter-gatherers. In my August 2 posting, I summarized the evidence from anthropology that children in hunter-gatherer cultures learned what they needed to know to become effective adults through their own play and exploration. The strong drives in children to play and explore presumably came about, during our evolution as hunter-gatherers, to serve the needs of education. Adults in hunter-gatherer cultures allowed children almost unlimited freedom to play and explore on their own because they recognized that those activities are children's natural ways of learning. In sum, for several thousand years after the advent of agriculture, the education of children was, to a considerable degree, a matter squashing their willfulness in order to make them good laborers. A good child was an obedient child, who suppressed his or her urge to play and explore and dutifully carried out the orders of adult masters. Such education, fortunately, was never fully successful. The human instincts to play and explore are so powerful that they can never be fully beaten out of a child. But certainly the philosophy of education throughout that period, to the degree that it could be articulated, was the opposite of the philosophy that hunter-gatherers had held for hundreds of thousands of years earlier. With the rise of schooling, people began to think of learning as children's work. The same power-assertive methods that had been used to make children work in fields and factories were quite naturally transferred to the classroom. In recent times, the methods of schooling have become less harsh, but basic assumptions have not changed. Learning continues to be defined as children's work, and power assertive means are used to make children do that work. > schools are the same as jails, education is the same as torture, it's just bullsh*t. Meant in jest. "Don't let schooling interfere with your education." - Mark Twain

rmrfrmrf 8y ago

This is a great example of how contemporary medicine's obsession with measurable outcomes produces interventions that are completely devoid of humanity.

b_tterc_p 8y ago

They had 2,000 data points... so they looked at the proportion of points on a given day when there was a report card released the previous day and when there wasn’t. Assuming Saturday’s accounted for, let’s say 20% of the population (blindly assuming) then they had about 400 data points and got a p value of 0.02. I’m assuming they did something to normalize for the number of days because there’s going to be far fewer report card days... idk. I think their statistics are probably shaky. Their confidence interval places the effect size at (20% to 1100%) if I’m reading correctly. I might believe that report cards increase rates of abuse but the idea that Friday is something special is probably just due to not having enough data for other days.

beatgammit 8y ago
Perhaps, but a report card is likely to get more attention on a Friday than another day of the week, and I could see consequences stretching into the weekend, which is supposed to be a time for a child to relax from the school week. That being said, I think we should put far less emphasis on grades and report cards in general, so I'd rather just not give out report cards on a regular basis. Grades and reports cause a ton of stress for kids that just gets in the way of learning. I also think children should be allowed to go at their own pace and have some level of control over what they learn. It's okay if a child lags in one area and excels in another for a year or two. Interests change, and children learn far more rapidly in subjects they're interested in. I agree that just moving report cards may not solve the problem. We need to reexamine why we give report cards and decide if there isn't a better way (and there are a lot of alternative teaching methods that may do better than the way most public schools are run).
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  Maybe, but, it’s not especially convincing evidence that this is a widespread problem. This is pure assumption, but if report cards effected rates regardless of day they probably would have mentioned this. We shouldn’t assume it is the case, and then even if it is the case, we should really take a hard look at whether is a meaningfully large number.
ngcc_hk 8y ago

joshuamcginnis 8y ago

If my years of adolescent beatings for anything less than an A taught me anything, it was: don't bring report cards home on Friday and sign your own progress reports.

miyhhbftdx 8y ago
It taught me something else: deal with similar situations for my kids in a better way. Some things I have inculcated as a part of my children's education: 1. Lots of peer interaction and physical playtime. 2. Pomodoro technique: just 10-15 minutes of assured focus to cover exam topics starting several weeks before the exam date. 3. Treat all grades with praise of hardwork! Because they did put in the time and effort. And briefly go over mistakes and skipped questions. 4. Treat the school curriculum as a secondary medium of instruction and push parental instruction as primary without speed limits.
- Jach 8y ago
  Great points, especially #4 (reminds me of the "No Speed Limit" post from Sivers), but I wonder about #3. It was (maybe still is?) common for lazy nerds to bemoan "Why couldn't I have been praised for effort instead of smarts as a kid?" as if that was the major cause of their laziness. I've suspected that even if they were praised differently it still wouldn't have helped many such lazy nerds because the effort required would still have been very minimal up until they hit their limits where things weren't so easy anymore without working hard (AP classes, college, sometimes all the way to grad school). As far as the effects of praise can shape someone I've figured getting praised for something you didn't do is worse than being praised for a trait, even if being praised for something you did do is better than for a trait.
- amvalo 8y ago
  > Some things I have inculcated as a part of my children's education: > 1. Lots of peer interaction and physical playtime Also known as being a normal human being...
ddingus 8y ago
Bingo. For me, it was different when parents handed out a beating. The school? Just no. My own kids were through school before the portal and notification systems arrived in our schools. In some ways, it is good to know problem areas early. There is time to make changes. As a parent, I would have appreciated that. As a student? Ugh. Many parents are busy and I can see the whole thing suffering from the same "5 star" problem we see in rating systems all over the place. It all gravitates to 5 stars being the constant expectation. Maybe I am glad I didn't have to deal with that mess. Being involved in my kids education was work, maybe more than today. Or maybe not. I wonder how many overcorrects happen due to a kid just having a bad day. Or the stress of just having a bad day amplified?

aerovistae 8y ago

I don't understand why this would help at all. Is it better to be beaten in the middle of the week?

grzm 8y ago
From the article: > "After comparing a year’s worth of verified child abuse cases to the dates elementary school report cards were issued, the researchers found a correlation between report cards and child abuse — but only when grades went home on a Friday."
a1369209993 8y ago
Actually, yes, for two reasons. Firstly, because you'll be beaten on (say) wednesday night, rather then friday night and potentially also saturday morning, saturday night, sunday morning and sunday night. Secondly, because you'll be beaten less severely, for fear that there might be a teacher who cares enough to notice if you show up thursday with bruises and a limp.
- mbrumlow 8y ago
  Bruses and limps don't vansish afet Sundays service. Anything requring a doctor to look at is going to last days. I don't think there is any evidence that changing the day will change the outcome. In fact. If you randomized the day schools sent this info then you will probably keep this stat hidden. Seems like the solution is to hold parents who abuse their children accountable.
  - XJOKOLAT 8y ago
    You said abso-fucking-lutely nothing, douchebag. Is what I would have said.

stmfreak 8y ago

Another plea to change the behavior of the many because of the criminal actions of the few. Can we please go after the criminals and not remove a parenting tool from the law abiding?

tzs 8y ago
How would sending report cards home on a day other than Friday be removing a parenting tool?

tzjmetron 8y ago

For me, it was quite the reverse problem - get perfect scores, have to sign them myself since parents couldn't be bothered. I would deliberately try to sign it as a completely different person to the point that at one time a teacher asked me if my dad was a doctor (he wasn't).

rblion 8y ago

To protect kids, we could create a new system of grades that involves more data than just numbers and scores. Maybe that could be a long-term solution for a lot of seemingly unrelated problems.

Tempest1981 8y ago
Some schools are trying "Standards-Based Grading", where each class has 5-10 semester objectives. Students receive a proficiency rating (4,3,2,1) for each objective. Essentially a more granular report of your skills, vs a single letter. Example: https://www.teacherease.com/standards-based-grading.aspx https://www.teacherease.com/standards-based-grading.aspx

solipsism 8y ago

I'm going to put my money on alcohol being a factor. People drink more on weekends, and of course the link between alcohol and child abuse is strong and incontrovertible.

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ddebernardy 8y ago

> 19 states still allow schools to hit students As one living in a country that bans parents from hitting their own children, I find that number shocking. Do they actually hit the kids in practice, or is this some left-over regulation from the past (like the French ban on women wearing trousers in Paris that got formally repelled a few years ago)?

trevyn 8y ago
You might be even more shocked if you leave first-world countries. Human brutality runs deep, and you can still find it displayed openly on the majority of Earth’s land mass.
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  A number of developing countries ban all forms of corporal punishments on children. Swaths of Latin America does so, as do a few African and Asian countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_corporal_punishment_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_corporal_punishment_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment
  - trevyn 8y ago
    All developing countries have ineffective enforcement of laws, as well — that’s one of the defining criteria.
    - moreira 8y ago
      I think there's a significant difference between the practice being banned but there being "ineffective enforcement of laws", and being somewhere where it's still allowed and seen as perfectly acceptable.
- jakobegger 8y ago
  The US is the only country that has not signed the UN convention on childrens rights. Even developing countries ban corporeal punishment. The US is the outlier.

ngcc_hk 8y ago

Sadly the study is behind paywall. If there are more details and the data is more open ...

nostrebored 8y ago

How many Fridays follow a report card release vs. those which don't? If it is the weekly release schedule that I experienced in Elementary School, then this statement is effectively "people beat their kids less on public holidays" which seems much less surprising. Also, where are schools that do "non-standard" reporting located? This seems like a geographically confounding factor.

burlesona 8y ago

I didn’t see an explanation (or theory) given for why there isn’t a problem on the other days of the week. Did I just miss it? The obvious guess would be people go get drunk on Friday night then come home mad their kid got a bad grade... But I am surprised that it’s somehow not an issue on other weekdays.

hvindin 8y ago

I do wonder if there is any chance that the reason that there is a spike in reports of abuse on the Saturday following report cards coming out on a Friday is because it is more likely to be reported? It's not mentioned anywhere in the article, but if someone said to me that 2 things are true: 1. There is some correlation between report cards being returned and child abuse 2. There is a spike in reports of abuse on Saturdays when report cards are returned on Friday I wouldn't immediately think "cool, lets return report cards earlier. Problem solved" Other than not really solving the problem of abusive parents, this also doesn't actually rule out child abuse happening accross the board but not being reported on weekdays.

Broken_Hippo 8y ago
This isn't something designed to solve the problem. The actual problem is really, really complicated and solving it is difficult. It is unlikely that all the abuse simply shifts to during the week and stops getting reported. What it actually is, however, is a change schools can make to lessen child abuse, even if it is just a little. It isn't something difficult or expensive to do.

dorkwood 8y ago

One possible cause I haven’t seen mentioned is that abusive parents are perhaps more likely to get drunk on a Friday, and the report card provides them a timely justification to beat their kids.

jakobegger 8y ago
Yes. I don't think bad grades make parents violent. Alcohol does.
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Markoff 8y ago

what is it report card? when i was young we had books with grades we were taking home every day, so parents could follow progress and see our grades every day, nowadays grades are published online do parents can check them whenever they want is this another case of some archaic american technology?

gizmo686 8y ago
American schools do that as well to varying degrees. In addition to that, they send out cumulative grades every semester or half semester. In theory, these grades should not be a surprise, but parents don't always follow the daily grades their child gets; particularly those parents which might be abusive.

DeusExMachina 8y ago

> “It’s a pretty astonishing finding,” Is it? I was never abused, but my parents were definitely not pleased by bad school reports. It's not hard to imagine that people who look for excuses to abuse their children, do so after getting a school report. Why is it so astonishing?

vinniejames 8y ago

How is this at all related to programming?

swebs 8y ago
This is not a programming website.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

It’s rather simple. Abusers are conscious of what they’re doing. They think if they abuse their child during the week they’re more likely to get caught because the effects of the abuse (physical and emotional) are still fresh the next day. If they do the abusing on Friday night, by Monday they think they have much less likelihood of getting caught. This may actually work a few times. But eventually they go too far.

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rexgallorum2 8y ago

This one requires a little lateral thinking. Why not get rid of report cards, or grades, altogether? The use of online platforms where teachers are expected to enter grades in real time sounds like a massive burden on the teachers, not to mention a privacy/security risk. Terrible.