By Greta Haroldson
Features Editor & Opinions Reporter
If you pay a modicum of attention to the goings-on of Harpeth Hall girls for longer than a few hours, you’ll quickly surmise that, like any group of teenagers, we like to complain. From formal lunch meetings to harried hallway gossip, our conversations tend to gravitate towards our student body’s biggest concerns: namely, what we are not allowed to do.
The length of our socks and the tucked-in-ness of our dress shirts feature heavily in the list of student grievances, but perhaps the biggest complaint is one that is rarely articulated by the student body: Harpeth Hall students feel they don’t get enough control.
Have you ever overheard one of your peers mid-rant, huffing about how the school won’t let her be president of her two favorite clubs? Or that she’s being made to choose between Honors French and AP Physics because she can only take so many advanced courses? All this frustration with the administration boils down to the Harpeth Hall model of paternalistic policies, administrative decisions that lessen academic freedom within the student body for what they consider to be our own good.
Our school’s policy model is not typical. Our closed gradebook and GPA rules are not fully shared with MBA, USN, FRA or most other high schools in America. Neither are personalized AP/Honors limits or caps to student leadership positions. The competitive drive that plagues our student body craves for these tools of academic advancement, and it grates with many students that our gallop towards academic validation must be done with reins. So why do our administration policies tell us to lead confidently, then surround us with guardrails?
Unsurprisingly, there is a reason. While tools like an open gradebook may seem like a boon to students, they are primarily instruments of comparison, not the secret to straight A’s. But, I hear you protest, I think comparison is the secret to straight As! Well, dear reader, while you may be right that comparison allows students to see where they need to improve from the example of their peers, it simultaneously introduces a social element feared by school administrators worldwide: academic competitiveness. And this competitiveness is the downfall of academic cooperation, social unity, and, indeed, good grades.
Harpeth Hall girls tend to be competitive, but this competition is most often focused on the national level: the average SAT score for this or that college, the average PSAT score for National Merit in Tennessee, and so on. Most students at our college preparatory school are here to prep for college, and they prepare with comparison. But comparison within HH itself can be dangerous, and that is what our policy-makers are trying to avoid.
To explore why in-school comparison can damage school culture, let’s walk through the effects of one of the instruments of comparison we do have here at HH. All official PSAT tests allow students to compare their scores to the national average, but also to the average score within their schools. Many HH students remember the day their first scores came out, huddled around their friends’ computers and debating if they should share what they got. But even if we all chose to keep our scores to ourselves, the comparison tool for all average HH scores forces us to assess our performance in the context of Harpeth Hall’s academic sphere. Seeing our scores through this lens can have serious consequences for the academic confidence of students. It’s easy to imagine a freshman who was once thrilled to be above 90th percentile, but had her self-assurance shaken when the data revealed the score she ‘ought to have got’ as a HH student. Even a freshman who scored above the national average could easily be startled by the significant drop in her percentile.
This kind of comparison is fruitless. It makes sense for a student to compare herself to the stats of accepted applications to the college she hopes to attend, because knowing to perform similarly to or above that average will help her in the college process. The benefits of comparing herself to her fellow classmates, however, are far more unclear.
Unlike at the national level, where we are competing directly with fellow applicants to get into colleges, competition between classmates in the college process is often unproductive. Harpeth Hall peers are only in competition with one another when they apply to the same colleges, and even then, these institutions often only consider the differences between applicants of the same schools through the lens of their shared resources and the college’s desire for students from a variety of backgrounds. With more than 4000 degree-granting postgraduate programs in the U.S. alone, viewing HH life through competition-tinted glasses is more likely to damage academic confidence and lessen collaboration. So why should we give students the opportunity to unnecessarily damage their confidence?
Mrs. Squires, current HH math teacher and former educator at Hillsboro High School, noted that the availability of instruments of comparison like open gradebooks could be invaluable to underperforming students. In her experience, Hillsboro students who were at risk of not graduating benefited from easier access to their grades and the pressure it placed on them to improve. Parents of struggling students also had more tools to ensure that their child was on track and not at risk of a delayed graduation.
But Harpeth Hall has a different culture from Hillsboro High School, and with that distinct culture comes different needs for the student body. On this, Mrs. Squires commented, “The majority of our students, I feel, are more at risk of burning out or trying to be too involved in too many things at one given time.”
At Harpeth Hall, policies that prevent students from taking on too much serve more students than policies that ensure we are on track to graduation. At Hillsboro, pressure from parents has benefited many students academically, but for HH students, parental pressure is more likely to give already on-track students unnecessary stress. So while an open gradebook and unlimited leadership roles can serve some schools’ best interests, it doesn’t serve Harpeth Hall’s.
But, I hear you protest yet again, we’re the odd one out! Other schools with high rates of overachieving students almost never have our policies. Wow, reader, very insightful. Yes, as I pointed out earlier, our local high schools don’t share the paternalistic policies that we have here at Harpeth Hall. FRA, for example, has a completely open gradebook and no caps to leadership positions or AP/Honors courses. But just because most schools have these policies doesn’t mean they should.
FRA student Jason Huddleston commented on his perspective of the role of an open gradebook in academic comparison. “If you can see your grades 24/7, and if you want to be good at everything, then you will know what you need to improve in, how you can make everything better,” he acknowledged. “But on the flip side, if you don’t care about anything, then if you see you’ve got a low grade in a class, you’ll be like, okay, I don’t need to try anymore.” The open gradebook at FRA seems to reinforce student’s beliefs in their academic potential, encouraging high-achieving students to maintain their good grades and low-performing students to feel that they can’t improve. This creates a culture where students have already decided if they are ‘smart’ or not, regardless of where they are in the learning process.
But it’s hard to believe that all these schools are acting against their students’ interests by choice. Two barriers to changing school policy, the students and the parents, may explain why we don’t see more HH policies elsewhere.
Harpeth Hall has faced a great deal of pressure from parents to open the gradebook, and having a closed gradebook is an established part of our school culture. For a school that has always had an open gradebook, making the decision to close it would be even more hotly debated and difficult to maintain. And within the student body, the adjustment to a closed gradebook would likely not be an easy one. According to Jason Huddleston, most overachieving FRA students would “just constantly be asking teachers for their grades, at least at first.”
Yikes, you say. So that’s it, then? No, reader, not necessarily. Many of these schools are making efforts to implement paternalistic policies, just gradually. For example, USN has adapted a partially closed gradebook that shows scores on submitted assignments, but not the overall grade. School administrators are constantly trying to decide the balance between what’s best for students and what’s achievable; we just have to trust that the correct balance will eventually be reached. Here’s to attending a school that has a lot more policies figured out than we may have initially realized.
