“This is going to appear on your permanent record.”
If those words, spoken by my third-grade teacher, were intended to terrify, they had the intended effect. I had never before gotten into trouble, but a couple of friends and I had let our exuberance get the best of us. Depending on your interpretation we either defaced or creatively enhanced the covers of a workbook. We didn’t write anything offensive or draw pictures of genitalia, just added descriptors like “The Great” to our names and illustrated the cover with stars. The teacher wasn’t amused.
That summer my family moved, and I wondered if my permanent record might lead me to be placed in reform school in my new locale, but the permanent record turned out to be an empty threat. The workbook incident never came up in any job interview. And I’m confident that on Judgment Day I’ll have far more serious sins to account for.
For several reasons I have been thinking about the concept of the permanent record recently. Specifically, should it be possible to edit or erase one’s permanent record?
The first was former President Donald Trump’s request (or maybe demand) of Republicans in Congress to expunge his two impeachments. Regardless of whether you think the impeachments were unjustified or that the not guilty verdicts were unjustified, is it possible to pretend they just didn’t happen? The justice system has a provision to expunge records for juvenile offenders with youthful indiscretions or mistakes, but should we get a do-over for things we do in our 70s?
The second was the news that the state of Florida’s revised history standards now include a standard that suggests that slavery was not all bad, that some slaves learned trades like being a blacksmith. It is hard to fathom that in the 21st century anyone can spin the subjugation and enslavement of other humans as in any way defensible. Governor and Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis simultaneously disavowed any knowledge and then doubled-down on the claim.
History, of course, is the ultimate permanent record. Winston Churchill is credited as having said that “history is written by the victors.” I am fully aware that we live in a time where there isn’t agreement about what is and isn’t a fact, but I believe that our understanding of (or perspective on) history may change, but not history itself.
My hometown, Richmond, Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy, and for years the city’s signature street was Monument Avenue, featuring statues of Confederates like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Those statues were removed following the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement. I didn’t grow up in Richmond, so didn’t have any attachment to the monuments, but over the past 50 years Richmond has moved from worshiping its Confederate past to forgetting or erasing its Confederate past. I wonder if it’s possible to adopt a third option, acknowledging our history while also putting it into context.
What really got me thinking about the “permanent record,” though, was a recent post on the ACCIS (Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools) e-list.
The counselor who posted had been contacted by the admissions office at her school about a new student interested in enrolling as either a ninth grader or a tenth grader. The student had been at another private school where he had earned a 4.0 GPA in ninth grade, but was the youngest in his class by a significant amount of time, and the family was considering a repeat year for social-emotional reasons. The family is wondering if the student would need to report both ninth grade years when he applies to college given that he would have a full 9-12 transcript from the new school.
I think there are a couple of interesting issues here. One regards reclassing, and the other what has to be reported about the student’s record.
I have seen more requests for a student to reclass (not necessarily the same thing as repeating) at my school in recent years. A lot of those are either explicitly or implicitly about athletics, hoping that a “redshirt” year will change a student-athlete’s options. In my experience rarely does that work out. My rule of thumb for both athletes and non-athletes is that an extra year won’t change your list of college options. Instead you may be a stronger candidate for the same group of schools.
I wonder whether we will see more requests to reclass because of COVID. The pandemic clearly impacted students both academically and in terms of personal health and well-being, and a reclass year for some is a way of buying time to re-capture some of what was lost. I have particularly seen an uptick in requests to reclass from students who transferred to my school in the ninth grade and realized how far behind they were.
The counselor posting on the ACCIS e-list reported that the family’s reason for seeking a re-class was primarily because of the fact that the student was significantly younger than his classmates. I happen to think that’s a good reason for an extra year, even if his academic record doesn’t suggest that a reclass year is necessary. I think we underestimate the role that maturity plays in an adolescent’s well-being and sense of self.
Both of my children ended up doing an extra year, for different reasons. My son repeated first-grade because he was a late bloomer in terms of fine-motor skills. I didn’t see the benefits until late in high school when he blossomed and went to college confidently on a high note. My daughter has a December birthday, so when our sister school wouldn’t consider her as a kindergarten applicant, we thought we would put her in the junior kindergarten program in our county public schools. The school system said she was ready for kindergarten. A year later she redid kindergarten at our sister school after the Head of School came to visit me and said they would consider her for first grade if we insisted, but that she advised against it. She said my daughter’s relative youth wouldn’t be an issue for the first few years, but would show up when her classmates went through puberty or when they started to drive.
The ethical issue here is whether it is appropriate to expunge or erase the student’s previous ninth-grade year. I responded to the counselor that it’s not appropriate or ethical (those might be the same things).
I have always believed that a transcript should be an unedited record of a student’s academic performance. When I was in graduate school in philosophy, one of my classmates, the one receiving full funding from the department, admitted one night that he had spent a year at another graduate school, but hadn’t reported it on his application. Ethics was clearly not his philosophical area of interest. Erasing a year is a form of deception just as much as erasing a year or a job off of one’s resume. It may be that the extra year needs to be explained, and that is best done in a letter of recommendation.
A transcript should contain the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And a permanent record should probably be permanent.