2 Responding to Arguments

Carter Jones wrote this response in Molly Burt’s ENGL 200 class.

Counterargument to Grade Inflation

 Society has altered education in many ways over time, including technology, curriculum, and funding. These adjustments and advances have had significant impacts on how education affects students, their subsequent careers, and society at large. However, the way in which we evaluate students, grading, has not altered much since its foundation. The letter grades that students received in 1918 are the same types of grades that students receive in 2018—to an extent. Many researchers claim that grades have been changing in the form of grade inflation—an increase in average grade point average of students over time without an increase in actual student achievement. Opponents of grade inflation such as George C. Leef (the director of research at the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy) contend that the phenomenon hurts students, professors, and the entire education system. However, there is clear indication that grade inflation is not harmful to our education system because its statistics are substantially flawed, its prevalence and impacts are limited, and the grading system itself is more detrimental to students.

In his article “Grade Inflation Eats Away at the Meaning of College,” Leef contends that grade inflation harms students by devaluing grades overall and allowing them to believe that they are more competent than in reality. Primarily, grade inflation tends to occur because of administrative pressures on faculty. Leef claims that “low grades can delay student graduation” thus “undermining state funding and faculty salaries” at universities (par. 8). Therefore, professors must allow for students to graduate by enhancing their scores. Additionally, Leef argues that students do not deserve the grades they are receiving because their study time has decreased. Students spent “only about two thirds as much time [in 2010] as they did some fifty years ago,” which is “hardly consistent with the notion that students today are really earning all those A grades” (par. 20). Because students do not utilize the equivalent amount of time on studying for exams, they are not be achieving as much as past generations. As a result, higher grade point averages for students are undeserved, according to Leef. He makes meritorious points against grade inflation, and it is certainly understandable why he and other educational researchers are concerned by supposed increases in grade inflation. However, there are multiple flaws with his argument, including statistical discrepancies.

Leef and other researchers have contended that grade inflation is an issue, yet their statistical methods may be flawed. According to Evangeleen Pattison, a research fellow at the National Science Foundation and a graduate student in the department of sociology at the University of Texas, multiple studies have highlighted how grade inflation is a nonissue (e.g., Kohn). Unlike sources supporting grade inflation, these emphasize “the necessity of using representative, transcript-based data” (Pattison et al. 2013). Likewise, per Nathan R. Kuncel, an assistant Professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology at the University of Illinois, student- reported results distort the data “with nearly a third of college students reporting inflated estimates of their grades” (Kuncel et al. 2005). Utilizing self-reported data harbors numerous possibilities for response bias. Primarily, some students might feel embarrassed about sharing inadequate grades with others. As a result, studies contending that grade inflation is an ever- increasing problem overstate the extent of the inflation, meaning that its potential harms are drastically limited. Additionally, there are other statistical limitations that hamper these studies’ conclusions. “Low response rates or biased samples” of students can contribute to “compressed distributions of grades or lead to inflated estimates of GPA” (Pattison et al.). Low response rates lead to a bias in the results because only certain types of students, such as highly successful ones that might want their grades to be known, would answer the survey. The issue of grade inflation has its potential impacts limited by significant statistical errors. In conjunction with data-collection methods, grade inflation’s overall prevalence is actually heavily limited.

Grade inflation is not as pervasive as Leef and others arguing against it claim. In fact, the opposite phenomenon could be occurring. Pattison et al. analyzed whether average education scores have increased and what economic outcomes correlated. While average high school GPA has increased from 1972 to 1992, “the mean GPA among students who attend a 4-year college dropped gradually” as well as “students who attend a selective 4-year college” (Pattison et al.). This significant decline contradicts findings that grades have been increasing for decades on end for every level of education. Additionally, the economics results from grades have not shifted at 4-year colleges. Grades there are “consistently associated with occupational prestige” and the small decrease in earnings is not “statistically significant evidence of attenuation in [their] signaling power” (Pattison et al.). Thus, the impact of mean grade adjustments has not had a substantial impact on students’ economic outcomes. Grade inflation is clearly not prevalent as Leef and others say; moreover, even if it were, it would not have an impact on student occupation. Finally, the potential impacts of grade inflation do not matter when compared to the value of grades in general.

Grading used as a tool for evaluation is highly flawed and leads to many detrimental effects that outweigh those of grade inflation. While high grades still correlate with occupational attainment, they are not the direct cause. Mark Oppenheimer contends that “GPA was seventh out of eight factors employers considered in hiring” because there is “‘a clamor’ from employers ‘for something more meaningful’ than the traditional transcript” (Oppenheimer). While Leef asserts that employers disregard grades because of grade inflation, it is clear that grades themselves are to blame. Employers ignore high GPAs because students cannot be distinguished primarily by their objective performance. Therefore, as Alfie Kohn (American author and lecturer in education) writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education, we must challenge the view that grades are the most correct and ethical method to evaluate academic achievement. The idea that there is an objective way of analyzing student success “reflects a simplistic and outdated view of knowledge and of learning” that restricts our perspective to one of “inputs and outputs, incentives, resource distribution, and compensation” (Kohn). Researchers such as Leef who argue against grade inflation have a narrow, pre-disposed belief that grades are ultimately the most effective tool for assessing student accomplishment. To fully understand the significance of student achievement and how to evaluate it, our minds must transcend the tunnel vision that grade inflation discussions create. Most importantly, it is not the professors’ primary job to sort out students for the workforce. Instead of “[rating] students like blenders for the convenience of corporations” educators should be offering “feedback that will help students learn more skillfully and enthusiastically” (Kohn). In essence, professors should not be primarily evaluating students on the basis of grades nor test scores; students should be subjected to qualitative feedback that opens their minds to specific strengths and weaknesses. Scores say nothing about the quality of a student’s learning or effort. A student could spend arduous hours each day studying hard for a concept they want to master. Another student may spend all night partying with his friends and then cramming the studying in at the last minute. While both might receive the same exam score, which one is the better student, the better learner? Grades do not reflect what each student deserves, and they never will, because some students can give their best effort towards a class while others disregard any struggle while still receiving the same unwarranted grade. Thus, the grading system exponentially increases student inequality and destroys real effort in learning, undermining the importance of grade inflation.

While grade inflation has been a widespread topic of discussion among educational researchers, there are statistical flaws in studies arguing against it, its effects and extent among university institutions are significantly limited, and the grading system itself has much more detrimental impacts. In order to alter education for the better, we must not necessarily analyze what grades students are getting on average, but why they are getting grades at all, and how we should better evaluate their successes and failures.

Mary Winzer wrote this response in Maia Carlson’s ENGL 200 class.

Response to “The Myth of Police Reform”

Michael Brown. Walter Scott. Alton Sterling. Tony Robinson. Eric Garner. Anthony Hill. How many of these names spark some recognition? Or, at this point, do the victims of police brutality all blur together, lost in an ongoing stream of case after case? There is no question that, in recent years, police conduct and credibility has become a controversial theme in most news outlets and across social media platforms. The typical result of outrage is to point fingers at the police directly involved in such incidents, but while officers using unnecessary amounts of force should see consequences, there are deeper roots to this issue that run beneath the surface. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article, “The Myth of Police Reform,” published in The Atlantic on April 15, 2015, Coates claims that the real issue is that people believe police are always well-equipped when in fact their skillset only effectively facilitates the use of force, yet we still send them in to de-escalate problems they may not be trained to understand. In response, I agree with Coates’ claim that police should not be deployed to solve every situation and that we, as a society, place too much overall trust in our criminal justice system, but I disagree with Coates’ points that body cameras and direct officer accountability are not steps in the right direction.

Coates’ primary overarching claim in his article is that police officers are not equipped to appropriately handle every situation they are sent to fix because they are not trained in all the intricacies of social work required to effectively de-escalate issues such as homelessness, drug abuse, mental illness, etc.—a point in which I wholeheartedly agree. Before I wrote my full support into this claim, though, I felt obligated to discuss it with someone in my life who could offer insight into the training practices of police departments. My father, Ken Winzer, who was a police officer for the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department for 27 years, explained his experiences to me in a personal phone interview. An important thing to note is that police departments across the country vary greatly, but Winzer insisted that extended training was becoming “the trendy thing right now in law enforcement”—that is, many departments were suddenly beginning to employ it before he retired about three years ago. He cited something called the Critical Incident Training (CIT) Program that was put in place to better help officers understand issues such as homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness, but he also mentioned that while this was an effective program, he did not believe, from a police officer’s standpoint, that he or his colleagues could always offer the best solutions to certain situations— and his department agreed. The KCK police department hired actual social workers to ride with police officers on call in order to provide a second skill set. While the profession requires a certain level of empathy, Winzer stated that these additions to the team were invaluable in de- escalating confrontations. “Sometimes people just need someone to talk to,” he said. “Sometimes arresting them will just make the situation worse.” In other words, if officers were to answer a call regarding someone with one of the complications discussed above, and these officers had the agency to arrest and even incarcerate said individuals, but lacked the understanding to effectively approach the situation from a place of social insight, no problem is actually solved. Winzer, at the end of our discussion, made sure to emphasize that even without such programs and employment practices, police departments still tell their officers that they are everything—social workers, law enforcers, meter maids… They must wear many different hats in order to do their jobs effectively. But while many officers and citizens may believe that they are trained in a wide range of skills and are capable of approaching a whole range of situations with the required amounts of both empathy and force, I would still counter with Coates’ idea that this mindset is actually a sign of a concerning problem in the criminal justice system. No matter how much training or experience is currently being given to officers, there are situations that they should simply not be present in at all—and yet we keep sending them.

Last year in Oklahoma City, 35-year-old Magdiel Sanchez was shot and killed at his own home by police officers. Sanchez was deaf, as well as developmentally disabled, and the officers who showed up because Sanchez’s father was allegedly involved in a hit-and-run gave only verbal commands for Sanchez to put down the pipe he held to ward off dogs before opening fire (Perry). Situations like this happen far too often—people with disabilities or impairments being injured or killed by law enforcement. This sort of pattern reinforces the criminalization of certain behaviors that should absolutely not be criminalized. Another example cited in David Perry’s article “4 Disabled People Dead in Another Week of Police Brutality,” published in The Nation, is Conner Leibel, an autistic teenager walking by himself in Buckeye, Arizona while stimming with a length of string who was tackled by officers and sustained multiple injuries. Stimming should certainly not be criminalized behavior, and noncompliance should not be repeatedly used as an excuse for violent escalation in these encounters. Programs like Critical Incident Training certainly have their place in encouraging education amongst those with authority, but the root issue is that they run on the idea that disabilities/impairments themselves are the problems rather than extreme escalation. Programs and registries amongst departments are not enough; what Coates is calling for is the reframing of policework. He encourages the idea that police should simply by removed from as many situations as possible, and while anyone could easily counter that this solution is just a setup for more risk of crime and unsafety in communities, I would argue that the biggest concern of any community should be ensuring that everyone has equal civil rights. The power the criminal justice holds now has continuously displayed trends of being misused, of targeting certain demographics. A study conducted by Stanford University analyzing traffic stops in major North Carolina cities showed that police were repeatedly more likely to search black and Hispanic (mostly from lower socio-economic backgrounds) motorists with a lower threshold of suspicion than they exercised with white drivers, while those searches yielded less discover of illegal drugs or weapons than when they searched white drivers’ vehicles. Coates’ claim is that the criminal justice system, as it exists now, holds power over these marginalized communities rather than authority, or control with consent, and the data exemplifies this. Not everyone is treated equally by law enforcement, and that should be more than enough reason to start considering ways to adjust the system overall. Removing officers from certain situations could easily result in a safer, more equitable criminal justice system.

Coates points out towards the end of “The Myth of Police Reform” that body cameras are a flawed solution, that they are the “least divisive and least invasive step” towards reform. He believes that they are tool to avoid a deeper conversation about the major flaws of the criminal justice system, and while I agree that body cameras are absolutely not a panacea, I would disagree with Coates that they are not an important step in the right direction because I believe the accountability they provide is a step towards regulating excessive uses of force in criminal situations. With the swaths of misconduct amongst law enforcement confrontations, body cameras are a typically reliable source of evidence when these issues are brought to light. Being able to have that insight at what dangerous escalation looks like is important not only to raise awareness amongst officers and citizens alike, but it provides a constant reminder of accountability which is, ultimately, a democratic idea. Video evidence of an encounter between an officer and 15-year-old Jordan Edwards in Balch Springs, Texas provided proof that was inconsistent with the officer’s initial statement. The officer was then fired and faced with murder charges (Wiley). That kind of accountability is invaluable to those seeking justice. It curbs misconduct amongst officers who may have unjustified prejudices that corrupt their work decision. It pushes an unsafe system in a safer direction. While police departments, at the moment, lack comprehensive guidance for proper structured use of such recording devices, this tool has the capacity to be employed nationwide and encourage more understanding of proper law enforcement practices, instead of further cultivating a culture that typically likes to shove every problem into the hands of the criminal justice system without looking further into which situations should really be under its power as opposed to, as Coates puts it, “the authority of other branches of civil society.”

Nicholas Sixbury wrote this response essay in Christina Hauck’s ENGL 200 class. Please note how Sixbury uses section headings to focus readers on different parts of the response.

The Andrew Jackson Courthouse Statue in Jackson County Should be Removed

Introduction

In June 2020, a statue of Andrew Jackson outside a courthouse in Jackson County, Missouri in Kansas City was vandalized, leading to a wider political discussion about whether the statue should stay up. After the statue was vandalized, Jackson County Executive Frank White, Jr. released a statement advocating for the removal of the statue (Greenstein 4), stating that as long as both the Andrew Jackson statue which was vandalized (and the other Andrew Jackson statue in front of a different nearby courthouse) stay up, “our words about fairness, justice and equality will continue to ring hollow for many we serve” (Greenstein 5). Art conservationist Karri Vaughn released an article the next month in The KC Star, titled “Don’t Remove KC’s Andrew Jackson Courthouse Statue. Create New Art to Challenge It,” in which she argued against removing the statue. Ultimately in November of the same year, the issue was taken to a vote amongst residents of Jackson County, a county named after Andrew Jackson in 1826, nearly three years before he was elected president (Cruz 16). Voters in Jackson County decided to keep the statue up in a “72-23 majority” (Cruz 1). Instead of removal, the statue will have a plaque placed upon it, explaining why the county chose Andrew Jackson as a symbol (Cruz 6). Despite the vote, there are still those who think the statue should eventually be removed. After the results of the vote had taken place, White, Jr. expressed disappointment at the outcome, stating, “I remain committed in my belief that the statues of a man who owned slaves, caused thousands of Native Americans to die and never stepped foot in our County should be removed from our public facilities” (Cruz 9). Vaughn argues that the Andrew Jackson statue in KC shouldn’t be moved because of its artistic merit.

Summary of Source Editorial

In Karri Vaughn’s “Don’t Remove KC’s Andrew Jackson Courthouse Statue. Create New Art to Challenge It,” she argues that the Andrew Jackson statue in front of the Jackson County Courthouse shouldn’t be moved from its current location because it would ignore the history of the statue and the artist’s intent in making the statue to be put there. She doesn’t mention the other statue, which stands “outside the Historic Truman Courthouse in downtown Independence” (Greenstein 7), perhaps because it wasn’t vandalized. Her reasoning as to why the statue shouldn’t be removed is that the statue itself has great artistic merit, which makes it relevant to artists today, and the original intent of the artist is an important part of the current production of art, so moving it would diminish positive effects it has on art today. The main goal of the author is to conserve the art we have today and ensure the production of new art. She writes to a local, educated audience who likely already have their own opinions on the potential removal of the statue.

While the statue might have great merit as a piece of art, the statue should be moved because that merit would not be diminished by relocation to a museum, art gallery, or similar facility, and its current location puts the efficacy of the local government into question.

Why Artistic Merit Isn’t an Issue

While the statue may have great artistic merit, that merit does not overshadow the public reception of the statue, and moving the statue would not significantly harm that merit. First off, the claim that because “artists use works from the past to contextualize contemporary pieces[,]… art conservation is essential to the current production of art” is dubious (Vaughn 3). While artists may imitate or be inspired by past works, plenty of them create original artwork; it would certainly be absurd to claim that no original artwork is created. After all, if all artwork requires a past reference, then where did the original reference come from? The definition of art itself is also rather vague, as Vaughn herself acknowledges when she contends that “art has a slippery definition and is no longer limited to high-quality, handmade or even material objects” (Vaughn 3). Many things not even created by humans could very well be considered art (or at least artful), such as beautiful landscapes, for instance. Vaughn also argues for the importance of the original artist’s intent, as “by upholding the artist’s intent, new artists can incorporate others’ work into their own” (Vaughn 4). She states that “if a conservator damages the artist’s original intent, viewers begin engaging with a facsimile” (Vaughn 4). It’s not clear exactly what she means the significance of viewers engaging with a facsimile (meaning an exact copy) to be, as she doesn’t clarify, but from context it’s clear that this is something negative.

This argument doesn’t really work for art created by natural processes, as there arguably isn’t intent behind the processes that created them. Instead, the humans who view such sights determine the significance and beauty for themselves. It’s also not clear what exactly it would mean to “damage the artist’s original intent” (Vaughn 4), but if understanding the original intention of the artist when they made a piece of art is so important, then the relocation of a piece to a museum shouldn’t be an issue. Within a museum, viewers can be educated on the context of the time when the artist created the piece, and this is already quite normal. Often when learning about a literary piece from a different time, it’s standard to learn about the history behind the writer and what was going on historically at the time that might influence their views. The same can be done for other pieces of art, including the statue. In fact, even before the statue became controversial, there were plans to put a plaque on the statue specifically to give context as to why the statue is there (Cruz 3). Given the fact that the reasoning why the statue is still up was considered unclear enough that it needed a plaque to provide explanation, the statue’s current location probably isn’t doing much to inform viewers of the artist’s original intent, but moving it to a museum where its context and history can be explained to the public would likely give people a better idea of the artist’s intent. Vaughn argues that moving the statue somewhere else would damage the artist’s intent, and that that would be a bad thing, but she fails to properly establish why moving the statue would be bad.

Why Andrew Jackson Is A Bad Symbol

The artistic merit of the statue also doesn’t overshadow the figure depicted by the statue itself. Vaughn largely ignores who the statue depicts until she briefly mentions his past in the second- to-last paragraph, but the person who the statue depicts should also be a consideration (Vaughn 11). The courthouse is meant to be a place of justice, where cases are tried fairly under the law without prejudice, but a figure of Andrew Jackson right outside puts that into question. Andrew Jackson is an individual who flaunted the law and put policies into effect that killed thousands based on his own prejudiced ideas, and a statue of him on government property calls into question the efficacy of the system that a courthouse is meant to carry out. In the article “Andrew Jackson was a Slaver, Ethnic Cleanser, and Tyrant. He Deserves No Place on Our Money,” Dylan Matthews, a writer at Vox, states that “Andrew Jackson deserves a museum chronicling his crimes and dedicated to his victims, not commemoration” (Matthews 6). Jackson is a particularly bad symbol to be put in front of a courthouse because of the way he has flaunted rule of law. In terms of the Indian Removal Act which started the Trail of Tears, Jackson believed that instead of negotiating with Native Americans, “the government should simply impose its will on them” (Matthews 12). In addition to this, Jackson committed war crimes while he was in the military. In 1818, he ordered “two British subjects, Robert Ambrister and Alexander George Arbuthnot, executed during the First Seminole War in Spanish Florida” (Matthews 32) without having sufficient evidence of them actually doing anything wrong. In fact, he “carried both sentences out the next day so there would be no chance of an appeal” (Matthews 34). In addition to this and “kill[ing] his own men for petty infractions” (Matthews 35), he was also fined by the government for behaving tyrannically when he took New Orleans in part because “he defied a writ of habeas corpus, the legal privilege recognized by the Constitution which allows someone being detained to insist that a judge look into his case” (Matthews 30). Someone who illegally prevents another person who is detained from seeing a judge is an awful symbol for a courthouse. Jackson not only has a horrific past, but his flaunting of the law and fair process makes him a particularly bad symbol for a courthouse.

Why Government Image Matters Now

With recent events like the murder of George Floyd and the now-canceled building of the Dakota Access Pipeline, public perception matters more now than it might have previously, as events like these make people doubt the effectiveness of the system they are largely forced to live in. It can be seen from the fact that “in a vote for Kansas City, Missouri, 60% voted to take the statues down” that at least in Kansas City as a whole, public opinion is on the side of taking the statue down (Harris 4). When George Floyd was murdered, the issue of police brutality was brought to public attention, bringing the system’s failure to reform into focus for many people that might not have been as aware of things before. The Dakota Access Pipeline represents another instance of the government showing its prejudice. Originally, the pipeline was designed to go through Bismark, North Dakota, but the citizens there rejected it because they didn’t want to risk contaminating their drinking water (Anubias 10). As such, the pipeline was diverted through Standing Rock (a Native American Reservation) even though it would contaminate their drinking water and damage sacred burial sites (Anubias 10). The Native Americans didn’t want the pipeline going through their land either, with “an estimated 10,000 people… in the region to join in the demonstrations,” including “hundreds of US military veterans,” “Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders,” and “Robert Kennedy Jr., environmental activist and nephew of former president John F Kennedy” (BBC 26). Even so, their protests were dismissed and met with “excessive force, including dousing crowds with pepper spray and freezing water as well as firing sound cannons, bean bag rounds and rubber bullets” (BBC 29). Police action against the protesters was bad enough that the United Nations spoke out about the excessive use of force against protesters (BBC 33). And yet, all of that was not enough to stop the building of the pipeline until recently when a change of administration was made after the election, and the building was canceled by presidential order. Events like these make people (very understandably) doubt that the government is really fair, or even that it has its citizens’ best interests at heart. This is worsened further when a county decides to keep up a memorialization of someone who is known for committing genocide against Native Americans, not only on public property, but in front of a building that is meant to carry out the law, ostensibly without prejudice.

Conclusion

The treatment of minorities by our current system of justice is an ongoing problem. Citizens are murdered in public by officers of the law without provocation. Indigenous people are exploited by corporations and the government for profit. And statues commemorating a figure who committed genocide against those he should have protected as people living in the nation he led are upheld in public. Vaughn argues that such a statue should stay up, not only on public display, but right in front of the courthouse where it has been for years. Largely ignoring the larger context of why people want the Andrew Jackson statue taken down, she argues the statue should stay up because, among other things, it “contextualize[s] contemporary pieces” (Vaughn 3). She says, “We should begin our evaluation of the Andrew Jackson statue with a historical backdrop,” but perhaps the history which should be focused on in this situation is the proposal to continue memorializing such a problematic figure in front of a courthouse after a history of abuse of native peoples both by the modern government and Andrew Jackson himself, the figure which the statue depicts (Vaughn 4).

Works Cited

Anubias. “Indian Removal Act: The Genocide of Native Americans.” UAB Institute for Human Rights Blog, 21 Jan. 2020, sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2017/04/17/indian-removal-act– genocide-native-americans/.

Cruz, Carolina. “Andrew Jackson Statues in Jackson Co. to Get Plaques after Voters Reject Their Removal.” KCTV Kansas City, 9 Nov. 2020, www.kctv5.com/news/local_news/andrew– jackson-statues-in-jackson-co-to-get-plaques-after-voters-reject-their- removal/article_013f1a82-1f03-11eb-9633-7794e3cdf844.html.

“Dakota Pipeline: What’s Behind the Controversy?” BBC News, BBC, 7 Feb. 2017, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37863955.