Education: Rubrics and the demise of learning

Hello!

I would like to begin communicating about my experiences in education.  I am a high school teacher agonizing over the state of education and the direction it is going.   I can't reveal the school in which I teach, but I can reveal the serious concerns that are undoubtedly systemic to the education system across the country.

Let me start with rubric grading.  English teachers are being pushed to use a rubric to grade essays:  in my school, that means students are expected to write timed writes (students are given a determined time to write -- 45 minutes usually), submit the paper, and the teacher (one boasts that the paper can be read in 20 seconds) "grades" with a rubric score of a 1-6 with 6 being the highest score.  There are essentially no comments on the papers.  The students get the paper back and are expected to use the rubric scoring guide to understand how their papers can be improved.  The disconnect is obvious -- most students' papers end up in the trash (or recycle bin if lucky) as soon as having discovered whether they are a "6," a "5," a
"4," a "3," a "2," or a lowly "1."

I don't shy from marking papers heavily to make suggestions for improvement including grammatical and stylistic issues, but I find it psychologically unsound to mark a paper with a low mark (as one highly respected retired teacher said, "When we write, we put ourselves on the paper.")  It is not necessary to give a low score to a paper on which the student is expected to learn.  Maybe rubric grading should be used only for final papers in which there will be no attempt to improve.