<p>I have a friend, an African-American, whose family moved to a then-all-white Texas suburb when he was entering 9th grade. He and his sister, and later a younger brother, were the only Black students at the high school. His sister would have been valedictorian on the basis of her grades, but the school district alertly adopted the “four year” rule when she was ranked #1 in 11th grade. That rule, of course, didn’t work to keep my friend from being ranked #1 in his class, so before his senior year the school district decided to include standardized test scores in the valedictorian formula. That got him into second place.</p>
<p>My friend didn’t care so much. He was friends with the kid who got to be the valedictorian, and at the time it meant money towards UT tuition, whereas my friend was on his way to Harvard.</p>
<p>My kids’ school diddled with its formula all the time, trying (without success) to find the perfect way to communicate what it valued and how it wanted ambitious students to behave. Every adjustment caused some dislocation among the kids, with the losers screaming bloody murder and the winners confident that justice had at last been done. My son, who had a single-digit rank, was knocked down a few notches when a 9th grade one-quarter studio art class in which he had gotten a B (his only grade below A- in his first two years of high school) suddenly became a factor in ranking, when it hadn’t been taken into account before. He had gotten a B in the class because someone had stolen the teacher’s grade book, and the teacher had no other record of the grades on people’s assignments, so he gave everyone Cs, and then raised the grade to B if a parent called to complain. (That was the worst part. I would never, ever have considered questioning a high school teacher about the grade he had given my child. As far as I was concerned, it was the child’s responsibility to work that out. But it became clear that the wanted parents to call him.)</p>