Before Math, Before Reading: What Schools Graded First

Before schools graded reading, math, or any academic skill, they graded whether a child was 'good.' Joey digs into how behavior measurement became the original American report card—from 1830s deportment grades rooted in Puritan doctrine about original sin, through modern surveillance apps that promise to quantify conduct, all the way to the structural pipeline that connects school discipline to incarceration. Same measurement problem across eras: the systems we build to observe and grade behavior bend the thing they're measuring. 00:00:00 - Behavior measurement before academics 00:01:33 - Colonial Puritan doctrine and school discipline 00:07:16 - School-to-prison pipeline connection 00:12:25 - Modern behavioral tracking systems 00:18:50 - How the system persists across eras --- Sources & further reading: • Southern Poverty Law Center — "From Slavery to School Discipline": https://www.splcenter.org/resources/stories/from-slavery-to-school-discipline/ • American Psychological Association — "Are Zero Tolerance Policies Effective in the Schools?" (Zero Tolerance Task Force Report, 2008): https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/zero-tolerance • Jamie Manolev — "No child left alone: The ClassDojo app" (2016): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304627527_No_child_left_alone_The_ClassDojo_app • APM Reports — "Two centuries of school discipline": https://www.apmreports.org/story/2016/08/25/two-centuries-of-school-discipline • UNC Southern Historical Collection — "…deportment has been uniformly correct…: Report Cards of the 19th Century": https://blogs.lib.unc.edu/shc/2013/12/06/deportment-has-been-uniformly-correct-report-cards-of-the-19th-century/ • Jack Schneider — "Making the Grade: A History of the A-F Marking Scheme": https://gradingforlearning.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/making_the_grade_jcs_pre-pub.pdf • Human Restoration Project — "A Brief History of Grades and Gradeless Learning": https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/writing/a-brief-history-of-grades-and-gradeless-learning/ • ERIC — "Student Discipline in Colonial America" (1984): https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED252451 • Center for American Progress — "Disparities in School Discipline Move Students of Color Toward Prison": https://www.americanprogress.org/article/disparities-in-school-discipline-move-students-of-color-toward-prison/ • Education Next — "Proving the School-to-Prison Pipeline": https://www.educationnext.org/proving-school-to-prison-pipeline-stricter-middle-schools-raise-risk-of-adult-arrests/ • Vera Institute of Justice — "A Generation Later: What We've Learned About Zero Tolerance in Schools": https://www.vera.org/publications/a-generation-later-what-weve-learned-about-zero-tolerance-in-schools • Trevor Fronius et al. — "Restorative Justice in U.S. Schools: An Updated Research Review" (WestEd, 2019): https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED595733.pdf • Coda Story — "A school communication app gamifies the classroom": https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/classdojo-schools-bias/ • Forbes — "Zero Tolerance Policies In School 'Promote Further Misbehavior,' Study Finds" (2024): https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2024/05/15/zero-tolerance-policies-in-school-promote-further-misbehavior-study-finds/ • Josiah Haller — "Horace Mann, John Dewey and 'The State as Moral Educator'": https://crimsonhistorical.ua.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Haller-Done.pdf • The Marshall Project — "Ban the Other Box" (on disciplinary records in college admissions): https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/06/15/ban-the-other-box • The Hechinger Report — "Four things a mountain of school discipline records taught us": https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-four-things-a-mountain-of-school-discipline-records-taught-us/ • Tandfonline — "Zero Tolerance and Alternative Discipline: A Look at 30 Years" (2023): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2331186X.2023.2179863 • …and 3 more in the episode research notes This podcast episode was fully generated by AI — research, script, voices, and production. Built with Claude, Piper TTS, and automated pipeline tooling.