Wade Morris

Wade Morris (Col ’04) is publishing Report Cards: A Cultural History with Johns Hopkins University Press. The book traces the nearly two hundred year history of American education by examining how grades have reflected the shifting power dynamics between teachers, parents, and students.

Morris argues that report cards reflected broader shifts in the evolution of U.S. schools: the republican zealotry and religious fervor of the antebellum period, the failed promises of postwar Reconstruction for the formerly enslaved, the changing gender roles in newly urbanized cities, the overreach of the Progressive child-saving movement in the early twentieth century, and―by the 1930s―the increasing faith in an academic meritocracy. The use of report cards expanded with the growth of school bureaucracies, becoming a tool through which administrators could surveil both student activity and teachers. And by the late 20th century, even the most radical critics of numerical reporting of children have had to compromise their ideals.