The Harvard Brief

Amid widespread concern that our approach to testing and grading undermines education, two experts explain how schools can use assessment to support, rather than compromise, learning.

Anyone who has ever crammed for a test, capitulated to a grade-grubbing student, or fretted over a child’s report card knows that the way we assess student learning in American schools is freighted with unintended consequences. But that’s not all. As experts agree, our primary assessment technologies—grading, rating, and ranking—don’t actually provide an accurate picture of how students are doing in school. Worse, they distort student and educator behavior in ways that undermine learning and exacerbate inequality. Yet despite widespread dissatisfaction, grades, test scores, and transcripts remain the currency of the realm.

In Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don't Have To) (Harvard University Press, 2023), Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt explain how we got into this predicament, why we remain beholden to our outmoded forms of assessment, and what we can do to change course. As they make clear, most current attempts at reform won’t solve the complex problems we face. Instead, Schneider and Hutt offer a range of practical reforms, like embracing multiple measures of performance and making the so-called permanent record “overwritable.” As they explain, we can remake our approach in ways that better advance the three different purposes that assessment currently serves: motivating students to learn, communicating meaningful information about what young people know and can do, and synchronizing an otherwise fragmented educational system.

Written in an accessible style for a broad audience, Off the Mark is a guide for everyone who wants to ensure that assessment serves the fundamental goal of education—helping students learn.

Ethan Hutt is the Gary Stuck Faculty Scholar in Education at the University of North Carolina. 

Jack Schneider is the Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.  

Max Jacobs is a PhD student in education at Rutgers University. He currently sit on the Graduate Student Council for the History of Education Society.

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On September 1, 1967, one of the Third Reich's most infamous figures hanged herself in her cell after nearly twenty-four years in prison. Known as the "Bitch of Buchenwald," Ilse Koch was singularly notorious, having been accused of owning lampshades fabricated from skins of murdered camp inmates and engaging in "bestial" sexual behavior. These allegations fueled a public fascination that turned Koch into a household name and the foremost symbol of Nazi savagery. Her subsequent prosecution resulted in a scandal that prompted US Senate hearings and even the intervention of President Truman.

Yet the most sensational atrocities attributed to Koch were apocryphal or unproven. In this authoritative reappraisal, Tomaz Jardim shows that, while Koch was guilty of heinous crimes, she also became a scapegoat for postwar Germans eager to distance themselves from the Nazi past. The popular condemnation of Koch--and the particularly perverse crimes attributed to her by prosecutors, the media, and the public at large--diverted attention from the far more consequential but less sensational complicity of millions of ordinary Germans in the Third Reich's crimes.

Ilse Koch on Trial: Making the 'Bitch of Buchenwald' (Harvard UP, 2023) reveals how gendered perceptions of violence and culpability drove Koch's zealous prosecution at a time when male Nazi perpetrators responsible for greater crimes often escaped punishment or received lighter sentences. Both in the international press and during her three criminal trials, Koch was condemned for her violation of accepted gender norms and "good womanly behavior." Koch's "sexual barbarism," though treated as an emblem of the Third Reich's depravity, ultimately obscured the bureaucratized terror of the Nazi state and hampered understanding of the Holocaust.

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In February 1848, a book auction took place in Astor House, No. 7, on the corner of Broadway and Vesey in lower Manhattan, New York. By all accounts, the books were shabby and books like them were discarded every day from private and public libraries: one observer described some of the books as “beyond a certain investure of raggedness and dilapidation, backs without covers, mutilated title pages, and missing colophons, on ordinary occasions.” Another observer writes, “They were so positively wretched that they really became fascinating in that very account—as your halfway beggars are despised by every body, while your thoroughgoing pestiferous, rag and filth accumulation sits to Murillo and the Masters.” Despite their ragged and pestiferous condition, these books drew the attention of booklovers throughout the United States. In some ways, the point was in the discontinuity between their deeper significance and their condition—and in the rare discernment of a true bibliomaniac which could see through to their real quality.

The afterlife of this collection is, in part, the subject of Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America (Yale UP, 2022), by today’s guest, Denise Gigante. Denise is the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in the Humanities. She is the author of the previous books, The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George (Harvard UP, 2011), Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (Yale UP, 2009), Taste: A Literary History (Yale UP, 2005), and two anthologies: The Great Age of the English Essay (Yale UP, 2008) and Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy (Routledge, 2005).

This book follows the sixty books in Charles Lamb’s collection as they flowed through the hands of collectors and eventually became the foundation of modern collections such as the New York Public Library and the Boston Public Library. The dramatis personae of Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America includes Robert Balmanno (1780-1861), the secretary of the American Shakespeare Society of New York; the actor and theater manager William Evans Burton (1804-1860); and Joseph Green Cogswell (1786-1871), the first superintendent of the Astor Library in New York.

John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

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There was a time when French people put up picture of Marshal Philippe Petain on their walls. He is a figure of immeasurable stature to the country of France. Victor of Verdun, a one-time minister of war, and finally, a traitor to his country. Or was he? Did Petain allow the stain of collaboration to tarnish his reputation, or did he use his figure to guard the French people from worse Nazi atrocities during the Vichy era? The answer to those questions would divide France in the years following World War II. The trial of Petain, which took place during a humid July in 1945, would leave some venerating the figure of Petain while others looked upon him as betrayer of the French people.

Professor Julian Jackson, is professor emeritus of history with Queen Mary University of London. His latest work is France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain published by Harvard University Press in 2023, covers the political trial of Marshal Petain for treason. Dr. Jackson has authored an award-winning biography of Charles de Gaulle and other works on the history of modern France including his next work an exploration of the life of Andre Gide.

Rick Northrop is an ex-journalist and undergraduate student in Calgary, Alberta Canada. He can be reached at [email protected]

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For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. After all, it serves no necessary purpose in our diets, and extracting it from plants takes hard work and ingenuity. Granulated sugar was first produced in India around the sixth century BC, yet for almost 2,500 years afterward sugar remained marginal in the diets of most people. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into almost all the food we eat, fostering illness and ecological crisis along the way?

The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years (Harvard UP, 2023) begins with the earliest evidence of sugar production. Through the Middle Ages, traders brought small quantities of the precious white crystals to rajahs, emperors, and caliphs. But after sugar crossed the Mediterranean to Europe, where cane could not be cultivated, demand spawned a brutal quest for supply. European cravings were satisfied by enslaved labour; two-thirds of the 12.5 million Africans taken across the Atlantic were destined for sugar plantations. By the twentieth century, sugar was a major source of calories in diets across Europe and North America.

Sugar transformed life on every continent, creating and destroying whole cultures through industrialization, labour migration, and changes in diet. Sugar made fortunes, corrupted governments, and shaped the policies of technocrats. And it provoked freedom cries that rang with world-changing consequences. In Ulbe Bosma’s definitive telling, to understand sugar’s past is to glimpse the origins of our own world of corn syrup and ethanol and begin to see the threat that a not-so-simple commodity poses to our bodies, our environment, and our communities.

Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Focusing on gender relations, family formation, and marriage patterns in areas peripheral to the England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire, Christian Raffensperger and Joanna Drell argue for a more inclusive understanding of medieval Europe. Their conversation dwells on Kyivan Rus and Norman Salerno in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but also the present state of medieval history and the importance of thinking beyond Western Europe and talking across language and geographical divides. Raffensperger is author of Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus in the Medieval World, 988-1146 (Harvard UP, 2012). Joanna Drell is the author of Kinship and Conquest: Family Strategies in the Principality of Salerno during the Norman Period, 1077-1194 (Cornell UP, 2002). Her recent article “The Luxuriant Southern Scene: Textiles as Reflections of Power in the Kingdom of Southern Italy and Sicily” is also a focus of conversation. It is published in Mapping Pre-Modern Sicily: Maritime Violence, Cultural Exchange, and Imagination in the Mediterranean, 800-1700.

Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University.

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Since the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove "conflict diamonds" from jewelry shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds--gems extracted from war zones--has only recently generated attention, it is not a new one. Nor are conflict diamonds an exception in an otherwise honest industry. The modern diamond business, Steven Press shows, owes its origins to imperial wars and has never escaped its legacy of exploitation.

In Blood and Diamonds: Germany's Imperial Ambitions in Africa (Harvard UP, 2021), Press traces the interaction of the mass-market diamond and German colonial domination in Africa. Starting in the 1880s, Germans hunted for diamonds in Southwest Africa. In the decades that followed, Germans waged brutal wars to control the territory, culminating in the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples and the unearthing of vast mineral riches. Press follows the trail of the diamonds from the sands of the Namib Desert to government ministries and corporate boardrooms in Berlin and London and on to the retail counters of New York and Chicago. As Africans working in terrifying conditions extracted unprecedented supplies of diamonds, European cartels maintained the illusion that the stones were scarce, propelling the nascent US market for diamond engagement rings. Convinced by advertisers that diamonds were both valuable and romantically significant, American purchasers unwittingly funded German imperial ambitions into the era of the world wars.

Amid today's global frenzy of mass consumption, Press's history offers an unsettling reminder that cheap luxury often depends on an alliance between corporate power and state violence.

Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life.

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In April 2014, David Bromwich spoke at the Institute about his forthcoming book, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Harvard UP, 2014). Bromwich is a professor of English at Yale University, and the author of studies of Hazlitt and Wordsworth.

While Edmund Burke is commonly seen as the father of modern conservatism, Bromwich argues that he was a more subtle and interesting thinker. Burke defended the rights of disenfranchised minorities, protested against the cruelties of English society, and agitated for peace with America.

Since 1977, the New York Institute for the Humanities has brought together distinguished scholars, writers, artists, and publishing professionals to foster crucial discussions around the public humanities. For more information and to support the NYIH, visit nyihumanities.org.

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Xiao Hong, Yom Sang-sop, Abe Kobo, and Zhong Lihe—these iconic literary figures from China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all described Manchuria extensively in their literary works. Now China’s Northeast—but a contested frontier in the first half of the twentieth century—Manchuria has inspired writers from all over East Asia to claim it as their own, employing novel themes and forms for engaging nation and empire in modern literature. Many of these works have been canonized as quintessential examples of national or nationalist literature—even though they also problematize the imagined boundedness and homogeneity of nation and national literature at its core.

Through the theoretical lens of literary territorialization, Miya Xie's Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia (Harvard UP, 2023) reconceptualizes modern Manchuria as a critical site for making and unmaking national literatures in East Asia. Xie ventures into hitherto uncharted territory by comparing East Asian literatures in three different languages and analyzing their close connections in the transnational frontier. By revealing how writers of different nationalities constantly enlisted transnational elements within a nation-centered body of literature, Territorializing Manchuria uncovers a history of literary co-formation at the very site of division and may offer insights for future reconciliation in the region.

Miya Qiong Xie is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative East Asian Literature at Dartmouth College. Her research involves modern Chinese, Korean and Japanese literatures. Broadly, she is interested in how people from the margins – geographical or metaphorical – gain power, find identity, and establish connections through transcultural negotiation and co-formation.

Linshan Jiang is Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies.

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Dr. Sheila Miyoshi Jager presents dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars in her new book The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia (Harvard University Press, 2023).

In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized but no less significant, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of the Korean Peninsula. In this eye-opening account, brought to life in lucid narrative prose, Dr. Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and by great-power rivalry, set the course for the future of East Asia and the larger global order.

When Russia’s eastward expansion brought it to the Korean border, an impoverished but strategically located nation was wrested from centuries of isolation. Korea became a prize of two major imperial conflicts: the Sino–Japanese War at the close of the nineteenth century and the Russo–Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth. Japan’s victories in the battle for Korea not only earned the Meiji regime its yearned-for colony but also dislodged Imperial China from centuries of regional supremacy. And the fate of the declining tsarist empire was sealed by its surprising military defeat, even as the United States and Britain sized up the new Japanese challenger.

A vivid story of two geopolitical earthquakes sharing Korea as their epicenter, The Other Great Game rewrites the script of twentieth-century rivalry in the Pacific and enriches our understanding of contemporary global affairs, from the origins of Korea’s bifurcated identity—a legacy of internal politics amid the imperial squabble—to China’s irredentist territorial ambitions and Russia’s nostalgic dreams of recovering great-power status.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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