This chapter examines report card marks in math and reading. Math and reading dominate the curriculum in the primary grades and are the building blocks for most other academic subjects. For that reason they have special relevance for the way children come to think of themselves in their academic role (a topic taken up in Chapter 9). Marks also are integral to the social relations of schooling. Not all children are aware of how they rank on standardized tests like the California Achievement Test (CAT) battery, but everyone in a classroom knows who is getting high marks and who is getting low ones. Invidious distinctions crop up around the marks teachers assign, and getting a low mark can be hurtful. Children work for good marks; they and their parents understand their meaning. Marks, moreover, are the centerpiece of children's cumulative academic record, and in that way early marking patterns shadow children throughout their schooling. For these reasons we view marks not as mere supplement to achievement scores, but as a coequal and complementary assessment of academic progress.

Retained children, we saw in the last chapter, were unable to keep up before being held back, but their test performance improved during the repeated year, and many repeaters after retention continued to do better relative to their classmates. These successes are important, but whether children fully appreciate them is dubious. Feedback about test scores is hard to decipher and often reaches children indirectly or not at all.