The definitive history of the report card.
Report cards represent more than just an account of academic standing and attendance. The report card also serves as a tool of control and as a microcosm for the shifting power dynamics among teachers, parents, school administrators, and students. In Report Cards: A Cultural History, Wade H. Morris tells the story of American education by examining the history of this unique element of student life.
In the nearly two hundred-year evolution of the report card, this relic of academic bookkeeping reflected broader trends in the United States: 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 expande
