Grading the U.S. Presidents

I mentioned a few days ago that in 8th grade, my classmates and I organized a protest when the school district decided to change our middle school's grading system from numbers to letters. There would be no more 92s or 85s, but As, B-minuses, Ds, and so on. We were outraged, wrote a petition, and gathered signatures from many of the kids.

I'm sure the logic of our arguments was a mix of youthful enthusiasm and Stockholm Syndrome (says the old lady who hasn't believed in grades as an academic method for many decades). We took the petition to a School Board meeting, which I just realized was probably the first civic meeting I ever attended.

We failed to persuade the board members and the grading system was changed to letters the next year. Note that we were trying to preserve what we perceived as a better way for the younger students, not for ourselves, since we moved on to high school, which still used the number system.

I remember one of our arguments for keeping the number system was based on its granularity, though I'm sure we didn't use that word, since I only learned it in the past 20 years. A student who gets a 99 knows they did better than a student who got a 97, but in the letter system, both would get an A, or maybe even an A+, depending on how that line is drawn. Distinction.

Almost 50-years-older-me thinks that level of granularity is not particularly healthy for students, and also knows that number grades go with tests that have a quantitative aspect to them, while letter grades go more easily with papers, essays, and even labs, which get sorted into qualitative piles.

Since remembering my 8th grade organizing movement for the number grading system, I saw a couple of Twitter posts where the writers were rating all of the U.S. presidents since World War II, using letter grades. Both of the posts were written by Democrats, but their grades for our leaders varied a bit (you can see them here and here).

I have so many thoughts about this idea in general.

First, that no president can get a pure A grade because it's an impossible job to ace. You will do something horribly wrong for some large number of people or the planet. I don't know how to grade that on a curve. For instance:

• It's not my right to decide that Eisenhower was great except what about "Operation Wetback"? 
• Or like, how could the two linked Twitter guys have given G.H.W. Bush a B+, after he pardoned the Iran Contra crooks and took us into the first Iraq war? 
• And they both gave Carter a C, in comparison to what? Because they're Gen Xers who remember Ted Koppel every night? 
• And how do you even put all these decades of failure that have led to catastrophic climate change into their grades? The interstate highway system is an achievement, sure, but it also destroyed city neighborhoods (which were home, in large part, to Black people) and directly caused car-centered land use to increase.
  

Second, that this assessment needs a rubric. Even a basic one with three topics: domestic policy, foreign policy, and a catch-all I'll call "upholding norms / respect for democracy / non-sociopathy." I shouldn't have to have that last one, but everyone who's lived through the last four years knows why we need it. I don't know how to weight the three areas, but let's just make them even.

Third, I can't help but wish for a numbered grading system. I don't mind using letters for most of these presidents. There's enough granularity for the ones who pass, but for the ones who fail, giving them all an F doesn't begin to grade them. In the old number system of my high school days, 65 was passing, so 64 was an F. And so was 60, and 50 and 40 and so on. All the way down to zero.

I think three of our post-World War II presidents deserve Fs, but if they were assigned numbers, they would instead be something like this:

• G.W. Bush: 40
• Reagan: 30
• Trump: 0

In writing those, I realize the scale I'm working with is based on "how much damage did he do to the country?" (and the world)...and "did he accomplish anything redeeming during his time?"

That's why Reagan gets a lower number grade from me than G.W. Bush, because while Reagan's damage was less obvious at the time than W's, I think Reagan's is deeper and will have longer term effects.

As far as redeeming moments in the presidencies of these three losers, George W. Bush had one semi-redeeming policy moment (Medicare Part D, as imperfect as it is). Reagan is said to have helped end the Cold War, of course, which is a pretty big achievement. But many historians are reassessing how key he was in that, versus his reputation benefitting from larger shifts that were happening independently in the Soviet Union. And we and the Russians still had a whole lot of nuclear weapons left to destroy us all by the time Reagan left office.

I have to admit, though: Trump has given us a new low bar in assessing presidential failure, because in the past I would have thought Reagan and G.W. Bush were as low as you could go on policy and Nixon was as low as possible on behavior.

But here we have been with the worst of both worlds for the past four years. I admit these years were beyond my imagination before him, because it seemed impossible for someone like him to be elected in the first place.

My only fear in writing this and assigning him a zero grade is that there's nowhere lower for anyone else —who could be elected — to go. (Or him in the next few weeks.)

I hope that's true. 

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This is my attempt at a three-part graded rubric (Foreign Policy, Domestic Policy, Norms) for the last 13 U.S. presidents.

President	For. Policy	Dom. Policy	Norms	Over all	Comments
Truman	D-	A	A–	B-	The Marshall Plan, the UN, but Hiroshima/Nagasaki and Korean War
Eisenhower	B–	A–	A	A–	Warren and Brennan to SCOTUS
Kennedy	C	B+	B	B–	The space program, missile crisis, but Vietnam, Bay of Pigs
Johnson	C	A+	B	B	Marshall to SCOTUS, civil rights legislation, Great Society but Vietnam
Nixon	A–	B+	F	C+	SALT talks and China but Vietnam; EPA and school desegregation but Rehnquist to SCOTUS
Ford	C	C+	B	C+	Stevens to SCOTUS
Carter	B+	A	A+	A–	So maligned. Iran balanced by Sadat-Begin, environmental work
Reagan	D	F	D	F	Too much to list
GHW Bush	C–	C	B	C+	Republican domestic BS [including the beginning of ed deform!] balanced by the ADA, but Thomas to SCOTUS, Iraq war, pardoned Iran-Contra felons
Clinton	A–	C+	B–	B	The crime bill, welfare "reform," don't ask don't tell, but CHIP, budget surpluses, RBG and Breyer to SCOTUS
GW Bush	F	F	B–	F	Too much to list
Obama	B	B+	A+	B+/A-	Drone strikes, but health care, but not more done domestically
Trump	F	F	F	F	Too much to list

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Late addition: Unlike many of my Facebook friends, I have not been following and sharing the daily posts of historian Heather Cox Richardson. But I did see her post from December 30, and it seemed a good accompaniment to this assessment of the recent presidents. As an overview, she writes that "the twenty years since 2000 have seen the end game of the Reagan Revolution, begun in 1980."