A growing number of the nation’s educators are stocking up on purple pens for grading papers and passing on the traditional red, which they say can be intimidating and damaging to a student’s self-confidence." Teaching should always be a positive practice. Red seems to stand out in such a negative way," said Dorothy Porteus, school support specialist with the New York Charter Schools Association. “Little guys internalize the red and it doesn’t make them feel good.” Porteus, who taught elementary school for 20 years, said a teacher should coach kids to do their best, not scare them into thinking they’ll never be good enough. She equates using red ink with drawing a frowning face on a student’s work." They put all this effort into something and by marking it up with red, in some ways it is like tearing their hard work to shreds,” she said. “They look at the red and think the teacher is upset with them, and this greatly influences their attempt to do their next paper.”

Michael Barone, who is often a voice of reason in politics, pointed out that, "This is ridiculous, because the only reason we associate red with bad in a classroom atmosphere is because that is the color that has been used to correct papers for decades,” he said. “If teachers now switch to purple, in time purple will become negative, and then what?”

The color “red” in regards to corrections of academic work is a social construction. (It should also be noted that red can be a sign of greatness, as in the Red Sox.) So now purple will be a color of disapproval in the same manner red has been. Frankly, I’d feel that having a paper turned back to me with purple all over it (aside from disappointing) would be far too girly. Of course, that too is a social construction.

Barone rightly points out in the article that this is an example of a "softer America." Our hyper-sensitive culture of "tolerance" has led to a goal of pluralistic equality in most areas of social life. This is one way that socialism has infiltrated our education system. On an economic level, socialism argues that all should be financially equal (history has shown this to mean equally poor). In the realm of education students should not be praised for having high grades or criticized for having low ones. Success is measured in sincerity, not the quality of the end product.

If we make all grades of equal value, then no grade will have any value. Of course students should always be encouraged to strive for excellence regardless of their grades, but that does not make all grades equal. We can never become better unless we know and understand what we lack. The purpose of grades and corrections is to help in improvement, not stifle a student’s self worth. If a student somehow takes it to mean that then they likely have other psychological issues that cause them to read that into it. Those issues need to be dealt with apart from the academic arena. Telling them that it’s okay to do poorly as long as they feel good isn’t going to help them face challenges that come along later in life, which is one of the primary purposes of education.

In short, changing grading colors isn’t really changing anything. However, the motivation behind the change is an indication of socialistic ideology infiltrating our education system. It’s not preparing students for their futures; it’s making school more like a support group than an educational venture.