If I had to give the lawsuit from Oklahoma a grade, it would have to be an "F."

In one of the most bizarre episodes in modern juris prudence, a mom has sued to keep a teacher from asking students to grade each other's papers.

Kristja Falvo lives in a school district in Owasso, outside Tulsa. She has three kids.

Two of the kids do really well in school. The third is reading disabled and struggles a bit.

A routine part of the educational process in her school district - and school districts all across the U.S., for that matter - was for teachers and students to go over schoolwork together, with students grading one another's work. The practice is known as peer grading.

In peer grading, kids in class get to see other kids' scores.

Apparently her son's scores were lower than many of his classmates' scores so they made fun of him.

They called him "stupid" or "dummy" or some other derogatory term associated with lower than average intelligence.

Kids are just mean sometimes, aren't they?

Anyway, this upset Falvo.

She said her son was suffering needlessly.

When the youngster was in elementary school, Falvo went to her son's teacher and asked that a special exception be made for her son, that he be allowed to grade his own papers.

That way, only he and his teacher would see his scores.

That system worked OK in elementary school, but when the student got into sixth grade, the practice started up again.

Falvo went to the middle school and asked for the same exception.

This time, however, school officials decided there could be no exception.

What if her son was less than honest in grading his papers? If the school allowed him to grade his own papers, wouldn't they have to let all students grade their own papers? Wouldn't all students then be tempted to be less than honest when grading their own papers?

So Falvo sued the school board. She lost at the state level, but the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on appeal that peer grading violates the Buckley Amendment.

The Buckley Amendment, passed in 1974, protects the privacy of student records by conditioning federal aid for schools to a guarantee that "education records" must be kept private without parental consent.

If Falvo has her way, teachers would need the permission of parents before they could call out a student's grade in class.

'The practice of exchanging papers and then calling out the grades unlawfully circumvents the purpose of safeguarding students' personal grade information,' attorneys from the conservative Rutherford Institute wrote on Falvo's behalf.

On the other side you have the National Education Association and the National Federation of Teachers who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief.

'The grading practice at issue is widely used throughout the United States because many teachers, and their employing school districts, have found it to be educationally beneficial," the NEA lawyers said.

I must say I agree with the teachers' union on this one.

Frankly, I'm surprised the U.S. Supreme Court decided to take the case, but since they did, I hope they use a very narrow definition of the critical phrase "educational records."

I think the Buckley Amendment meant to protect things like official school transcripts.

I really don't think members of Congress had pop quizzes on their minds when they wrote the legislation.

If the high court finds that they did, it would wreak all manner of havoc on education as we know it.

Could graded artwork hang in the halls of the school? Could we publish honor rolls in the newspaper? No more bumper stickers about kids being "good citizens" or "students of the month."

Could students even be allowed to haul graded papers home on the bus? What if they kid sitting next to them got a peek?

And what about that star athlete who's held off the team for "academic reasons." No more of that. The school would be liable for tipping off the public.

Even more unsettling to me is the idea that - if Falvo prevails - the long arm of the federal government would be reaching right into the classroom and controlling how teachers grade the daily spelling lesson.

That's not a good thing.

And it seems to me that is only one step removed from turning disputes over grades into federal cases.

That's not a good thing either.

I think teachers should be afforded the opportunity to teach kids how to respect one another and the flexibility to come up with ways to grade papers without ridiculing one another.

And I think grading disputes should be handled in the classroom, not in the courtroom. [[In-content Ad]]