Audio Profile: (Re)Making The Grade

Brewster lies about 80 minutes from New York City at the end of the Harlem line. The local high school has a fairly non-diverse crowd of students, most of them college-bound after graduation — the typical lot in a suburban New York public school. There’s a stark division between Advanced Placement, or AP, classes and grade-level courses and it manages to worm its way into the school’s social pecking order because of course it does. Students will often refer to the grade-level classes as “stupid” or “remedial” and obsess over the social currency their grades provide.

That’s why Brewster High School English teacher Marcus Eure decided to take away the entire corrupt system: He removed the grades.