The Los Angeles Times reports that the public schools of Los Angeles and San Diego are changing the way students are graded. Critics will undoubtedly claim that this is a lowering of standards and a dumbing down of expectations, but the explanation sounds reasonable.
The article began:
A few years ago, high school teacher Joshua Moreno got fed up with his grading system, which had become a points game.
Some students accumulated so many points early on that by the end of the term they knew they didn’t need to do more work and could still get an A. Others — often those who had to work or care for family members after school — would fail to turn in their homework and fall so far behind that they would just stop trying.
“It was literally inequitable,” he said. “As a teacher you get frustrated because what you signed up for was for students to learn. And it just ended up being a conversation about points all the time.”
These days, the Alhambra High School English teacher has done away with points entirely. He no longer gives students homework and gives them multiple opportunities to improve essays and classwork. The goal is to base grades on what students are learning, and remove behavior, deadlines and how much work they do from the equation.
The changes Moreno embraced are part of a growing trend in which educators are moving away from traditional point-driven grading systems, aiming to close large academic gaps among racial, ethnic and economic groups. The trend was accelerated by the pandemic and school closures that caused troubling increases in Ds and Fs across the country and by calls to examine the role of institutionalized racism in schools in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer.
Los Angeles and San Diego Unified — the state’s two largest school districts, with some 660,000 students combined — have recently directed teachers to base academic grades on whether students have learned what was expected of them during a course — and not penalize them for behavior, work habits and missed deadlines. The policies encourage teachers to give students opportunities to revise essays or retake tests to show that they have met learning goals, rather than enforcing hard deadlines.
“It’s teaching students that failure is a part of learning. We fall. We get back up. We learn from the feedback that we get,” said Alison Yoshimoto-Towery, L.A. Unified’s chief academic officer.
Traditional grading has often been used to “justify and to provide unequal educational opportunities based on a student’s race or class,” said a letter sent by Yoshimoto-Towery and Pedro A. Garcia, senior executive director of the division of instruction, to principals last month.
“By continuing to use century-old grading practices, we inadvertently perpetuate achievement and opportunity gaps, rewarding our most privileged students and punishing those who are not,” their letter said, quoting educational grading consultant Joe Feldman….
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The central issue to consider is that grades are always a barrier to real learning. Any extrinsic motivational scheme erodes curiosity and drives conformity. Grades create stress which inhibits learning. Grades are damaging, meaningless and a lousy and lazy form of assessment.
Any extrinsic motivational scheme erodes curiosity and drives conformity.
Exactly.
lousy and lazy
an accurate assessment of this assessment method
Yes, Steve.
There is always a hidden curriculum. What the grading system says is that this stuff you are doing is so onerous, so not intrinsically motivating, that we have to threaten and reward you, with sticks and carrots, to get you to do it. The system, by its very structure, teaches that learning are personal growth are not sufficient rewards in and of themselves. It reflects a lack of understanding of what drives human behavior.
cx: learning and personal growth
Any parents of students currently in LA or SD schools here who can weigh in?
I once had a student announce out loud for the whole class to hear that someday he wanted to talk just like me. He was serious. He was a junior or senior in high school. If I remember correctly I was giving one of those initial teacher speeches at the beginning of the school year. At that time I was teaching in a minority majority high school. Ninety percent of my students were Latinos (no x’s back then). At that point, I really had no idea of what their lives were like and didn’t really know how ignorant I was. Needless to say, I wasn’t dumbing down my vocabulary; I was coming out of a highly educated community. As a special education teacher, I soon learned that most of my students were years behind their peers, and the level of education of most of the “on grade level” students was nothing to write home about. I remember one of my students getting upset when I wrote on his essay. He had used his sister’s computer but paper was hard to come by. After that I gave him a thumb drive, so he could turn his work in without using paper. Thumb drives became very popular.
Would traditional grading have helped most of these students? Nope. They already figured they were stupid and were just putting in the time before graduation. If I had followed rigid protocols, there would have been few success stories. I spent most of my time convincing them they weren’t losers and that they could think critically. If I asked questions, I had to frame them as asking for opinions to get them to respond. Class participation would have been dismal otherwise. But they came to class. And they learned. I hope they left a little bit better prepared to face the world.
I know these are special circumstances I have described, but we have to do better at revealing the intrinsic rewards of learning to our students, no matter where they are. Carrots and sticks can be useful on occasion. We all still respond to them, but that feeling of satisfaction that comes from engaging in something because we want to, because we are excited by it.,,,nothing compares. How we transition from the carrots and sticks and if we can is the issue. At least we can make our system more humane.
Thank you for this important perspective.
My only caveat is that if a district opts to eliminate grades, it should also be required to create small classes. If the districts want to have classes of thirty or more without traditional grades, the results my deteriorate into chaos. In order for non-grading to work teachers would need to be able to create an environment in which teachers must collaborate closely with students which is impossible to do with five or six classes with over thirty in each class.
I remember when the Summerhill experiment was all the rage. Some schools that tried and failed adapt the model in US public schools wound up with anarchy, chaos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School
cx: may not my
I managed to get my district to not give my students letter grades that they would automatically fail in science and social students in upper elementary school, grades 4 and 5. As a result, I had to substitute an anecdotal evaluation instead. Plus, I had to translate them. It was a beast. I spent entire weekends writing them 4X a year. Teachers most likely will still be accountable to provide some form of reporting to parents so be careful what you wish for.
Yeah, switching to such a system would necessarily require smaller and fewer classes. It is VERY time-consuming.
Exactly. Please read what standards-based grading is really like. This movement is not a movement to eliminate grading–it just changes grading to an impossible practice, where teachers have to meet deadlines but students don’t, where teachers have to write multiple versions of tests in order to allow students to retake tests. Once again, more work is put on the backs of teachers. Students won’t study for tests because why should they? They can take the first test and see how they do.
This creates even more work for already over-worked teachers. The only way to handle this and still have a life is to dumb down the curriculum.
Also, please read all the comments in the newspaper comment section. Many mention “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Many people commenting against this standards-based grading are people of color who are against it. Please read their reasons.
I’m against it because it limits me to rubrics and standardization and doesn’t allow me to give the individualized feedback that I give to every single student. It forces me to conform to the Group Think of Teaching by Committee.
If the discussion is Grading v. No Grading–well, that’s a different discussion. I’m open to that. But that is not what is being forced on the teachers of these districts.
Hear, hear, Montana Teacher.
They are not eliminating grades. They are tweaking the grading system.
There are alternatives to traditional grades that do not involve throwing out assessment altogether–e.g., lists of content mastered, accomplishments, and stuff to work on.
As an educator, 18 year Oakland public school family, and mother of college student, I find myself on the fence about this one. I agree with the learning issues and inequity as a barrier because I see it all the time. Unfortunately, post-secondary institutions can be unforgiving when it comes to homework, tests, and deadlines. They simply will not accept late work and won’t allow retaking of tests. Not sure how to dovetail this new policy into the post-secondary world without seeing a lot of potential college dropouts.
Yes, if education is supposed to prepare children for life, work, and citizenship, then you would have to question whether removing the variables of behavior, work habits and deadlines is wise.
And, ironically, if behavior, work habits and deadlines are removed from the equation, some students will fail as a result. Does that really create equity?
Is the primary goal of schools equity or to create productive/responsible adults?
And lets add in the fact that most colleges are no longer looking solely at SAT/ACT/AP scores for acceptance: they have been looking at letter grades and types of classes taken in HS. Covid pushed more colleges to look at grades only as an indicator since the tests were unable to be taken. I’m happy that the SAT/ACT/AP nightmare may be coming to a halt, but there has to be something that gives colleges a clue as to what kind of a students they are accepting into their institutions. I also know that letter grades can be deceiving, too. There are no easy answers or quick fixes.
All of these changes favor the wealthy and connected. Ditching standardized tests means less competition to fear from smart, highly motivated middle-class students. Couple that with grade inflation, and the distinguishing factors become where you went to high school (see private schools that consistently place huge percentages of students at the most elite colleges), extracurricular activities that regular people don’t have the time or money for, and bullsh!t personal statements that are written by parents and edited by consultants. And of course the applicant’s race.
The rich will do and get what they want because they can pay for it. Varsity Blues showed that parents cheated the testing system. Sometime along the way, someone (or some group) deemed every career or job required a 4 year degree from an institution of “higher learning” and the madness began. I’m glad to see the “testing as gatekeeper” diminished but there has to be something that colleges can look at to determine if a student is a good fit for college. Grade inflation will then become the problem and then the parents or consultants who write the dreaded college essays. Most “higher education” is just a money grab…parents paying the extra 4 yrs so that the kid can get a job. It’s all really messed up.
I agree with much of flerp’s comment above.
It seems as if California’s big districts are basically doing what private schools do all the time. If you have ever looked at the grade distribution in top private high schools, it is extremely rare for a student to receive any grade lower than a B, and with a few exceptions, grades of A- and above are given to most students in most classes. The small mistakes that students make — forgetting to submit a homework assignment — are often treated far more harshly in public schools.
Unfortunately, we have a system of affirmative action for the most privileged students. I support having affirmative action for disadvantaged students but oppose affirmative action for the most privileged students who don’t experience racial bias. Smart, highly motivated middle-class students should be competing on equal footing with the richest and most privileged students; instead, those middle class students have to be extraordinary while the most privileged students have to just be excellent. None of the changes in the grading system in California public schools will change any of that.
Most elite private schools give reports on student progress. Most do not give letter grades.
Diane,
I am not sure that is accurate. (It’s possible to look at the school profiles that all high schools have to submit along with transcripts for their students, and some of the private school profiles include grade distributions).
But some elite private schools don’t give grades. I believe the progress reports general emphasize the positive and sometimes seem to spend quite a bit of time describing what is being taught in the course (as opposed to evaluating the student against some standard or against other students in the same class.)
No doubt if a student is extraordinary, a private school teacher’s progress report will make that clear. But the students who aren’t particularly outstanding are likely presented in a very positive way. And the ones really struggling are unlikely to be presented as D or F students. Or even as mediocre students.
I can’t speak about “all elite private schools.” Those I know don’t give A-F grades.
Diane,
You may be right. In any event, when progress reports are used by private schools, it tends to be a way to present students in a very positive light. They generally accentuate the positive and minimize (or don’t mention) the negative. A student’s academic performance in a class could be in the bottom half of the class, but doubtful that would be evident to anyone reading the progress report.
Someone who would be a B student in a public school with grades could be “an eager learner, who demonstrated a strong understanding of the material”. A D student could be “an eager learner, who overcame some early struggles with the material and made some noteworthy contributions to the class.”
Further to my previous post — and a quite bit off topic — I don’t think most people realize how the deck is simultaneously stacked in favor of the enormously privileged and yet also against white applicants who are not enormously privileged.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/17/harvard-university-students-smart-iq
It goes without saying that it’s even worse for Asian applicants.
We have a bullsh!t discourse about privilege and admissions at elite colleges, and it doesn’t even acknowledge the gigantic heart of that privilege. And the attacks on standardized tests not only do nothing to disrupt that privilege, they actually solidify it by making it even more difficult for the most competitive middle-class candidates to compete.
flerp,
This seems on-topic to me, as my comment at 3:40 made similar points. But thank you for the link to the Guardian article.
“. . . 43% of Harvard’s white students are either recruited athletes, legacy students, on the dean’s interest list (meaning their parents have donated to the school) or children of faculty and staff (students admitted based on these criteria are referred to as ‘ALDCs’, which stands for ‘athletes’, ‘legacies’, ‘dean’s interest list’ and ‘children’ of Harvard employees). The kicker? Roughly three-quarters of these applicants would have been rejected if it weren’t for having rich or Harvard-connected parents or being an athlete.”
This was brought up during the lawsuit about Harvard admissions policy.
However, it certainly is not in the public consciousness. I don’t know why it seems as if a lot of middle class and working class white and Asian students still believe it is affirmative action for URM that prevents them from getting seats. It is affirmative action for overprivileged students, most of whom are white – that is a far bigger barrier.
The middle class/working class public school students that are admitted have to be exceptional and extraordinary. But according to the Guardian, (if I did the math correctly) over 32% of the white students admitted do not have to meet the same high standards.
Which we already know, since there would be no need to identify those students during the admissions process if they would be admitted on their merits if they weren’t identified.
Your concerns are shared. I don’t think this will go over well in the post-secondary or corporate worlds, unless they welcome less-prepared young people for the workplace. There’s no need to change the system whatsoever. Just continue to hire teachers who are open to a barrage of ways to encourage and value children, in order that they can find themselves and care about their future.
Plus it’s a confusing mess to transfer these grades into college applications.
One small step in the right direction. Just eliminate the grade and tell parents what their child has learned and they will be on their way to the philosophy I have been talking about for decades.
It’s a shame that we have to see white kids fail due to the pandemics before we realize what we have done to black and brown kids for 200 years. But better late than never. That’s why the subtitle for my new book is “Pandemic Solutions to a 200 year old crisis.”.
If public schools keep coming up with these ideas, charters will be in the rear view mirror.
But it’s still a grade on a 1-4 scale. Additionally, it only addresses pure academic learning. Nothing about soft skills.
Speaking as a high school teacher, the system doesn’t work like you imagine. There’s a big difference between giving students more time because they NEED it rather than they WANT it.
If I give you a task that you can do capably in a day, then it should be done in a day. If you take a week and it’s the same quality as it would have been had you completed it in one day, then you didn’t need a week.
Do some students provide better work with more time, sure. And every teacher I work with has always been comfortable with that system.
But when high school have no real deadlines, they adopt terrible life habits. They do work at their convenience. And the longer they procrastinate, often the lower the quality because they keep getting farther removed from the information.
How many standards should be covered in a term? 5? 10? How many qualify a student to pass to the next course?
This is a philosophy. And like many philosophies, it’s utopian but impractical.
On the other hand…
Changing the phraseology of sort and separate
doesn’t end sort and separate.
It doesn’t end traditional RANKISM used to
justify and to provide opportunities based on
an assertion of superiority.
(what “Somebodies” do to “Nobodies”)
By continuing to use century-old sort and
separate practices, we inadvertently perpetuate
achievement and opportunity gaps, rewarding our
titled and punishing the less titled.
Dropping the traditional “lipstick” for
the “lipstick” du jour doesn’t change the
bacon…
Isn’t this, in essence, standards-based grading as described by Tom Guskey? I believe other academics, such as Dylan Wiliam, Jay McTighe and Rick Stiggins have talked about this idea of providing students multiple opportunities to demonstrate learning without grading for years. Guskey has even acknowledged that behavior, such as turning work in on time, is important and, as such, has recommended to schools/districts that if they want to include this it should be a separate “grade” from the academics.
Therein is the problem with Guskey’s theory.
Report cards would be sizable matrices that are indecipherable to most parents. It’s also incredibly time consuming at the high school level where teachers have 150 students daily.
At our school, students see this as a ticket to procrastination and minimal work. SBG is great for creating bad habits.
I went to a conference about SBG about six years ago. Every teacher using it had a bunch of caveats that essentially made this a wishy-washy philosophy.
Theoretically it sounds great. It’s really just a revival of outcomes based education from the 90’s. It’s a lot of work for teachers. Especially since the lack of deadlines means you end up grading ten different assignments each day by the time October arrives.
My son attended a middle school for about a year and a half that used a grading system like this. We (my son, and my wife and I) were perpetually confused about what the report cards meant and how my son was doing.
I recall a very unpleasant encounter with a parent, many years ago. The parent, not surprisingly a father, confronted me at an evening school event, arguing strenuously against our no-grades policy in Lower and Middle School. His son was in 3rd grade. He was still on the safe side of apoplectic when I asked him why he thought letter grades were so important. “I want to know how my boy is doing! What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” I responded. “But how could you not know how he is doing? We provide several very comprehensive narrative reports each year. Each teacher writes extensively about his progress, his areas of slower growth – much more detail than I ever got about my kids when they were that age. We have several teacher-parent conferences during the year, when you can explore in depth the progress and growth of your son. And, as you are aware, we are very open and relaxed about communication and I hope you feel free to meet with any of his teachers if you are concerned.”
Rather than being mollified by my reassurances, he apparently found them wanting, as his skin tone was quickly moving through pink toward livid. I will say, he had good neck veins. “But that’s not the same! I want to know what his grades are!”
I responded, gently enough, “Why?”
“Because I want to know how he’s doing compared to the other kids!!!”
Still gently, I asked, “Now why is that so important to you?”
End of conversation and, not too long after, the end of enrollment for his son.
I suppose this represents part of my philosophical concern. I don’t find arranging students in a hierarchy of test grades a useful way of looking at children. I don’t think it’s good for the kids at the bottom (or the top and middle, for that matter). Education is not a competitive sport. Education is about learning and growing, not about winning and losing.
Even in SBG, there’s still a ranking. It’s a 1-4 system.
Plus, high school is very different than 3rd grade.
My point is that high school students will game any system and squeeze out every item that they can use to their advantage.
For example, SBG insists that deadlines don’t matter. Few 3rd graders would leverage this. High school kids push the envelop very hard here. The core SBG idea here is that some students need more time than others. But there’s a significant difference between “need more time” v. “submit when I feel like it even though I could finish this in 45 minutes.”
The same goes for the retake policy. If a student has a project, essay or other large scale summative, they will often take forever, submit something lazy and well below their skill level in the hopes of it being acceptable. Then when they receive a low score, redo / retake only adding more grading for the teacher because their first effort wasn’t their best. They’ll skip a lot of formative, too.
I’m not arguing that either system is better. I’m of the belief that SBG is very narrow and gives high school students so much leeway that they take advantage of it to extremes. I’ve been living it for six years and the students just keep figuring out more ways to do things at their convenience.
“He no longer gives students homework and gives them multiple opportunities to improve essays and classwork.”
I was doing something similar for most of the thirty years I was an English teacher between 1975 – 2005. In addition, I offered extra, challenging assignments that students were not required to do but could do and turn in to help improve their grades, and if a student turned in an essay or report that didn’t earn the grade they wanted, they were allowed to do it over and turn it in again for a higher grade demonstrating they’d learned what they hadn’t known before.
Sad to say, most of the students that could have used that extra work to increase their learning curve didn’t take advantage of it, but a few did and ended semesters with grades way above 100%. Some wanted to see how high they could get that number. I used to ask them why keep doing all the extra work when you’re already at 135%. The A you are earning started at 90% of the required work. The reply was always, “I wanted to see how high I could get that percentage.” Not many did that but …
The only test was the final exam and it was open book with a study guide handed out the month before the test. Basically, the final was a review of all the literature we’d already read and learned from. Students already earning A’s going into the final were excused from taking it but a few took it anyway to send their grade even higher, but I couldn’t grade than any higher than an A+ because the grading program didn’t allow us to add any more pluses.
My old friend, Ralph, got his degree in London around 1950. He always poked fun at the American system of constantly grading students. Ralph is not a person to be scoffed at. He started the world Oligokeet society, and his name is known among those who study worms worldwide.
Still, there are problems to be met. Any system, no matter how problematic, is not shoved aside wholesale without consequences. Witness the various world revolutions, many of which saw decrepit, incompetent regimes replaced by organizational methods that turned out worse. In my experience, alternatives to grading work is usually met with increased indifference until immediate consequences are the result of inactivity. Those consequences can rarely be real. If I fail to build a man a proper back porch, I will likely be forced to rebuild it on my own dime. It is hard to make this happen in a class.
We should not, however, be tricked into avoidance of new ideas just because they are new.
Yes, that’s a good point. The British system does not constantly grade students, and students who want selective universities are not expected to excel at very high levels in all subjects – from foreign language to writing to advanced science and math. And students who aren’t aspiring to selective universities have other educational options that provide them with training toward whatever their interests are.
I suppose that is balanced against taking GCSE and A level exams. Not sure there is any system of evaluating students that can’t be criticized for some problematic aspect.
My district has been playing around these concepts for about six years. Not all in because scoring 1-4 is trickier than you think in several high school subjects. However, we have experimented with generous deadlines, strongly weighting summative assessments and remakes.
My take is that the philosophy is seductive but the reality is disappointing. At the high school level, I have observed the following student behaviors:
1. Because deadlines are meaningless or near non-existent, students procrastinate until their parents threaten them with consequences. In families where parents are disconnected, students just leave assessments open.
2. Knowing that a retake is available, students will often not prepare or do the absolute minimum to meet the requirement. Then, when disappointed with their score, retake. As a teacher, I see few students give their best effort the first time.
3. With day to day work being worth little or nothing statistically, students skip the work. They enter the assessment hoping to get a decent score but often can’t because they’re unprepared. But they can retake. So every assessment is no risk.
4. If you want to rebut that they eventually learn to avoid the retake. They don’t. The retake saves time over doing the homework. But it leads to teachers having more work.
5. In the article, the teacher claims that students gamed the traditional grading system. They game this one as well.
I have other criticisms but this could go for a while.
Good comment.
Thank you for the info. I wish I hadn’t been too busy this week to give your comment a slow reading until now. I was just yesterday assigned to a grading policy committee here in Los Angeles and I need to research. Please write more if you see this reply, gtaperuo.
Here’s the thing, leftcoast.
You won’t find very much research on the topic. When you do, it will almost always be positive because of the research source. People like Rick Wormeli make tons of money from book sales and seminars. Online and virtual outfits support it because it’s really just competency based learning and easily transferable to online ed.
Plus, it sounds great as a philosophy. So a lot of teachers promote it (before experiencing it) because it feels right.
There are a few studies that show that it doesn’t promote more learning. Usually it just keeps things the same.
The mathematical trick of the system is the 0-4 system. 4’s are super hard to get. 0’s only occur if no work is submitted. So a really good essay or project for example is a 3. Any basic and minimal attempt on the same assessment is a 1 because there’s an attempt. Simply trying, no matter how minimally is passing.
The “no deadlines” policy is a teacher killer. At the high school level (and this is my experience so my focus is here), kids will simply wait until they feel like doing anything. By week five, teachers are grading ten different assignments every single day.
I get the policy that some students need more time, but I know few teachers who don’t provide that when necessary already. Most students will simply use no deadlines as an allowable excuse to procrastinate. I’ll say this again: there’s a big difference between needing more time and taking more time. 80% of my students can do a capable job on the assignment and submit it by the end of the period. But only 40% will do it. The other 40% will turn it in (maybe) a week later and it will be no better in quality than if they had submitted it “on time.”
I’m still waiting for 25% of my students to submit an assessment from mid-October. 4-5 weeks ago. They are allowed to turn it in and they get full credit. And if they underperform relative to their ability, I have to let them retake at their convenience.
The posters here who keep talking about learning for the sake of learning don’t understand that the average teenager is rarely engaged by this abstract idea. To be honest with you, the whole system would be great if an AI did all of the assessing.
Sounds like I need to stand up for the right to have due dates as a right of professional autonomy. Otherwise, it will be impossible to actually read my students’ writing. I already allow all my students to turn in all assignments late and redone any time, but I receive nearly all work on time because the overall culture of the school is one of required timeliness.
Also, it sounds like I need to express concern about university acceptance rates.. This new grading policy could deny access to exclusive universities by lowering grades across Los Angeles. I know two teachers who already use the 0-4 point mastery grading scale. The straight A students loathe being in their classes because of he impossibility of getting the high grades they need to compete.
Thank you so much for your clear explanations of your experiences.
Our district is promoting this system. It is made to sound objective, but it is not. With traditional grading, teachers already have the freedom to give students extra time when needed or retakes when needed, but these are not mandated and are left up to teacher discretion.
I would also like to point out that the Los Angeles Times reporter did a poor job of showing all sides of this grading system and did not investigate its potential effects.
This is a complex minefield of a topic. Some things to consider on both sides are: first and foremost, Common Core and CBE tech software groups advocate a skills-based education system with test score “mastery” grading usurping everything else, and this fits well with that anti-public education push; traditionally aggregated grades are better predictors of future success than are skills-based scores, including such qualities as effort and content knowledge; students deserve chances to overcome the difficulties wrought by extreme wealth inequality; teachers deserve and must demand professional autonomy and agency in instruction and grading; grades, while more meaningful than skills mastery are still far less meaningful than face to face interactions between teachers and students; and blaming grading and other data, as Yoshimoto-Towery did, for opportunity inequality is like blaming the nose on your face for causing virus transmission.
My advice to the “reformers”: Stop. Restore education; don’t “innovate”. Leave it to professional educators to use their best judgment. Respect teachers.
Here’s the thing. Colleges don’t actually care about either grades or test scores. They know that both are very poor proxies for what they really want: successful graduates. By “successful” I mean (a) people who are rich enough (and grateful enough) to donate to the college and/or (b) people who accomplish notable things the university can point to and say, “Yeah, that’s one of ours”.
Nearly every single applicant to an elite university has perfect or nearly perfect grades and very high test scores, so that isn’t going to distinguish anyone (plus grades and testing mostly “measure” (sic) conformity and socio-economic status). What colleges are looking for is people who stand out – people who have already accomplished things, worked on projects, developed skills, pursued interests and passions, etc., and people who can talk about those experiences in meaningful ways.
Those kinds of attributes are exactly what are developed in progressive schools that forego grades and testing. The focus is on who each student is as a person and what unique contributions each brings to the table. There’s a reason why the rich and powerful like the Obamas and the Gates send their kids to schools like Sidwell Friends, Lakeside, etc.
Isn’t Sidwell Friends a bad example of a progressive school that foregoes grades and testing? There was a lawsuit against it about the way math grades were given:
“Adetu was a student at Sidwell Friends from 2000 until her high school graduation in 2014, according to her family’s initial complaint. A year earlier, when Adetu was a junior, she and her parents filed a claim with the DC Office of Human Rights, alleging discrimination and retaliation largely related to her math classes. The complaint specifically accused a math teacher of allegedly using “biased, improper scoring” to grade Adetu’s tests and of having “steadfastly refused” to make accommodations for her athletic commitments while doing so for other students. ”
On the other hand, without any grades, we can always completely trust the decisions of private schools to sort their students:
“One of the family’s contentions is that the Sidwell Friends college counseling office gave Adetu a different ranking on the Secondary School Report for the various colleges, with her being rated “excellent” for Spelman and “very good” or “good” at the others. They interpreted that as proof that the school was pushing her to attend the HBCU rather than an Ivy League school.
There are different ways to complete an SSR, but Sidwell’s policy was to rank students on each college’s form compared with other applicants from the school….”
Private schools decide which applicants get presented to colleges with the highest rankings and which get lower rankings based on how those applicants “compared with other applicants from the school”? Hmmm…..that process surely isn’t abused at all.
If you read about the college counselors quitting, it’s clear that parents weren’t sending their kids to Sidwell Friends for its progressive education alone — they had expectations.
Although all of this is off topic to what California is doing, because they are looking for ways to make education better for the vast majority of students who are not highly motivated to excel academically who aren’t aspiring to those highly selective colleges.
Sidwell Friends is “progressive” like Joe Manchin is a “Democrat.”
Steve,
Yes, it seemed an odd school to invoke.
BTW, “standards based grading” is still grading, so if that’s what these districts are changing to, they have not abandoned grading.
Right. Fortunately for Guskey, he’s not a high school teacher with 150 students. Making these judgment calls and putting them on a written document / record is so subjective.
No grading system is perfect. All grading systems can be gamed.
Take a closer look at the SBG system. It’s great for online learning. Here’s the standard. Do it when you feel like it. Retake if you want. Retake again, why not?
Every year, I have students who are great contributors in the classroom but aren’t great at academic tasks. In SBG, this counts for nothing. It’s purely this: Did the student master the standard?
Plus, no one really can define what a 1-4 score truly is. Just like any rubric, there are gaps and interpretations.
Hope those SoCal teachers enjoy a job that never ends. Because that’s what they are getting.
They’re trying to switch to standards based mastery grading. Basically, students don’t get graded on work they do. They have to “master” a standard before they can move on to the next one. They are graded on exit exams instead of on work they do. In other words, it’s competency based education in disguise. Many students will be held back.
If we implement MLG, our students, who are predominantly of color and free/reduced meals will have difficulty earning ‘A’s and getting admitted to selective universities when competing with students from private schools and other districts that don’t have MLG. In the MLG 0-4 point system, 4s are extremely difficult to achieve. It’s easier to pass classes with 1s for little effort, which would boost graduation rates, but high achieving students would suffer. Community colleges would have a wider and more diverse pool of applicants, but universities like UCLA would have a wealthier, whiter application pool.
And consider what this would do to our high school teaching sisters and brothers. High school teachers who have experience with MLG know that it’s a teacher killer. With no due dates, teachers wind up grading ten different assignments at a time by October. Students are able to put forth no effort until the last minute. MLG assumes, like the CCSSs do, that the only things we teach are skills, as erroneously “measured” by tests. That is not true. We teach content. Skills support the learning of content. We want our students to learn as much content as possible, not just show on an exit exam that they got the gist. MLG precludes the grading of class work and only allows us to use periodic assessments. Sound familiar?
Most importantly, teachers must demand professional autonomy. There is no reasonable call for uniformity among instructional practices. We are neither robots nor readers of scripted curricula. If a teacher deems it appropriate to use MLG, what is stopping her? It doesn’t need to be mandatory. Let teachers decide what is appropriate based on their training and knowledge of their students.
Mastery grading, just like charter schools and standardized testing, brings the opposite of equity. One might call it elitism, even racism. I invite all to consider the idea of rejecting support for a new grading mandate.