The Most Inequitable School Practice – Grading

Grading. Ugh!

If there was one noteworthy failure in my career as a school leader, it would be my inability to train my teachers to grade fairly and consistently across grade levels and content areas. I was never successful in getting 9^th grade English teachers or 11^th grade chemistry teachers to align their grading practices to benefit their students. One English teacher gave extra credit. The other didn’t. One chemistry teacher accepted late work. The other didn’t. One teacher graded with a “check” system, while another set of teachers graded on the “100 point scale.” And don’t even get me started about the teachers who gave students extra credit for bringing toilet paper to school!

So, this week, I was interested and mildly hopeful when I read an article titled “As They Revamp Grading, Districts Try to Improve Consistency, Prevent Inflation,” printed in last week’s EducationWeek online. Here are some of the highlights:

“Ensuring grades are fair and meaningful is not as easy as A, B, C (or D or F).”

“As they address the lingering affects of the COVID-19 pandemic, districts are struggling to square fairness and transparency in grading with a longstanding problem: consistency. Students with similar mastery of academic concepts often get different grades if they go to different schools in the same district – or have different teachers in the same school, administrators fear.”

“Variations in how teachers approach extra credit work, points for classroom participation, and penalties for late assignments make grades less consistent and less reliable. That’s why more districts have taken on the complicated, sometimes contentious work of untangling the assumptions baked into students’ grades and how those assumptions affect their learning.”

“In a quest for consistency, they’ve adopted policies that de-emphasize formative assignments, like homework; give students multiple chances to redo work; raise minimum scores from zero to 50, so that grade bands for A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, and F’s hold equal weight in a student’s cumulative grade; and establish clear rubrics to determine when students have mastered a skill or concept.”

…

“These debates about grading are not new. But they’ve been the target of renewed attention – and a fair degree of controversy – as schools navigate concerns about grade inflation and academic recovery.”

“Districts face strong headwinds, including competing views among researchers, policymakers, and pundits about the most effective policies. Parents, teachers, and students have differing understandings about what grades mean. And, for better or worse, new grading policies can affect educators’ workloads, classroom routines, and teaching methods.”

“A tricky thing about grades is that they serve so many purposes, and can be shaped by so many factors. In seeking to rethink grading, districts must keep broad questions in mind: What are grades meant to communicate?”

“Are they inflated by overly lenient approaches? Do some students receive lower grades because of educator biases and circumstances out of students’ control, like a lack of home internet access, that make it difficult to meet homework deadlines? Are grades meant to reflect a cumulative measure of students’ work, or their current grasp of academic concepts?”

“It’s a process that can uncover a lot of inertia and unintended consequences, grading experts said.”

“’Grades should accurately reflect a student’s current understanding of the course content, free from biases,’ said Joe Feldman, a former teacher, principal, and educational consultant whose book, Grading for Equity, has influenced districts around the country…”

“In theory, students with a similar level of content understanding should have similar grades, even if it took one student longer to demonstrate that understanding, he said.”

“But grades that incorporate points for extra credit, class participation, turning in homework on time, or even showing up to class with needed supplies, distort that reflection, Feldman contends. Students who’ve mastered less content may have higher grades if they are able to comply with those behavioral expectations. And students who take longer to grasp course content at the beginning of the year may see their grades dragged down by lower scores on early assignments, even if they eventually demonstrate a full understanding of all academic concepts.”

“’Most teachers get very little training in how to grade, so they are forced to replicate how they were graded,’ Feldman said. ‘In doing so, they replicate some of the same unintended consequences.’”

If there is one practice that tells me that our traditional school system is doomed, it would be that system’s inability to fairly and consistently “grade” learning. Because the traditional system has never graded its learners fairly and consistently, and it’s doubtful that it ever will, assessing learning needs a beginning – a place where equity is possible. And that’s not our current public school system.

Til tomorrow. SVB