Research

Quotes from this article:

There are definitely too many phonies running around acting like they’re down for the people but only looking out for their own interests and will be quick to snitch, betray, and sell you out. This is also to combat and to struggle against these behaviors, this is not an attempt to point the finger at anyone. We cannot blame the people for 500 years of colonialism; we have to attack the system, the real problem that we are facing that is killing us at this very moment.

This is something with which I couldn't agree more.

I think there are two things that are becoming more apparent in the Left today: 1) we are seeing clear lines being drawn (meaning we are seeing people’s true colors come out), which is good in the sense that alliances are being made based on principled unity; and 2) we are seeing people who would rather attack and make enemies with other oppressed people or people in the movement than go after the real institutional enemies of the people in terms of the system as a whole.

Depending on where this piece goes, I'm definitely in agreement. (If it hits a tone of 'left unity', I'm going to struggle with it; if it hits a tone of 'there are too many in what we call "the left" fighting others', I'm in agreement.)

... one of the biggest forms of opportunism today is political careerism where people use the grassroots and larger movement to build their own networks for their own future political career in a sense.

This isn't the first time I've heard this. In fact, this sentiment was expressed in the interview with Tariq Mehmood about the Asian youth movements in Bradford with Working Class History (Part 1, Part 2).

There are far too many people seeing that they can 'grab control' and 'build a career' on the backs of people suffering, and they simply don't care. Because:

These folks usually like to play all sides, have their hands in everything, and be known in every circle of activists, organizers, and even radicals because they want to use these networks for their careerist intentions.

Another form of this opportunism we can see inside the Non-Profit Industrial Complex where many political careerists hope to build up their networks and hold leadership positions already.

This is an area that really needs to receive a lot more attention, especially with regards to global organisations. There are a lot of governments that use or manipulate non-profits for their own goals. (I say 'manipulate' because there are countries where getting away from non-profit structures is incredibly difficult was a result of laws.) They continue:

Non-profits, however, have hired many people of color who in other sectors of work would not have a job, but looking at the role that the Non-Profit Industrial Complex plays in guiding the struggle in a direction that is not a threat to the state because their funding in large comes from the state itself.

This is true in countries where they 'compete' for the tax-based donations from the public (e.g., Slovakia has a 2% contribution from taxes that people can donate to their choice of non-profits -- this directly links the state to those organisations, and it also informs them about which non-profits to work with).

Another way some use the movement, is to promote themselves, build themselves up as an activist celebrity, build their own “legacy,” and many times it is because they also want to get paid.

Definitely this, too. It pairs well with the careerism that was previously discussed.

This is part of the social conditioning and colonialism of building up personalities and not empowering individuals to realize their own potentials as revolutionaries and as human beings. This is not to say we shouldn’t celebrate our revolutionaries, our victories, our communities and individuals who have made that “revolutionary sacrifice,” what I’m being critical of something completely different.

Definitely this. There's a glimmer of this when people (particularly non-anarchists) start asking about different anarchist figures, assuming that all of them spoke for every one of us. Their work is/was important, and it's important to recognise them (and their flaws). However, the perspective a lot of us have on the world is that these people do not represent us; they help us build the movement, help us describe things through theory, help us orient praxis, etc. They're not our idols, and they shouldn't be.

There are those however that wish to get paid. That is okay as long as some of that is getting back to the oppressed communities and the revolutionary movement. The real issue is the liberals, who have no other way to build a legacy or are good at anything else so therefore they seek to do that for themselves in the movement.

Fucking this right here. I am fine with people making money (in a society that requires it to survive), but it needs to be in conjunction with helping part of the community in some material form.

So what we have instead of a real movement is these folks taking the struggle in a direction of personality cults in a sense and we lose sight of the people who are the real makers of history always.

Yes. Another element of personality cults is that they try to build their momentum into political campaigns.

Self-Righteous behavior is too common in the activist circles today where they divorce themselves from the oppressed communities because the activists see themselves as better. This is an elitism, that comes from being separate from the oppressed communities, where activists see themselves as above “the people,” because they see that they have the correct language, the correct internal behavior and practice.

Yes. This is too fucking common. (And this is something that we all need to work to rid ourselves of. It's hard, but it needs to be done.) He continues by saying:

All oppressed people have been socialized and colonized under this White-Supremacist-Patriarchal-Heterosexist-Capitalist-Imperialist system, so even the activists are going to carry some baggage from the system even though they say otherwise. We have to understand that we are living in unhealthy conditions and these conditions are brought with us into the movement.

And:

There are some who do not wish to change or are not doing so at this moment, and we have to figure out how to deal with them if they come from our communities as well. So this is where we have to work with our people where they’re at not where we want them to be, otherwise we will be isolated from those we really have to reach right now.

The personal is political in a sense, but we cannot be neutral when the system is waging war on us. These also manifests itself today in people not calling out oppressive behavior when it happens and not challenging opportunists when they come into our communities and try to use us.

What I mean by the White-Left Vanguard Party is the white-left organization who survived the 60’s (after the truly revolutionary organizations were defeated) or is new, and think that they need to lead the struggle and impose themselves on oppressed communities and communities of color.

So they have the white savior complex and feel that they need to speak for the oppressed. This does not just exist in the authoritarian left but also within the anarchist circles. This is something that is prevalent in all of the white left, and we should rely on other white leftists to challenge. Oppressed people however, should never allow them to come into our communities and impose their programs on us where they see only other whites being fit to lead us.

I think more white anarchists (and I'm not excluding myself here) need to read this and let it sink in.

In the Third World today people are organizing more in a horizontalist and autonomous ways in the communities because the state is not providing for them and they build up the mutual-aid relationships out of their need for survival. Many have found out this way of building is the only way to build something fundamentally new.

The illegitimate leadership today can manifest itself in many ways: the people who do no work but want all the credit, sideline haters (who basically criticize from the sidelines of the movement but are not willing to fight with the people or who intend to make poster children out of the youth and let them catch all the heat from the state and will not defend them), opportunists, people who wish to co-opt the movement or organizations that they had nothing to do in building (a form of opportunism), and of course the state and organizations with deep ties to the state. The Non-Profit Industrial Complex now represents a form of illegitimate leadership in our communities and do many of the things mentioned. Many of them have also deep ties to the state but act as the representatives for our communities.

We should not allow this to happen anymore; we shouldn’t give them any power.

A lot of the research that comes from [academia] feeds the war machine, so how can this be a revolutionary institution? It is not. Its role is to act as training for the people who will become the new middle class and upper middle class, fundamentally this is the role of the university.

After many students graduate from universities the only jobs that are available to them for the most part is in the Non-Profit Sector, which also promotes the idea that the ones with a university education are the best qualified to lead. I do think that if our people decide to attend a university they should come back into their communities and democratize their knowledge.

Name mentioned: Rodolf 'Corky' Gonzales (Chicano organiser and revolutionary)

Also Academia and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex have attempted to hijack the revolution, take credit for, change the language, and again be the “legitimate” forms to struggle. Academia takes folks away from their communities if they’re people of color and oppressed. They attempt to define the struggle for the people from the ivory tower and they have a monopoly on book knowledge inaccessible to the majority of society.

And this is a succinct reason for why I think academia can never be the center of a 'revolution' or any form of actual change in society. Co-opting is the best they can do.

Looking at the education model within academia where you have an expert on a subject talk to you for hours and you are expected to regurgitate what they tell you in a test or essay. Do people really learn this way? We need to look at forms of popular education. Just because you are not a professor does not mean you do not have things to teach, based on your experiences. You probably have many things to teach your professors; there is a lot of value in your life experiences and they are valid.

Fucking spot on, and I'd apply this same principle to compulsory schooling.

We have to be relevant to the most oppressed and our communities. We cannot build organizations and events just for us but where non-activists feel that they can relate to and think is interesting.

Yes!

Quotes from this article.

If we take a historical perspective, the impact of academics on radical theory has been marginal.

This is largely true.

Overall, the relationship between struggles on the ground and academia is a complicated one. There are barriers in both directions. We meet academic arrogance as much as vulgar anti-intellectualism. At times, it seems that we are dealing with two parallel worlds with very little interaction and no common political commitment.

One issue I have with this is that how we view and define "vulgar anti-intellectualism." I say this because I've been called "anti-intellectual" for critiquing academics and universities, especially considering how they do little to nothing in the face of the precarity of their institution. They also rarely speak up about the multiple abuses academia participates in. People like myself, who realise that academia is not a necessary institution and believe in full school abolition, often get put in the same box as people who are genuinely anti-intellectual.

Also, even groups that are consistently "anti-intellectual" (see: fascists) still support people they deem as "intellectuals" because they put forward research that supports the fascists. People need a more nuanced view of anti-intellectualism.

But academic arrogance is astoundingly common and does not fuel helpful relationships between themselves and people on the ground. Even academics have realised this, as there are people who have done what they could to bring their work to the community, to organise with their communities, and to support causes that support people.

As a consequence of the student and youth rebellions, radical theory became an academic career path. The decade saw a boom in the publication of academic books and journals edited by Marxists. Even when the overall appeal of Marxism decreased in the 1980s, this trend continued, as a significant number of Marxists had entered the ranks of academia. Today, this is true even for anarchists who were almost entirely absent from academia until the 1990s. Today’s two best-known anarchists, Noam Chomsky and David Graeber, are both academics. Only in the Global South does the personal union of militant and theorist still exist, exemplified by the likes of Subcommandante Marcos or Abdullah Öcalan.

I think, as well as the radical theory becoming an academic career path, the fact that a lot of academics saw themselves as the radical students and assumed that because they moved into positions as academics? They were still creating change in the world rather than further cementing their position in a system that co-opted a lot of work and research, watering down a lot of ideas and actions.

As much as I adore Graeber's work (and it is fantastic), I think there is an irony in how he and Chomsky became the 'voice of anarchism' at different times. Especially Chomsky, who had some questionable takes that didn't really align with basic anarchism. (Side note: I do need to spend some time re-reading Chomsky. Also, I need to go back and review both Subcommandante Marcos and Abdullah Öcalan. Among many others.)

Probably in the vein of "bad for Chomsky," a bunch of dorks look to him as the authority on anarchism, which is a whole fucking irony of not understanding anarchism. In that regard, I feel bad for the man.

It is no coincidence that the conflict ended with neoliberalism finalizing the distinction between struggling and thinking about struggling. Neoliberalism turned universities into market places of self-promotion rather than terrains of intellectual growth.

Because I don't know many people who went to university prior to the 1980s (I was the first person to attend and graduate university in my immediate family, and I was the first to get a Masters degree; the only other people in my family who attended university were two cousins who were 3 and 5 years older than me), I want to know how true this statement is. Were universities ever really "terrains of intellectual growth?"

I say this because the history of schools and universities often indicates that they weren't, and many of the people that I've read seem to show that the people who saw them as such were either left alone to do whatever they wanted (more or less) or had to fight in order to do the work they wanted to do. In the former case, they saw little to no issue with how things were operating (because it worked for them and they were part of the dominant culture); in the latter case, the people recognised that it was their fight that allowed them to have that "intellectual space."

When academia takes control, theoretical work shifts form and content. Today, the term political is almost an antonym to the term scholarly. Academics fear that political engagement discredits them. They write exclusively for a small circle of other academics. The question of “What is to be done?” is no longer raised, let alone attempted to be answered.

This keeps making me ask the same set of questions: Who made a big deal about politics in schools? Who continually kept claiming that schools shouldn't be political? And did they recognise their work as political? Did they recognise an ability to "be apolitical" as being political? Did they not see their work as inherently political?

These always need to be addressed, I think. We really need to point out the root cause for this.

Academic publishing has become a lucrative industry. Paywalls separate an exclusive academic audience from the rest of us. To read academic articles, we must “pay per view.” Alternatively, academic authors must > pay up to USD 3000 to make a piece publicly accessible. This is particularly odd if we consider that the salaries of academics, and the infrastructure they use, are largely paid for by the public. So, while the public is denied access to the work it has financed, private publishing companies cash in on poorly produced and heavily overpriced publications that collect dust on the shelves of university libraries. In order to publish in respected academic journals and presses, academics also have to agree to formal demands that further alienate ordinary folks. It is therefore not surprising that the vast majority of academic articles circulates among a couple of hundred professionals at best, satisfying only the economic interests of parasitic publishing companies and the reproduction of a self-involved intellectual elite.

When I critique academics, this is kind of something I go back and forth on. I recognise that their work is often difficult to make freely available because of the structures they're doing it in.

But I also wonder: How much of a fight is going on about this? I rarely see tenured academics putting up a fight on this front. Instead, the only people I've heard discuss this include people working on their PhD (such as @johntheduncan, who openly said that his institution "doesn't even pay for lecturers" to have their work published in open access journals while recalling discussing the possibility of making his own work freely available).

If academics want to claim they're "part of a movement," they need to be breaking down the walls of their institution while learning that their career simply may not exist by doing so. (But that the world will be better off for it by making learning openly accessible to all.)

One of the reasons we don’t know is that these questions are often sidestepped. People seem afraid of stepping on each others’ toes. There is an esprit de corps in all social circles, academic ones included, and this affects even radical academics. No one dares to cast the first stone, because everyone sits in the same glass house. It is striking that people who passionately come to the defense of open access and commons against the norms and values of neoliberalism turn very pragmatic when their most immediate environment is concerned.

This last part is largely why I have so much disdain for academics (as a group). I also think this element is what made someone like David Graeber so widely appreciated among many anarchists; he showed up, he put his own career on the line for his values, and he paid for it in the US academic circles (where he couldn't find employment).

He wasn't perfect by any means, but that's an example that more academics need to be following.

We have no detailed knowledge of the professional and personal situation of individual academics and cannot judge their choices. We don’t know how much they resist the tendencies discussed above in their daily work. But there seems to be no concerted effort to name, denounce, and alter these tendencies, and, subsequently, very little collective resistance.

This is, again, why I have such a problem with academics as a group, and I genuinely find the same amount of frustration for those who call themselves anarchists and academics. If you are not organising to make learning accessible, what is the point? There are people with fewer resources and more to lose fighting for what you should be, and we're often met with disdain from academics.

Do not think it is lost on me that early years, primary, and secondary teachers often face incredible amounts of disgust and condescension from academics but that they are suddenly making a bit more noise now that Critical Race Theory bills are going out and it impacts them, too. Academics rarely show solidarity with those they see as "beneath" them, and this has to change. And this also applies to anarchist academics.

Note: I'm glad there is more solidarity, but this needs to be consistent and wide. People with tenure need to do a hell of a lot more to support the people in their very institutions who are put into positions of precarity and poverty existence. They need to stand up more for more people who are targeted and break the institution when it shits on someone. Until that's there, I cannot feign happiness over one instance where they're doing something where it also impacts them directly.

Yet, throughout history, workers with much more to lose – and with much less ideological pretense – have found ways to protest. They unionized, they organized campaigns, they engaged in sabotage and direct action. Why is this seemingly no option for radical academics? A common response to anti-academic sentiments is that the struggle needs to be everywhere, also in academia. That is a valid argument – as long as there is indeed any struggle in academia.

Other radical academics have become prominent enough to act as celebrity supporters – or even unofficial spokespeople – of social movements. The above-mentioned Noam Chomsky and David Graeber are examples, and so are Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, or Vandana Shiva. Radical celebrities serve a purpose, and we are glad that the media grants them a platform to voice their opinions. But celebrities are by definition exceptions to the rule. They do not change the pattern. And, at times, they distract from the problem.

A list of suggestions for moving forward:

1/ There is no radical theory without practical experience. Theoretical work cannot be separated from movements against capitalism and imperialism. It must respond to the questions posed by struggles on the ground. We cannot afford non-activist theory.

There is no way that theory can be developed without on-the-ground knowledge and experience.

It's also relevant to say that academics need to stop co-opting the work of marginalised people on-the-ground, particularly as they are so often the people that academia dismisses and excludes. Make it known who you are working with and whose work you're pulling from; stop making it about your own career.

2/ There is no radical practice without theoretical reflection. We must evaluate the effects of our struggles and reflect on our experiences. We cannot afford anti-theoretical activism.

I think there is so frequently a misunderstanding of what people mean when they say that they're "doing praxis" or "doing practical work" instead of theory, and it needs to be recognised that a lot of people who've been intentionally excluded from the spaces that "create theory" without practical knowledge feel that their practice is grounded in the theory they learned on the ground.

Which is true.

Yes, activists need to spend more time reflecting (everyone does) and may need to work together to build theoretical practice (which is fine), but I think we need a better understanding of how activists feel excluded (especially people from marginalised and historically excluded communities).

3/ Radical theory must contribute to radical practice. Its purpose is not to understand things, but to change things. This requires the development of strategy and tactics.

I think it's worth repeating something that Francisco Ferrer once wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: "Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed – even in part – the other immediately suffers. There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world."

He also provided an 'equation', which is: Action + Reflection > word = work = praxis Sacrifice of action = verbalism Sacrifice of reflection = activism

4/ We must raise our view. The outside of academia is much more interesting and relevant than the inside of it. Radical theory must not be limited by academic conventions, disciplines, and norms.

Precisely this. Being outside of academia also allows us to free ourselves from the walls everyone has built (that only continue to get smaller as people seek to carve out careers as much as humanly possible).

5/ We must actively seek out non-academic sources. Many of them are excluded from academia due to geographical, cultural, or language-related reasons only.

Seek out and not co-opt from. There are far too many academics to actively steal work and take credit from it.

And it's not even that many of the people they steal from ask for credit, but it should just be considered proper behaviour to include them and make people aware of the people you're working with instead of claiming their work as your own. Not only should academics seek out non-academic sources (and include them), they need to treat them with respect.

6/ We must defy the formal restrictions put on academic work, since they confine the contents.

Most definitely.

7/ We must change the academic environment itself. It must be freed from the yoke of both the state and capital. Academia must be seen as the institution of power it has become. Today, “academic freedom” mainly refers to relative personal privilege, not a space of free intellectual development.

By change, we really should encourage everyone to actively dismantle the institution. These institutions are now claiming they're "decolonising," but they're built on colonialism. (This is a paraphrased version of this tweet by Judicaelle Irakoze.)

8/ We must be aware of and counteract the impact that hierarchies of class, gender, and race put on the production of radical theory. This effort must be led by those affected by them.

Agreed, and we really need to include other axes of oppressions: ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and casteism.

9/ We must make academic work accessible to everyone. There needs to be free access to libraries and conferences, and free distribution of academic writing.

Yes! 100% yes. And we need to include non-academic work. We also need to stop holding people up as celebrities and figures.

10/ We must establish counter-institutions, that is, places and networks that allow for scholarly work beyond academic restrictions.

Learning centers, study groups, everything. We need spaces of education to be based in community, which is something that academia (and schools) most certainly are not and will never be.

Quotes taken from this book chapter.

"The reason for the tenure denial was Sid’s grading practices, and his refusal to change them at the administration’s request. He never liked letter grades. Sid told me that, when he taught high school, it broke his heart 'to squeeze these kids into one of the five letters of the alphabet.' He much preferred narrative evaluations, where he could offer feedback using 'all the letters of the alphabet.' By the time Sid was teaching in college, he had adopted a blanket grading policy where everyone in the class got a B. Nobody would fail, and nobody would get an A. In Sid’s way of thinking, this freed everyone to focus on their learning instead of their grades. At Temple, Kirschenbaum suggested that instead of giving everyone a B, Simon should give all As in order to get the attention of the larger institution and possibly spur a conversation about grading. This tactic worked; the administration noticed what Simon was doing and didn’t like it."

I don't know anything about Sid Simon, but if this story is true? The fact that the administration wouldn't stop to have a conversation with someone who is actually doing the work highlights some of the same issues we have today. People who are actually impacted by policies are being forced into utilising policies that they may not agree with are usually not considered when developing them.

I actually really love using narrative feedback (along with one-on-one feedback throughout projects), but I find it strange that he'd opt for a 'B' for everyone. I wonder if this is because my views on how grades unnecessarily impact students' lives plays into it, and a B can be seen as "bad" in today's hyper-competitive world.

"In response, a faculty committee was formed to investigate the research on grading, chaired by . . . Rod Napier. The results of this committee’s work indicated that the existing research did not provide strong arguments in support of traditional letter grading; a finding that continues to be true today."

"The conferences were followed by the establishment of the National Center for Grading and Learning Alternatives, led by James Bellanca, who until his recent retirement served as the Executive Director of the Illinois Consortium for 21st Century Schools and has long been active in the skills-based or mastery learning movement, variants of which are leading alternatives to traditional grading (more on that later)."

I don't know who Bellanca is, but I bristle at "skills-based or mastery learning movement" because something similar is attached to Common Core. (And while I'm not a proponent of content-based curriculum, Common Core is a questionable direction to go in order to achieve "skills-based" competencies.)

"What has changed in those fifty years? Not that much. The general finding that teacher-assigned grades are subjective and unreliable remains constant. More recently, however, researchers have increased an emphasis on non-cognitive skills including persistence, engagement, and positive school behaviors. Research also focuses on educational outcomes like successful graduation from high school or college, finding that grades can provide “a useful indicator of numerous factors that matter to students, teachers, parents, schools, and communities,” and have been shown to predict academic persistence, completion, and ease of transition from high school to college (Brookhart et al., 2016, p. 833). Grades appear to correlate with cognitive knowledge as measured by standardized tests. In this sense, grades can serve as a measure of success in school, although there’s a circular logic underlying these observations: Students who perform well on the dominant school-based performance indicator (grades) are observed to “do well” in school, both academically and behaviorally."

Surprise! Circular logic in our schools? Who would've guessed.

"A culture that views intelligence as innate, a curriculum based on social efficiency and transmission of knowledge, and a deep-rooted belief in “scientific” measurement and sorting of students produce the desire to see inherent value in grades as instruments of rational control."

A culture that views intelligence as innate is ableist, so I'm wondering if this chapter is going to point out how ableism (and the history of eugenics) factor into public schools and our systems of grading. (If it doesn't, it should.)

"The history of American education has been characterized as a struggle between psychologist Edward Thorndike and philosopher and psychologist John Dewey going back to the first decades of the 1900s."

If anything has ever made me want to scream, it's the bizarre fanaticism that so many education departments in the US have for Dewey. There were many other options and alternatives beyond him, and he receives credit for something that was often discussed among many (Dewey is a really good example of the "Great Man" theory playing out in education systems).

Note: Thorndike was part of the eugenics lineage in schools. It should go without saying that this article should be more forthright in explaining what his position was beyond the following passage:

"Thorndike was a proponent of scientific management, believing that the goal of education was to sort young people by their ability to improve the efficiency of the system. He believed deeply that 'quality is more important than equality' (Rose, 2016)."

"Scientific management" often gets to be used as a euphemism to obscure what it really is that many of these people were pushing for.

"Creating real change in education is hard, perhaps as hard as any societal challenge."

To be honest, this is probably because education is the centerpiece for all of these societal changes. In order to effectively change society, we need to change education. You cannot hope for change in society if you do not attempt to change education and the related structures.

For anarchists, this is where a lot of prefigurative politics fit in. (And I think it's also why a lot of anarchists, though their intentions are good, forget to talk about learning and education within societies in explicit tones.)

"Things like grades become deep cultural practices embedded in schooling, and the structures of schooling—for instance the use of transcripts designed to record only final letter grades and the use of the grade point average (GPA) as a summation of all individual course grades—reinforce the importance of grades. To change this, we need to engage in what Star called infrastructuring work, creating new structures—such as new forms of transcript—and practices—such as the way colleges use information from secondary school for admissions—that create value for information about learning beyond the final letter grade and GPA."

The structures of school are circular and self-justifying.

Something interesting is that there is yet to be consideration that the school itself is unnecessary and that we can replace it with something else. That would be a novel idea, especially as this "infrastructuring work"—while necessary in the current moment—still leads to the same conclusion: There is a 'final destination' in learning, culminating in a transcript, diploma, or certification.

That sounds like it is also a problem that needs to be solved.

"In Wad-Ja-Get? the authors distinguish between a five-point system of mastery and a two-point system, which is akin to Pass / No Credit, sometimes referred to as standards-based grading. It is difficult to pin these terms down clearly in either literature or practice (see Guskey & Anderman, 2013 for some useful definitional work). The key, however, is that grading in these approaches is based on clear demonstrations of what students can do and does not involve percentage-based grading or comparative grading such as curves."

It's important to recognise that two- and five-point scales are still grading, even if percentages are not part of the structure. We currently have schools that utilise the IB system (5-band scale from 0-8 per criteria, which then becomes a scale of 1-7 for the whole mark of the class), and they still rely on a lot of arbitrary values while focusing mostly on skill and mastery. You can't ungrade while still grading.

But they outline what mastery learning should look like:

"One key advantage of mastery learning is that it does not make time the main arbiter of learning, allowing for individual variation on the way to learning goals, with liberal use of formative assessments and feedback. Another advantage is that mastery assessment emphasizes what students know and can do, as opposed to merely ranking them against one another."

"The problem isn’t student resistance, resilience, or grit; the problem is that the whole system emphasizes ranking and grading over learning. We need to change the system to reignite a focus on learning."

This whole section on the infrastructure of grading (and how opaque university admissions processes) fuel the 'value' of grades and GPAs is really good, but it makes a mistake: it presumes that schools were designed for learning.

I know that people want to believe that the purpose of schools were for learning, but that purpose has largely been secondary for an overwhelming number of people. One need only connect the history of schooling to the arguments we have today to recognise that schools have never provided environments that were conducive to genuine learning for the majority of people: they have always excluded people, and they continue to do so today.

Remember that schools were used to further colonialism (residential schools for Indigenous and Black people), they persist in furthering imperialism and hegemonic supremacy (read a history textbook), and they were built using eugenics as a template (especially in SEN/G&T programs). Prior to movements for public schooling, they were inaccessible to the majority of people and were created for those with money. There was also a point where schools were segregated by gender, if girls were allowed at all.

Schools were never intended to be spaces of genuine learning, and everyone needs to stop pretending they were as they call for reforms.

"One technology that has enlivened the conversation in this area is digital badges, which can be used to denote learning or accomplishment in more granular ways than traditional grades and can be used to guide individualized pathways towards specific learning goals."

Going back to the original (which was riffed in Troop Beverly Hills): "Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!"

I don't understand this desire for technology to be such an invasive part of our lives in so many ridiculous ways. Why do I need to have a 'badge' to prove that I've done something? It's almost like they want to turn learning into a collection of Steam achievements and trying to attach a meaning to it. I really don't see why, in most areas, people cannot just come and go as they please; learn and work as they want. We're still putting a transaction on it; you learned a skill, so here's your badge!

This still has the chance of perpetuating a major negative element of our learning environment: constricting pathways that don't enable people to try out or observe the work they want to do. It also doesn't do anything to decrease the likelihood of bullshit jobs that no one should need to do.

"Another element of infrastructure that needs to change in order to upend the dominant system of letter grades and percentage-grading is gradebooks themselves."

"LMSs are both ubiquitous and nearly invisible in schools; they are infrastructure. And LMSs typically have a narrow view of what grades and grading look like. It’s difficult to find an LMS gradebook that doesn’t start with the assumption that 100% is “perfect,” thus making the objective for students to maintain grades that—on average—are as close to 100% as possible. Gradebooks are hopelessly averagarian. In response, students game the system within or across their courses to maintain or maximize their average."

Yes, but also no. There are a lot of LMS systems where you can drop elements of grading entirely, opting for an alternative. Managebac, as much as I loathe it for the 5 million unnecessary questions it asks me every time I create a class/unit/assignment, has a simple "comments only" function for all teachers. If an LMS does not have this function, it is less the LMS that needs to be changed and more the outlook of the people running it. (It also means that the people designing these systems, as is often the case, haven't actually encountered the reality of what it's like to be a teacher.)

We keep missing the forest for the trees here, putting "infrastructural blame" on individual tools. LMSs don't just appear out of thin air; the biases and assumptions hidden in their programming by the people developing them are what need to be addressed.

But the author already highlighted this when discussing people being afraid to use non-traditional transcripts for entry into university and the potential harm it could cause to their students:

"Independent school leader Scott Looney was frustrated with the limiting aspects of the traditional transcript, believing that its structure limited innovation, discouraged interdisciplinary and engaged learning, and was more useful for sifting and sorting students than anything else: a strong echo with the arguments discussed above. Even more frustrating, he felt unable to do anything about this without jeopardizing his students’ access to top colleges. A college admissions officer friend suggested that, while it might not be a great idea for his school to do its own thing, if a consortium of schools banded together, it would make it easier for colleges to respond positively to an alternative transcript. And so the MTC was born, with the goal of developing a transcript that represented areas of mastery instead of course titles and grades."

So the issue is less the tool but more the people designing and implementing them. This creates a circular problem, and that circular problem isn't being pointed out. These reforms aren't fixing that.

"School is indeed a kind of game, but it’s a terrible game, with broken engagement and reward structures. Students are motivated to get good grades, but not to learn."

Now make this argument from the perspective that the point of school was never about learning, and you will be getting somewhere.

"A key to this approach is changing the frame for grading. Instead of starting with 100%—which you will most likely lose—in a gameful course you start with zero, but you can end up wherever you want based on the choices you make and the effort you put in. In this way, gameful learning is aligned with ideas from mastery learning. Learners are given autonomy, in terms of being able to make choices with respect to assignments and pathways through a course. Their feelings of competence are supported, in part through being able to make choices about what to work on, and through a sense of productive failure. What this means is that if a learner earns, for example, 60% of the points available on an assignment, this isn’t a failure at all (though it would certainly be viewed as a one in most standard grading systems), but instead represents progress. What did they learn? What hasn’t been learned yet? How should we focus future work by this student to help ensure that all goals are met by the end of the course?"

As a reform to grading in a broken system, I like this concept. However, I still question aspects of it: How do you determine a percentage of knowledge? Who is determining what it means to get that 60%? If your whole school hasn't bought into this idea, how do you navigate a situation where a student who has "made 60% progress" (like a download meter) in terms of traditional marking?

This also doesn't do much about superfluous assignments. If this is meant to engage a student by addressing their autonomy in a course, then an instructor needs to come to terms with how meaningful their assignments are (both in terms of doing the work to complete it and the feedback they will receive). This makes the assumption that the assessments they're given will be meaningful, which isn't always the case.

" Gameful courses also emphasize a sense of belonging, helping students to feel a part of something larger than themselves. In the study of academic motivation, self-determination theory has demonstrated that when learners’ autonomy, belonging, and competence are supported, they feel more intrinsically motivated (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Roy & Zaman, 2017). When these three elements are thwarted—as they are in much of contemporary education—extrinsic motivation is required to get learners to engage. For today’s learners, that extrinsic motivation comes from grades."

First, if you want to create an environment that where students have "a sense of belonging" and can help "students to feel a part of something larger than themselves," why not create a truly collaborative learning space and environment instead of continually modelling things on what already exists (and wasn't designed for that purpose)?

Alternative schools are doing this already, as there are a number of Democratic Schools, Secular Homeschool Co-Ops, and Learning Centers that provide space for learners to work with each other and without the artificial barriers of the classroom (how we divide subjects, how we divide learners, etc). People are intentionally trying to create spaces that do exactly that, so why not explore those?

Anyway, I agree entirely that motivation should be intrinsic.

But I disagree that the "extrinsic motivation comes from grades." Grades are a placeholder. What do people tell children when they get bad grades? They won't get into a good university. They won't get a good job. They won't be successful in life. They will be poor (implying that poor people are bad, which is gross). Grades are a stand-in for "you will be economically disadvantaged if you don't work hard enough."

When kids say that grades motivate them, ask them why that is. At that point, you will get the honest answers.

"I am happy to say that efforts to reimagine education through centers for academic and learning innovation are spreading across higher education more broadly (Kim & Maloney, 2020). The status quo around grading is in part a response to the perceived demands of college, so it is fitting that colleges should lead the way forward."

I need to point something out about academics that infuriates me: They think everything starts in universities and rarely want to accept that, just because something "is a response to the perceived demands of college," it doesn't mean that we have to start there. This is a much larger conversation than "What can universities do to help reform a system while refusing to change the values that got us here in the first place?"

Should universities change? Certainly. But should people in universities start understanding that there are options beyond creating systems that still enable people to perceive themselves as "better than" those who opt to do something else? Yes.

This "ungrading" hasn't yet figured out how to change culture; it's looking at how to reform what's happening instead of genuinely change it.

"The current combination of technology (e.g., digital badges), advocacy (e.g., Mastery Transcript Consortium, the growth of academic innovation centers in higher education), and crisis as it relates to education might bring about an adjacent possible favorable to advancing approaches to grading that enhance learning and equity."

The more I think on this, the more frustrating it is. "Digital Badges" are nonsensical; they don't promote genuine learning any more than Steam Achievements promote enjoyment of the games. If these badges are tied to "goals," these goals are determined by someone else; the only way that's not possible is if we're all creating our own badges, and that already means it's impossible to really use them.

If the goal is student autonomy and agency, the badges are just a nicer way of giving someone a transcript; they get to show off the parts they like or the bits that are relevant, but they still have the same end-goals in mind. (Also, this builds into "techno-solutionism," and the solution really isn't more technology.)

I also hate that this person is ignoring projects that exist in reality that are not in tertiary schooling. It's easy enough to find schools that have existed for years (like Summerhill in the UK) and people developing learning communities for kids required to get through compulsory schooling (like the Hedge School Cooperative in Austin, TX). It ignores projects like Flying Squads and other self-directed education projects.

When academics view the problem as "starting in academia," they ignore all of these and drive support to other fixes (that might not even be fixes). That attitude has to change.

"Historian and founding director of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research Ibram X. Kendi argues that the statistical methods we use to “measure” learning were developed by scholars who were also proponents of eugenics, committed to “proving” that the Black race was inferior to others (Kendi, 2019)."

It should not be at this point that someone mentions eugenics (which definitely targeted Black people, but it's worth noting that these methods targeted a wide range of people when they were implemented and depended upon location).

This point should've been mentioned when the author name-dropped a literal eugenicist and obscured their beliefs behind "scientific management," which happens again:

"Thorndike’s scientific management approaches to education played a key role in reinforcing and amplifying the inequality that has been there from the start."

Stop using the phrase "scientific management" when you mean "eugenics."

"Education is a system, and when we work for improvement, we need to focus on its multiple interconnected elements simultaneously."

Here's an innate issue in this framing: School is a system. Education is natural. Stop equating education with school; you do not need schools in order to learn anything.

"To the first objection—that we are lowering standards by moving to a Pass/Fail system—I ask, what were our standards in the first place? Let’s begin with the assumption that passing is the equivalent of a C or C- in the standard grading approach. If you aren’t happy with students earning those grades, why do they exist at all? Shouldn’t a passing grade mean that the student has at least learned the core goals of the course? To me, this objection is an argument for raising standards such that nobody can pass a course without mastering the core learning objectives. This objection reveals a lack of focus on learning in our current grading systems."

This is actually a really good point. Just on the basis of having a 5-point grading system (in the US: A, B, C, D, F), you have to wonder why it is that only the A (and sometimes the B) are "acceptable." (Side note: D's are often passing grades in compulsory school. In universities, they are passing grades for courses unrelated to you're program. If you're aiming for a History BA and get a D in a history course, you're retaking that class because it generally doesn't count.)

"The second objection—that without high grades to aim for, students will become unmotivated and stop working—reveals the devil’s bargain inherent in current grading systems, in which students are only working for grades, not for learning. Self-determination theory calls this the “overjustification effect,” wherein receiving a reward (a grade) for something you used to enjoy doing (learning) causes your enjoyment to decrease, and your need for extrinsic rewards (more grades) to increase in order for you to continue to engage (Lepper et al., 1973). If this isn’t a clear call to refocus assessment and grading on learning, I don’t know what is. This objection implies a lack of focus on care and equity."

I'd even argue that we don't need grades of any sort for this very reason and that the existence of schools necessitates an external motivator, even if they opt to use "digital badges" over traditional letter grades.

"The third objection—that this move is unfair to “hard workers” who were shooting for an A, or to students who need a good grade to improve their GPAs—again shows a lack of focus on care in our grading systems. The first group isn’t materially affected by the change to Pass/Fail. The second group can be supported with a note to their transcript, or in letters of recommendation. In any event, the real question here—if care is the focus—is what the best move is for most students?"

Even if we are to merely reform the system to Pass/Fail or Pass/No Credit, we could do something that promotes learning: Learning progression in a topic.

This still doesn't promote student autonomy (but it does enable more space for agency) because it still relies on someone to 'set a course', but we could extend models that exist in some vocational sectors (hair dressing, mechanics, etc): Passing parts of the class allows people to do those things and to help teach others those skills, while "failing" is reframed as "needing to improve" (and giving them space to work on those while retaining prior skills).