Quotes from this book:
Reminder about who this guy is.
To Mallory, one of the most important indications of a high-quality, equitable school is that students are successful regardless of their teacher. One teacher’s students shouldn’t learn different material or be less prepared for the next grade than another teacher’s students.
This literally isn't possible, and the fact that the person writing this (hypothetical?) situation doesn't see this is ludicrous. The values that I bring to the classroom are going to impact my students' grades in ways that are much different than those of my colleagues. In our schools, the relationships that we have with students impact our grading, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.
Though I try to make sure my relationships with students don't do this, it's impossible for me to say they don't. Have I given leeway to students who struggled with life issues and trusted me enough to share them? Yes. Have I also tried to give students the benefit of the doubt when they haven't? Also yes. But I probably still gave the students in the former group more leeway than those in the latter. (This is less common now because I've reflected on those practices, but I know it was something I've done in my past because it was something that I learned from my teachers as a student and from the people teaching me to be a teacher in university.)
Mallory put on her detective hat and considered, investigated, and then rejected several explanations: No substantive differences in instruction. Teachers were using the same curriculum with the same tests and even scored those tests as a team to ensure fairness and uniform evaluation. Mallory scoured students’ previous test scores and grades, with no indication of drastically different profiles of the classes as a whole. No substantive difference in the classroom physically—it wasn’t as if one classroom had a broken thermostat or was closer to a noisy playground. What was even odder was that students with identical standardized test scores received different grades depending on their teacher. The teachers were teaching similarly, the students were demonstrating similar achievement, but the grades showed inconsistency. This data seemed unexplainable, impossible, and grossly inequitable.
This is one of the most interesting attempts at writing a scenario and pretending that what's happening isn't happening? Like, it must be difficult to write a story about an administrator who genuinely has zero clue about anything happening in classrooms and doesn't know any reason why students' grades could be so drastically different between teachers.
Also, what is a "substantive difference in instruction?" Oh, well, it's apparently not this:
On a lark, Mallory looked at the syllabus for each class—each teacher of a course had created her own personalized version—and it shocked her. Each teacher’s syllabus began with a similar introduction to the course content and description of important materials for the class, but then it was as if each teacher was in an entirely different school...
Which then goes on to describe late work policies, homework grading, point assignment, and assessment organisation. Clearly there's no "substantive difference in instruction" if these policies are being employed in radically different ways across the board. (If you have strict late policies, you run your class as such; it is literally a substantial difference between two teachers, their practice, and their instruction.)
Teachers’ different grading policies made it possible for two students with the same academic performance to receive different grades. What particularly confused and concerned Mallory was that some teachers were grading students on criteria that seemed to have nothing to do with their academic achievement—such as whether their paper had intact holes or had the proper heading—and others were basing parts of students’ grades entirely on subjective criteria, such as effort, that were susceptible to teachers’ implicit biases. This grade data that couldn’t be possible suddenly was.
Again, it must be fun to write a scenario where the administrator of a school (or even principal) pretends they have no clue how people are "giving wildly different grades" and "doesn't know how such wildly diverse data can be generated." Also must be fun to further pretend that the administrator or principal doesn't engage in this: They are equally (if not more so) guilty of judging students based entirely on irrelevant "academic criteria."
Especially since they're often putting policies in place that encourage that. Oh. Wait, what did that about the author page say?
Joe Feldman has worked in education at the local and national levels for over twenty years in both charter and district school contexts, and as a teacher, principal, and district administrator. He began his career as a high school English and American history teacher in Atlanta Public Schools and was the founding principal of a charter high school in Washington, DC. He has been the Director of Charter Schools for New York City Department of Education, the Director of K–12 Instruction in Union City, California, and was a Fellow to the Chief of Staff for U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley. Joe is currently CEO of Crescendo Education Group (crescendoedgroup.org), a consulting organization that partners with schools and districts to help teachers use improved and more equitable grading and assessment practices. Joe graduated from Stanford, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and NYU Law School.
Not to say this applies to this author, but it's a convenient thing to note about how tied in Harvard is to charter schools and influential people in that movement in the United States. But anyway, the bolded parts are a bit interesting considering he's literally creating a "poor, clueless administrator."
Even though he knows full well that he would've been responsible for many of the policies that enabled harmful grading practices and could've made significant changes to those systems but chose not to. (Like grading, full stop.)
Teachers’ different grading policies made it possible for two students with the same academic performance to receive different grades. What particularly confused and concerned Mallory was that some teachers were grading students on criteria that seemed to have nothing to do with their academic achievement—such as whether their paper had intact holes or had the proper heading—and others were basing parts of students’ grades entirely on subjective criteria, such as effort, that were susceptible to teachers’ implicit biases. This grade data that couldn’t be possible suddenly was.
The practice of grading is literally an exercise in applying subjective criteria to a person's work. This is not difficult to understand, and pretending otherwise is absolutely bizarre.
To Mallory, no longer were her teachers’ inconsistent policies a theoretical dilemma. The school had spent months of planning and coordination to make sure teachers in the math department were using sequenced curriculum and that each teacher was preparing students to be ready for the next year—called “vertical alignment.” Yet teachers’ different approaches to grading was undermining all of it, sending confusing messages about learning and impacting students’ grades and promotion rates, their beliefs about school, and even their self-image.
I'm pretty sure, even if you "fix" the problems of grading to make it "more objective," students will still tie their self-image to that arbitrary number or letter. That's still harmful, even if you're "grading better."
But now came her second shock: When she began a discussion of grades with her teachers, it was like poking a hornet’s nest. Nothing prepared her for the volatility of conversations about teachers’ grading practices. Many of her teachers, previously open to exploring new ideas about nearly every aspect of their work, reacted with defensiveness and adamant justification. Teachers with higher failure rates argued proudly that their grading reflected higher standards, that they were the “real teachers.” A teacher with low failure rates explained that he was the only teacher who cared enough to give students retakes and second chances. One teacher simply refused to discuss the topic, citing her state’s Education Code that protected teachers from administrators’ pressure to change or overwrite grades. One teacher began to cry, confessing that she had never received any training or support on how to grade and feared that she was grading students unfairly. Conversations about grading weren’t like conversations about classroom management or assessment design, which teachers approached with openness and in deference to research. Instead, teachers talked about grading in a language of morals about the “real world” and beliefs about students; grading seemed to tap directly into the deepest sense of who teachers were in their classroom.
Question: Why is a former principal and administrator writing a scenario where teachers are the primary aggressors in the system? Teachers are a problem, yes. However, many of these concerns get wrapped up as either straight up aggressive or absolutely inept.
A person claiming they "received no training or support" on something is highlighting a systemic failure, which is that grading often doesn't have coherent standards. I have never received training in building a coherent set of standards for grading; I have received multiple assignments in teaching programs and further professional development requesting that I "grade something" according to a given set of standards.
Which have never taught me anything useful, but they did teach me that grading is a bullshit exercise and that we really should be focused primarily on feedback and dialogues. (I wonder how students improve... through feedback or seeing a "C" on their paper. Anyway...)
When she talked about these grading problems with principals of other schools, Mallory was surprised and dismayed to learn that grading varied by teacher in every school. This phenomenon was widespread, even the norm. Teachers thoughtfully and intentionally were creating policies that they believed, in their most thoughtful professional judgment, would promote learning. Yet they were doing so independently and often contradicting each other, yielding in each school a patchwork of well-intentioned but ultimately idiosyncratic approaches to evaluating and reporting student performance. Even when a department or a group of teachers made agreements—for example, to have homework count for no more than 40 percent of a grade—teachers’ other unique policies and practices, such as whether homework would be accepted after the due date, made their attempts at consistency seem half-hearted and ineffectual.
This shit happens, but yet this author wants to play as if principals and administrators don't know (and don't encourage) it? Give me a fucking break. This framing is such trash.
On one hand, like a train’s third rail, grades provide power and legitimacy to teaching and learning. Grades are the main criteria in nearly every decision that schools make about students. Here are some examples:
- course assignment (eligibility for advanced, honors, or AP classes)
- graduation (completion of course requirements)
- academic awards (valedictorian, summa cum laude)
- extracurricular activities (athletics, clubs)
- promotion (able to progress to next grade level or sequenced course)
- retention (repeating a course or grade level)
- additional supports (mandatory tutoring or remediation)
- additional opportunities (special field trips)
- scholarships
- college admission
Grades inform decisions outside the educational world as well. Potential employers consider grades when hiring, and GPAs are often required for youth work permits and reductions in car insurance, which means students’ grades can affect family income and expenses. And those are just the decisions made by institutions. Caregivers and families often provide rewards and privileges (including praise) or enforce punishments and restrictions (including shame) based on grades.
Is there a reason why you're not questioning this system? Like, should this system even allow or deny access to courses, extracurricular activities, or additional opportunities (fails to support learning)?
The rest of these assume that learning should only take place within a hierarchical system, and that's abhorrent. But the presumption that grading should impact all these areas is beyond disgusting, especially since there's no questioning of that system (based entirely on arbitrary criteria) in the first place.
And sorry, what employment is based on compulsory school grades? I have never had a potential employer consider my GPA, but I have had potential employers question where I went to high school to gauge my "suitability" for the job (prestige, assumed assimilation into dominant society) and completely fail to because they didn't know my school. The same has been true of my university degrees. Does it matter that I did well in school? Not at all.
It's mattered where I was and how well known they were.
But like a train’s third rail, grades are so powerful and important to classrooms and schools that no one dares touch them. As Mallory experienced, the questioning of grading practices by administrators, caregivers, students, and even teachers can invoke anxiety, insecurity, pride, obstinacy, and conflict. And so most of us avoid the topic altogether.
Have you tried the question "What if we just don't?" because I feel that might actually be beneficial.
... that I began to see that teachers use grading for many different, and contradictory, purposes:
- To communicate the achievement status of students to parents or guardians and others
- To provide information that students can use for self-evaluation
- To select, identify, or group students for certain educational paths or programs
- To provide incentives for students to learn
- To inform instructional decisions
- To provide evidence of students’ lack of effort or inappropriate responsibility
No wonder that grading practices vary so widely. The teacher who grades to sort students into programs will use grading practices incompatible with the teacher who grades to incentivize students to learn.
This is literally how the State tells us to use grades and how we've all been taught to view grades. Are you going to tell me that these "contradictory uses" aren't part of the overarching system? Like... ask questions, mate. You want to claim to be "critical," ask some fucking questions.
Also, stop blaming teachers for this on their own? This is literally a systemic issue that you're avoiding discussing as such.
Reasons for variation in grade (according to the book):
... I found that many grading practices themselves had deep flaws. For example, I learned that the calculations that we commonly use to derive grades—and often embedded in our grading software—are mathematically unsound.
... I learned that many of us evaluate students on criteria that are nonacademic and highly susceptible to bias. For example, a teacher who evaluates a student’s effort as part of a grade likely applies a culturally narrow definition of what effort looks like.
... teachers often use grades for behavior modification, offering the reward or punishment of points and use (or threaten to use) the zero or F to motivate students even though the “motivational F” is largely a myth; research is clear that low grades, or the threat of low grades, do nothing for the student who has low confidence in their academic abilities or limited experience with academic success—the majority of students who receive Fs.
... I also learned that our grading often creates “collateral consequences” that contradict our intentions. For example, we lament our students’ rampant cheating and copying of homework. Yet when we take a no-excuses approach to late work in the name of preparing students for real-world skills and subtract points or even refuse to accept the work, we incentivize students to complete work on time by hook or by crook and disincentivize real learning. Some common grading practices encourage the very behaviors we want to stop.
Funny, I wonder what questions we could be asking here and what assumptions we could throw away to start a different conversation. (I also wonder why it is that this person keeps blaming teachers for the system they work in, especially when that system punishes us for speaking up about how harmful it is and how elements undermine what the system claims it "wants.")
For example, we teachers often assign students a zero in the gradebook if homework isn’t handed in by the deadline. However, we don’t account for all the reasons that a student wouldn’t turn something in on time. One reason, of course, might be laziness or disinterest—certainly not legitimate reasons. Perhaps a student has after-school classes or sports, which could make it harder to turn in work on time, but arguably this is a self-inflicted wound. But what if a student’s circumstances are beyond her control? What if there isn’t a space at home that is quiet enough, or well-lit enough, or not distraction-free enough for a child to complete homework? What if a student’s caregiver is away at a job (or second job, or third job), so that she isn’t around to provide support? What if the parent or caregiver isn’t formally educated enough or doesn’t speak enough English to help the child complete the homework? What if the child has home responsibilities (caring for an older relative or younger siblings) or has her own job in order to contribute to the family income? What if the student who has few supports simply doesn’t know the answers to the homework? What option is there but to submit the work incomplete or late? Clearly, we don’t want to grade students based on their environment or situations beyond their control, but unfortunately, when we use grading practices such as penalizing students for late work, that is often what we do.
Why are "laziness" or disinterest not legitimate reasons? (Also, define "laziness." And then remind me who often gets seen as "lazy" in school. Wait, ableism and racism are checking in with me and telling me that it's a confluence of the two factors that often get labelled as "lazy.")
Also, who is to say that extracurricular activities or after-school classes are "self-inflicted wounds?" A lot of kids are forced into those activities because of external factors: improving their university applications, parental influence, childcare, etc. Like... it's pretty fucking bullshit to assume these things are always choices; that's not how life works. How can you seriously ask "What if a child's caregiver is at a job (or second job)?" and not recognise that extracurricular activities and extra classes have the same function for some people? How oblivious can you be.
The rest of the questions are useful, but why are those more legitimate than other environmental factors?
To my relief, I also learned that grading, if done differently, can be accurate, not infected with bias, and can intrinsically motivate students to learn. Grades can clearly and more objectively describe what students know and can do. Grading practices can encourage students not to cheat but to learn, to persevere when they fail and not lose hope, and to take more ownership and agency for their achievement. And the power of these approaches can be especially transformative for struggling students—the students who have been beaten down year after year by a punishing grading system of negative feedback and unredeemable failure.
A system designed entirely on arbitrarily assigning letters and numbers to criteria and ranking them can never be objective. It can never not be infected with bias. It's inherent in how we assign criteria and ascribe importance to it. It literally is impossible, and thinking otherwise is nonsense.
"More" objective does not mean "better." It means you're obscuring those biases behind something else.
It didn’t work out so well at first. When I discussed these practices with teachers, I was constantly met with the same arguments: Our current grading system prepares students for the real world and if we alter it we’re doing our students a disservice; “smart kids” can handle changes to grading and can be internally motivated but “remedial” or “regular” students need external motivation; these changes just inflate grades; students will just game the system. Conversations were intellectual jousts that didn’t really change what teachers believed or did. Grading was so deeply intertwined with teachers’ belief systems and their daily practices that it wasn’t as simple as just explaining and justifying the practices. I realized that for teachers to become convinced of the effectiveness and the equitable impact of different grading practices, they had to try them out. Through a combination of persuasion, promises, and appeals, I found some teachers willing to test out these new grading practices.
When the system upholds these exact values, when people are taught through their experiences that this is what is expected, you are going to run into those arguments. Grading is not only "intertwined with teachers' belief systems," but they are intertwined in the very lessons that the system teaches us. If you cannot see that, you cannot understand the depth of the problem.
This is so fucking superficial.
Quote from a person named Lucy, who is an 18-year "veteran of teaching" (which is always a weird phrase, as if we're going to war):
“This challenges what I’ve learned to do as a teacher in terms of what I think students need to know, what they need to show back to me, and how to grade them. This feels really important, messy, and really uncomfortable. It is ’Oh my gosh, look what I’ve been doing!’ I don’t blame myself because I didn’t know any better. I did what was done to me. But now I’m in a place that I feel really strongly that I can’t do that anymore. I can’t use grading as a way to discipline kids any more. I look at what I have been doing and I have to do things differently.”
Hey, look. This is the exact thing I've mentioned. This book bends over backwards to blame teachers when a teacher themselves points out that they're perpetuating the system that was done to them. Weird for that to exist after so much "teachers have been doing this thing" without realising that it is a systemic issue. I swear, Feldman. Critically analyse yourself.
Chapter 1: What Makes Grading So Difficult to Talk About (and Even Harder to Change)?
Here's my answer to the chapter's question before engaging in the content: Hierarchies, the State, and indoctrination to believe schooling is at all necessary. Anyway.
And yet, teaching has never been so challenging and so embattled. Our students, who are increasingly diverse, with greater percentages of students whose first language is not English, and whose families live below the poverty line, need us to occupy so many roles beyond teacher: nurse, mentor, social worker, therapist, parent, cheerleader, tutor, and college advisor. We are responsible to adhere to regulations, laws, and directives under layers of bureaucracies. We often feel buffeted by ever-shifting political winds, pawns in complex political games in which people outside our schools argue over competing values and philosophies that affect what we do inside our classrooms: how and whether to teach certain topics (the perspectives of the Civil War, the genocide of Native Americans, evolution, global warming), read certain authors (J. D. Salinger, Toni Morrison), prepare for standardized exams (SBAC. PARCC, state graduation or end-of-course tests), and use certain materials (state-adopted textbooks, iPads and apps, laptops, smart boards). Solidarity and organizing among us seem less possible because of the waning influence and presence of teacher unions and the fragmentation of how we are trained: alternative certification programs, residencies, university programs, and fast-track programs that even threaten the very concept of teaching as a “profession.” Even the idea of a “school system” seems to be shifting beneath our feet into a “system of schools,” where cities agnostically support a portfolio of traditional public schools, charter schools, home schools, distance learning centers, and even private schools via vouchers and “educational savings accounts.” Salaries are rising but are still well below that of other professionals, and often are alone insufficient to support a family. Too many of us work within schools and communities where violence is a fact of life, adding to our own stress as well as our students’. We are guinea pigs in experiments testing how best to evaluate and motivate us, and we are judged by criteria that suggests ignorance—or worse, dismissal—of the challenges of our students and the complexity of our work. It is no surprise that as many as one out of three teachers report experiencing high levels of occupational stress. An obvious result is high turnover, a “revolving door” of teachers, particularly in schools that serve low-income communities, where teachers stay just long enough to hone their skills before leaving and being replaced by brand new teachers.
There are a lot of things here to unpack that are seemingly being swept under the rug in order to discuss how we can reform grading into a "more useful system" to "help students understand themselves," and a huge chunk of that can also be seen in the faux diversity this passage espouses.
If our students are "more diverse than ever" (failing to check some history: segregation of schooling, imperialist wars creating refugees and migrants, and the inherent eugenics of our school system... among others), then why are we relying upon a singular set of standards that are developed entirely within the context of one hegemonic culture?
If our students "need us to embody multiple roles," why are we not considering how schooling is a failure to our society and that the development of silos for children have segregated them from community?
What does it mean to "professionalise" a position that should've been a guide for learning? What does this mean to "professionalise" a position that relies upon culture to understand the role? What hierarchy does this create? (Here's a hint: It creates a hierarchy requiring respect of our students and families because our authority is superior to their own, but learning requires the community to work together. These hierarchies are antithetical to learning as a whole.)
If we're guinea pigs, what does that indicate about the care of the State? If anything, it should highlight that they do not care and that the role of school is not genuine learning, which we keep assuming it is. Don't work from that assumption; work from an assumption that the school is an indoctrination center that maintains the racial capitalist system. Because it is. Ask anyone who does not benefit from it and often finds themselves in direct conflict because of who they are.
Amid all of these pressures and expectations, with administrators and policymakers defining nearly every aspect of a teacher’s practice, we have one remaining “island of autonomy”: our grades. Grades are entirely within our control—the declaration of our professional judgment of student performance and the most concrete symbol of our authority and expertise.
This guy keeps saying "we" as if he is still a teacher and has never been anything other than a teacher; he's been involved in the bureaucratic nonsense involved in schools, including charter schools. If he recognised the position of teachers (most of whom will not move on from the classroom both because of limited upward mobility in the hierarchies that is inherent in any job and also because a lot of people prefer to stay in the classroom because it is where most of the direct change can be implemented), he'd understand that grades are not purely within our control.
The number of times that I've had a head of school, principal, whatever check my grades and change them based on their personal feelings about a student and their family (or, also, how influential that family is) is... astronomical. I watched the head of school for one place that I worked at change the grades of a child of a teacher because that teacher annoyed her. I've watched principals change grades of sports players in the US. I've seen grades get fluffed up because someone's family sent a lot of money or built a space.
We don't have control over those either. This is such a garbage argument. (Nor do I want control, but the point remains that he's just wrong.)
It's not teachers who implement these structures, btw. It's admin. And if admin truly believed that teachers should be "more coherent" across the board, they'd have done something about it long ago. But they didn't. Because they overwhelmingly think that these structures are fine unless it's harming them.
And even when the sanctity of a teacher’s grade is not so formally codified, administrators know that they tread on thin ice when they talk to teachers about their grading, potentially inviting formal complaints, union grievances, and even lawsuits. Grading is arguably the only aspect of schools in which the power dynamic between the teacher and her supervisor is inverted!
Amusingly, I tried looking for lawsuits around grades, and the one thing I found is a Professor who basically did a weird "teachers aren't childcare workers" complaint (we are, btw), some weird "Southerners are stupid" garbage, and supporting a teacher for not accepting late work because a student was "too accomplished" and "should deal with it."
Like... the whole thing is what the fuck.
And despite hunting for cases of teachers being sued over grades, the one thing I found was how two teachers were able to sue their district after being fired because of giving low grades and being targeted for it.
But how many of these cases go overlooked? How many unions don't do anything to support their teachers in these cases (which has happened)? This guy acts like this is commonplace, but it really isn't. (Along with the fact that teachers can be targeted for inappropriate grading but be released for different reasons.)
So guess who still has control, even in the "inverted" space.
Teachers often agonize over what grade to assign, are uncomfortable with how much grades matter, and face constant arguments, bargaining, and pleading by students and caregivers over grades.
Because grading is an arbitrary exercise that no one needs to be engaged in working with and doesn't do anything to help students improve. Start from that assumption because assuming we need grading answers none of the questions being presented.
Maybe we struggle with discussing grading because we have very little experience doing so. Grading and measurement is rarely if ever included in teacher preparation programs or in-school professional development. As a result, the majority of teachers are left on their own to decide how to grade and why and are unaware of the research on effective grading practices.
First, maybe it's because grading is an entirely pointless exercise that could be thrown away tomorrow with no real impact. There's no reason for it.
Second, if it's not discussed in our PD or preparation programs, maybe it's because grading is so fucking arbitrary and something that we assume people learn through experience as a student. It's a system we perpetuate on children because it was done to us.
Like schooling.
Despite this complete lack of training and support with how to grade, teachers’ grading policies and practices aren’t arbitrary. We apply our professional expertise and experiences and carefully deliberate over what assignments and behaviors we include in the grade and what we exclude, the relative weight of those assignments and behaviors, and the magnitude of consequences, rewards, incentives, and disincentives. And yet, each teacher makes very different choices. If we choose to award points to students for being on time, raising their hands to contribute ideas, for working collaboratively, or for turning in work by the deadline, we believe that these skills are important in life and that a grade should reflect performance in these skills. If we instead prioritize that students learn the academic content, perhaps we deemphasize or exclude those “soft skills” from the grade. If we want students to learn responsibility, we allocate a large portion of the grade to students’ homework. If we believe that our grades are an important way to distinguish the top students, we grade on a curve. Teachers can even disagree on what makes a grade “fair.” Most teachers believe that students who try should not fail regardless of whether they actually learn (Brookhart et al., 2016), but other teachers believe the opposite: that fairness is honestly reporting academic performance regardless of effort. Because each teacher’s grading system is virtually unregulated and unconstrained, a teacher’s grading policies and practices reveal how she defines and envisions her relationship to students, what she predicts best prepares them for success, her beliefs about students, and her self-concept as a teacher. That’s why challenges to our grading practices don’t just offend our professional judgment; they can invoke an emotional and psychological threat.
If we're all making different choices, it literally is arbitrary. That is the definition of arbitrary. You literally defined arbitrary. I hate this so much.
As I researched and learned more about the equitable practices in this book, I had the same experience as Jillian: feelings of guilt, shame, and anger. How could I have not seen the faults in our traditional system, the ways many of our current grading and assessment practices harm the most vulnerable students? Throughout my teaching career, I created the best curriculum I could, built the most positive relationships with students possible, but were my efforts compromised, or even undermined, when I graded? That can’t be, can it?
Why are you asking a useful question ("How could I have not seen the faults in our traditional system?") and then running as far as you can get from actually answering it? Reform the traditional system is a shitty answer; it's not even critically engaging with the system. It's just assuming the system is correct (it's not), but we've done it wrong.
With each new piece of evidence and information that contradicts a belief, we have to make more significant changes to our expanded web of belief, each time rejecting the new information or accepting it while limiting its validity so that it impacts our web as little as possible.
Okay, so he'll talk about webs of belief but won't apply this to himself. He does it with regards to "extra credit," but he's still operating under the assumption that "grades are necessary."
Which means he's run into evidence showing that grades are harmful and has discarded it in favour of a system that still unnecessarily ranks and orders students and is still arbitrary (because the criteria, even if "agreed upon" by everyone in a school, will be arbitrarily determined).
In the face of persuasive and nearly incontrovertible evidence that our current grading practices are harmful and ineffective and that other practices are more accurate, equitable, and motivational, you may dismiss or marginalize that evidence.
Joe, why is it that you're focusing on equity when that concept doesn't imply justice or liberation? Also, all grading is still harmful.
Finally, with the stubborn persistence of the achievement gap, we can no longer implement equitable practices in some areas of our schools—responsive classrooms, alternative disciplinary procedures, diverse curriculum—but meanwhile preserve our inequitable grading. Although a handful of authors have addressed grading, there hasn’t been discussion of grading through an equity lens—how grading is a critical element to affirmatively promote equity, to stop rewarding students because of their wealth, privilege, environment, or caregivers’ education and to prevent us from punishing students for their poverty, gaps in education, or environment. Traditional grading practices perpetuate our achievement and opportunity gaps and improved grading practices promote objective assessment of academic mastery, transparent expectations, growth mindsets, a focus on learning instead of points, and student agency—all key ingredients to serve diverse learners and create culturally responsive classrooms.
Losing my mind here. Grading is still going to perpetuate injustice, even if you "make it more equitable" (whatever the fuck that means). The criteria selected are still going to reflect either the hegemonic culture or the openness of the hegemonic culture to "accepted" cultural practices of everyone else. It will still rank skills based on importance; it will still incorporate patriarchy and whiteness in the systems. It'll still be ableist and marginalised disabled people.
Like... there is nothing you can do to retain grading in any way because it is a harmful practice. It will continue to uphold systems but do so under "nice" framing.
Chapter 2: A Brief History of Grading
Grading is part of the “grammar of schools” (Tyack & Cuban, 1995), a concept so embedded in our idea of what a school is that it seems silly to question it. What seems more foundational to everyone’s school experience than getting grades?
Literally should be an indicator to start questioning the entirety of grading rather than reasons for reforming it. But we're not going to be doing that, it seems.
Teachers have always given feedback to students about their learning, all the way back to Socrates and his pupil Plato (as well as God to Abraham). But the introduction of our current grading system is a relatively recent phenomenon, borne out of a particular American political, economic, and social context.
This is a fun way to justify that some form of grading should exist because it is "feedback." Grading isn't feedback. It doesn't provide any avenue for learning and determining how to improve; you also can't sufficiently fight back against grades because they have no real standards or criteria to adhere to.
Because they're arbitrary.
We’ll begin our history at the end of the 1800s. Prior to that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the family was primarily responsible for educating children, with schools serving a relatively small role. Relatively few children attended any formalized school—around half of white children ages fifteen to nineteen, and far fewer children of color for both legal and nonlegal reasons—and the school year averaged only seventy-eight days (Snyder, 1993).
Which half of the white children? Because what you'll notice is that it was overwhelmingly a space for white boys and no one else. You can't just say "white children" when it's clearly not true.
Overwhelmingly, this guy isn't actually asking questions to any of the assumptions he presents. He's acting as if he is, but it's all just a list with extra details. Anyway, he starts off by listing the five trends of what changed schools (does not highlight any pushback that most certainly took place and does not question the fact that business owners and politicians were lobbying for these changes. The five trends are:
- The rise of manufacturing
- Progressive educators (but only mentions John Dewey, the crown prince of teaching programs everywhere, ugh)
- Migration and immigration (no mention of how this was also associated with eugenics)
- Intelligence testing and categorization (no mention of this was also associated with eugenics either)
- Behaviorism (which includes a discussion about Little Albert and only says it "would be prohibited today" and not that the experiment conducted was child abuse)
Now that schools served many more students with a much wider diversity of backgrounds, languages, ethnicities, and incomes, there were two fundamental shifts in the purposes and design of schools. First, whereas schools had always been responsible for acculturating students, the one-room schools had served a relatively homogenous group of students from families deeply rooted in the community. Now, schools were expected to “Americanize” the diverse, unruly mass of immigrants, rural transplants, and the poor by preparing them with the discipline and habits that factories prized in its assembly-line laborers.
Why does he use the phrase "unruly mass of immigrants?" If he's attempting sarcasm, it's inappropriate; if he's not, it makes it sound as if he agrees that migrants "need to be civilised" or "need to be assimilated" instead of actively supporting a genuinely multicultural society.
By the way, schools cannot do that in the ways that we "allow" them to.
Secondly, charged with preparing students to meet the needs of the industrial and commercial world, schools could do so most efficiently if they matched each student with the appropriate curriculum based on the student’s ability—the Progressives’ vision of schools-as-training-ground. Equipping each student with the skills most appropriate to their intellectual ability would create the smoothest and most successful transition into the work world, and this would lead to economic success for the country.
Hey, Progressives? Want to deal with the inherent eugenics structures apparent in your history? No?
If a student did not possess the intellectual capacity to succeed in a more rigorous academic track, then to not match that student with a vocational track would be a waste of school resources and would frustrate the child, perhaps leading to dropping out and depriving the commercial world of the student’s contribution.
This guy just states stuff as fact without commentary. It's really annoying.
It’s also important to keep in mind that schools’ new commitment to evaluating students and sorting them occurred alongside a legal sorting out of many African American students, who were constitutionally mandated to attend separate and unequal schools.
This is true but... If you only saw the segregation of Black and white schools? You missed a lot. Because there were schools for the "feebleminded" (which often targeted poor migrants) and residential schools. They were trying to segregate all of the people that they saw as undesirable.
It’s easy to see how these ideas—schools as sorting and acculturating mechanisms in service to efficient and appropriate preparation for workforce employment—remain pervasive 100 years later. Tracking in our schools persists despite evidence of uneven pedagogical benefit and its discriminatory result. Students of low income, black and brown ethnicity, and those with special education needs are disproportionately placed in vocational and lower track classes, and those classes have been consistently found to have lower academic expectations and more traditional and less engaging pedagogy. In addition, the largest industries (currently, computer technology) constantly exert pressure on schools to provide more appropriately trained employees for entry and lower-skilled positions. Schools continue to serve as assimilating and socializing agents, and though twenty-first century industries often demand more advanced skills than the assembly-line factory owners a century ago, in many classrooms, we continue to place a premium on punctuality, quiet attention, and following directions, the same behaviors desired of students over a century ago.
First, "black and brown ethnicity?" Feels really off because it's conflating ethnicity and race.
Second, all of the state-supported pedagogies have little choice but to be "less engaging." Children in vocational tracks can be engaged in those tracks because they genuinely enjoy something in it; they're not inherently bad, but the fact that they segregate students into vocational or academic is. (This pairs well with my disdain for segregating subjects.)
As we mentioned earlier, prior to the turn of the century, before the large influx of families to urban centers and the rise of large schools to accommodate their children, the one-room school served few students and the teacher was a familiar member of the tight-knit community. It therefore should come as no surprise that communicating student progress looked very different than today. In most cases, the teacher would present oral reports or written narratives to families, perhaps during a visit to a student’s home, to describe how students were performing in certain skills like penmanship, reading, or arithmetic (Guskey & Bailey, 2001). These reports helped to determine areas for the teacher’s further instruction for the student, readiness for apprenticeships, or eligibility for higher education (Craig, 2011).
Is there a reason that we're acting like this is an impossibility? Is there a reason that we're acting like grading was given to us as something "easy to use" and "easy to communicate" complex information? We act as if this is an old technique, but it's something we can still do today and often are still made to do: parent-teacher conferences. I would rather communicate with parents more frequently than be like "Here's a paper and it says your student has an A."
Are you not going to ask the question you should be asking? "Were grades utilised to perpetuate alienation among members in a school, isolating people and breaking down local community connections?" Because that's what I'd be asking based on the history you're presenting.
With compulsory education laws, larger schools, and the emphasis on efficiency, schools had to develop more succinct and simplified descriptions of student progress. No longer could educators use the clumsy “unscientific” narrative reporting—it was time consuming and too unstandardized. Instead, there was pressure to identify a standardized system of communicating student achievement, not only for bureaucratic ease within the school for sorting purposes, but also for external audiences—colleges or employers. Letter grades (A-F) had already been in place in some colleges and universities since the early 1900s to signify a student’s achievement in a course relative to others in the course—called “norm-referenced grading”—and secondary schools began to use the letters well (Cronbach, 1975, cited in Schneider, 2014). Because, as the thinking went, intelligence is distributed across a population with a normal distribution (more familiarly known as a “bell curve”) just like height or weight, then grades are more objective when they reflect that curve within any population. Schools therefore superimposed the normal distribution across a student group and labeled them by letter according to that distribution. By the mid-1900s, a majority of secondary schools used A-F grading and assigned grades according to the normal curve distribution.
Part II: The Case for Change
Chapter 3: How Traditional Grading Stifles Risk-Taking and Supports the “Commodity of Grades”
And yet, twenty-first century classrooms continue to use the grading systems of the early twentieth century even though, as Marzano (2000) writes, there is “no meaningful research reports to support it.”
Interesting that Feldman fails to acknowledge that grading as a whole has very little support, and it doesn't really matter if you grade "more equitably." It's still an extrinsic motivator that most people do not like and feel stifled by, regardless of if it's "nice" grading or not. (I, personally, have always had loose grading policies! No punishments for late work, a lot of space for mistakes... and still it sets children up for failure and frustration. However, in places where I could drop the grades (like scouts or tutoring), children I worked with were far more likely to engage in deeper learning.
Because they weren't worried about a fucking grade of any sort. Feedback meant a lot more to them.
We can see that each category captures a range of information about students. The Tests and Projects category might describe what the student has learned about the academic content of the class—whether she has learned to use the FOIL method to multiply binomials or understands the water cycle or can analyze and critique a rhetorical argument. Evaluating this type of student performance is relatively objective and straightforward: A student either knows the water cycle or she doesn’t. By contrast, categories like Class Activities and Participation are more subjective and undefined. Although some subjectivity may exist in evaluating academic categories like Tests and Projects, it is nothing compared to the significant subjectivity of evaluating these nonacademic categories. What is the right way for students to behave in a class? What does it mean to show sufficient “respect”? How much listening is good enough? Each teacher likely has her own unique definition and criteria of how these categories are evaluated and entered into the grade.
This is a lot all at once, and the part that he takes as being objective isn't. So, let's start:
First, "Tests and Projects" are not entirely objective aspects of grading. In an economics course, there is rarely a "correct" answer (and any economist who says there is really should be questioned highly). There are justifications for answers, but a lot of economics teachers will often grade by the "correct" answers in books rather than considering whether or not the student built a cohesive case.
Which is also somewhat subjective. The same thing can be true of history. When people ask for "causes," what we can give them are often best guesses followed by justifications. Some answers are more correct than others (based on available evidence), but there are also history teachers who will enable Bad Versions of History (e.g., States Rights history instead of a focus on slavery). How does this impact students who actually engage with the topic? They will be marked down.
I've also seen English classes run by teachers using misogynist methods. Grading (assumed) girls down on their work because they view it as inherently inferior. Tests and projects are not sufficient.
Second, while he's correct on the subjective nature on Participation, this doesn't take into consideration any of the reasons why teachers end up tacking it on there. Same goes for "Class Activities." I have literally been given absurd rules on how much I had to grade. Sometimes those categories get tacked on to meet the absurd quotas we're given.
Chapter 5: Traditional Grading Demotivates and Disempowers
Our final perspective on the impact of traditional grading is how those practices harm students not because of a mathematical calculation or variances from teacher to teacher, but because of how students psychologically understand and react to their grades. Like all of us, our students want to accomplish those challenges we put in front of them, to feel confident and competent, and to be motivated for the next academic challenge. How does traditional grading support or erode these traits in our students? How does our inherited approach make those dispositions harder for students to sustain and more difficult for us to support?
These are all good questions and should be the minimum starting point for anyone discussing schooling.
Third, when each teacher has a different system of grading, students don’t know whether any given teacher’s system will benefit them or be fair. Imagine getting a new job and being told that you will be evaluated on every task and expectation, by different supervisors with different approaches, and that evaluation scores will be combined in complex formulae unique to each supervisor. And on top of that, you’ll be responsible to understand and remember each supervisor’s unique approaches, and if you forget or confuse those distinct expectations you’ll be penalized. It’s as if we wanted to create for our students the most stressful, disempowering, and least desirable work environments imaginable!
There's less math involved, but I definitely remember working at a big department store where that was literally what happened. The whole structure of school (in this capacity) is precisely the same shit that managers will do. You can do something brilliantly and someone will still punish you for it. Because work isn't about doing well (and neither is school); it's about following instructions and orders and obeying.
Carol Dweck’s (2006) “growth mindset”
Note to self: Come back to this point on its own.
Chapter 6: A New Vision of Grading
Based on how traditional grading undermines our best hopes, the most obvious conclusion is that we shouldn’t have single-letter grades, and maybe no grades at all. They add uncertainty, hide our expectations, confuse everyone involved, fragment a school’s expectations, add stress, and pull attention away from true learning. But for most of us, the reality is that grades are not going to be eliminated. Our society’s understanding of school and the decisions our institutions need to make mean that we will continue to rely on grades in much the same manner as the institutions of the Industrial Revolution: as efficient ways to describe student performance.
So if we can't do the thing that would be best (no grades!) in the place where it would be best to do it because society understands the system differently... then... What is the point of "reimagining grading?" I really don't understand how you can have a "new vision" while you're basically saying that we shouldn't put the effort into undoing the harmful system we've been using.
It's really bizarre. And considering this book was written by someone who worked in charters... which could actually do far more to 'revolutionise' the grading scene (if they weren't so hellbent on being centers of social disadvantage, redistribution of resources from the poor to the wealthy, and overt corruption, in many cases). Why not be part of that movement?
Probably because it wouldn't sell books and charter programs (and professional development courses!).
Part III: Equitable Grading Practices
Chapter 7: Practices That Are Mathematically Accurate
Pillar I: Accuracy
This is the topic of this chapter, and whew. It's going to be a joy because I hate people who talk about "pillars" in education, which is largely because everyone I've ever met who talked this way and worked in schools? Complete piece of shit who didn't know what they were talking about, so it really makes me hesitant immediately. Anyway.
But behind this quest for finely tuned accuracy, there’s an even deeper assumption, perhaps even a hope: The more math we use to arrive at a grade, the more objective it will be. For many of us, more math = more fair, and so we imbue our grade book with mathematical authority. We believe that the math of our grading software purges our grades of any unfairness, cleanses our grades of the potential stains of subjectivity or bias, and shields them (and us) against criticism from students, caregivers, and administrators. When asked why a student got a certain grade, we can respond simply, “That’s just how the math worked out,” as if the grade was out of our hands. We feel a comfort and a relief knowing that we’re just entering student data; it’s the grading program that awards the grades.
Never have I heard that justification from a teacher. Ever. The justification is always backwards and attributed to student ability and motivation, never math. Did he ever talk to the teachers at the charters he worked at? Or did he enjoy building up all the strawmen to destroy? I'd be curious to hear from them.
There’s no research that finds that failing grades motivate students, and plenty of research that has found the opposite—that a student who receives 0s and Fs becomes less motivated, not more motivated.
True, but is there research on achieving passing grades? And how was that research, if done, framed? Did it look at whether or not the students cared about the A? Or other external factors? Genuinely curious.
Starch, D. (1913). Reliability and distribution of grades. Science, 38(983), 630–636.
Starch, D. (1915). Can the variability of marks be reduced? School and Society, 2(33), 242–243.
These two things get referenced a bit, and I'm curious.
Chapter 8: Practices That Are Mathematically Accurate (Continued)
Most of what I'm getting out of this book is the failure to acknowledge eugenics in schools, an inability to understand what underlies a grading system, and a conflation of "accuracy" with "makes people feel better."
Overall, this whole thing is an argument to stop grading, but he doesn't get that.
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