After reading Mr. Schneider’s opinion piece on standards-based grading, the system that his daughter’s school is employing, I realize that educators in my position have a lot of work to do in educating parents on the intentions of standards-based grading systems. There is clearly still a disconnect between educators and parents in helping them understand why we’ve abandoned the A-F system for this new and different way of expressing our students’ learning. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” seems to be the line of thinking. Well, my friends, it is “broke.” Let me tell you why.
I taught for eight years in traditional public schools in Illinois, schools which used a traditional grading system, and I found the A-F system largely satisfactory. But when my district proposed a switch to a standards-based system, I started looking into the research on it, which I found intriguing and convincing, even causing me to question my own grading practices. When I moved to Indianapolis to work at Christel House Academy, a public charter school on the southside of Indianapolis, I got to see the system in action and how it works to help our population: mostly poor, inner-city, minority students. After seeing the positive impact that the grading system helped to cultivate in my new students, I came to realize that I was doing some of my former students a disservice.
Working within the A-F system, for the most part, students who I thought should have succeeded, based on the work that they turned in, actually did well in my class. Students who didn’t turn in work or behaved badly generally failed, and the assumption on my part was that they did not deserve to pass. Regardless, some of these students were profoundly intelligent and even demonstrated some evidence of the capability to master the objectives I’d set before them, though perhaps not through the formal means that I’d required. For example, some students could verbalize some truly deep and critical thinking about the texts we’d read, but they’d refuse to turn in any written essay. In my mind, their inability to follow through with my requirements demonstrated their unworthiness to pass the course. In reality, I had been thinking about what assessment should mean in the wrong ways, much like Mr. Schneider.
What are standards?
First of all, grades have to represent what a student knows and can do. If we can agree on that point, then we have a philosophical basis in moving forward with the discussion. If we don’t, please read my last piece, which argues why this should be the case.
When Mr. Schneider says that his daughter’s grades “don’t address a specific class or subject,” he’s simply misinterpreting what standards actually are. The standards are the objectives, skills, or knowledge that students are required to master and that teachers use to determine the grade for the course. States have had standards for decades, but some teachers fail to actually assess the skills based directly on those standards. However, it’s likely that his daughter’s teachers have been assessing their students on state standards, or perhaps the Common Core, throughout her entire schooling experience; Mr. Schneider likely never felt the need to look into the specifics of why his children were earning the grades that they were because he was satisfied with what he saw. Like most parents, he cared only about the final product: the letter grade on the report card.
But the fact is that a letter grade on a report card tells you almost nothing about the reason why the student is earning the grade he or she is. The letter grade includes so many factors, including aspects of behavior that could easily inflate or deflate the grade. For example, I once had a teacher who rewarded bringing in class supplies like tissues and hand sanitizer with extra credit points. If Mr. Schneider sees an A in science, he is likely satisfied with that response, although it could potentially mean that his daughter was able to bring in enough Kleenex for the entire class. If he, however, sees a C, D, or F as the final grade, he will probably need to ask why. In a traditional grading system, the retort may be something to the effect of, “Susie isn’t turning in her work,” or “Susie failed the last test,” just like I once had, with no regard for the specific skills that Susie is actually struggling with. By giving this type of feedback, the teacher trying to inform Mr. Schneider of his daughter’s shortcomings has actually given almost no valuable information to help explain where the child actually struggles in class.
Contrarily, if a teacher states that Susie is not passing English class because there are specific standards that she is having difficulty with, then we’ve done both the parent and the student a great service. By saying, “Susie is struggling with describing how characters in a story respond to major events and how characters affect the plot, as well as using information gained from the illustrations and words in a print or digital text to demonstrate understanding of its characters, setting, or plot,” this teacher, and moreover, the student herself can likely tell him what she should be learning, where she is in her learning, and what she needs to do to reach the objective. The idea that Mr. Schneider has “no idea how [his] child is doing in school” because “none of these grades correspond to the ‘A to F scale’” is patently false, and actually backward; the A to F scale is actually far less informative. The standards-based reports that Mr. Schneider is receiving on his daughter’s progress are both descriptive and prescriptive, while the traditional letter grades are neither.
What is growth mindset?
Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success changed the way I think entirely about any mental or physical challenges that one could hope to learn or accomplish. The premise of the book, essentially, is that any skill can be learned and improved upon with time and pointed practice. The book is full of examples of Dweck both showing how superstars like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods came to be ultra-successful through hours upon hours of practice and how normal people were able to positively transform skills that they thought were impossible to improve through one simple mechanism: they believed that they could get better and acted as if that were true. People will often exhibit a “fixed mindset” by saying things like: “I’m just bad at math” or “I’m not an artist.” This thinking is a pathway to shoulder shrugs and avoiding any honest attempt to get better at that given challenge.
The pictures above are self-portraits for adults who exhibited an admittedly fixed mindset by claiming, “I can’t draw.” Their “before” drawings (on the left) show that this was once true, but just five days after entering an intensive class, their drawings showed remarkable improvement.
Mr. Schneider criticized the standards-based scale (Emerging → Developing → Meeting → Exceeding the standard) for being too kind and gentle, and in fact, “dripping with optimism.” My contention is that the standards-based scale is a direct reflection of a growth mindset. Simply because a student has not demonstrated mastery of a standard does not mean that he or she will not be able to with time and pointed practice. It is a subtle shift, but Mr. Schneider is correct in identifying the lean toward positivity. As he puts it, we are “presuming every child is on the road to excellence.” Hidden in this sarcasm is the assumption that being more pessimistic would somehow inspire students to be more successful in terms of meeting standards. The reductio here, of course, leads to absurdity. If this is true, we should rank our kids on an A to C scale (with A meaning “Accomplished” and C meaning “Complete failure with no potential for improvement”) and see how far that gets us. I’ll take a grading scale, and, moreover, a teacher who is dripping with optimism any day of the week because an optimistic teacher never gives up on his or her students, and always remains more demanding than the complacent one who has admitted that a child can’t or won’t learn.
The shocking part of Mr. Schneider’s article, however, is that he actually seems to agree with me. At one point, he takes a slight detour and questions, “Isn’t every human being constantly developing?” Well, yes, and standards-based grading actually acknowledges and rewards this fact. This seems to be a tacit admission, on his part, that growth mindset is valid. What he doesn’t seem to acknowledge is that the grading scale he is denouncing is measuring students up to the standard appropriate for the child at the given age range and difficulty level. So, clearly, we are all developing throughout our lifetimes, but we also are expected to evaluate our students against the appropriately-leveled expectations based on their grade level. Standards-based grading ensures that teachers do this.
Where Standards-Based Grading Misses the Mark
While I do think that the grading system that we use at Christel House is the best and most accurate way of expressing what students know and are able to do, I recognize that it does have its shortcomings.
For one, it does not reflect behavioral objectives (punctuality, respect, effort, etc.) in the academic grade, which Mr. Schneider alluded to in his article. He admonished his eldest daughter’s school for accepting late work for 90% credit (I’d argue it should be 100%; see my other article for why) and only giving a 40% on work not turned in. While it’s true that we don’t directly punish students for poor behaviors by marking them down on their academic grades, it is true that positive behaviors are rewarded through academic grades. If you have a growth mindset as a student, then continuing to practice the skills you need, you will eventually get better at them, which will then be reflected in your grades. But again, the academic grade should not be clouded (inflated or deflated) by the behaviors that our students exhibit.
The most prominent shortcoming of standards-based grading, however, is that someone as intelligent as Mr. Schneider can so easily misinterpret the intentions of the methodology. It takes a great deal of research, professional development, and interest in the topic to truly understand why it’s better for teachers and students. To the average parent, overturning the entire system in favor of a strange new approach seems fruitless. But if the strongest counter-argument is “We’ve always done it this way, so we should keep doing it,” then I propose that we need to take a new approach, an approach that actually measures and communicates what a student knows and can do in relation to a standard.
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