On September 25, 2018, the Orlando Sentinel released an article outlining the story of a teacher who claims she was fired from Port St. Lucie K-8 school, apparently for not giving students 50% for assignments or assessments that were not completed by her students. After 17 years of teaching, Tirado took a stance against the zero zeroes policy and was subsequently released from duty. You can find the article here: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/audience/david-whitley/os-ae-florida-teacher-fired-for-giving-zeros-david-whitley-20180925-story.html
On the day of her resignation, Tirado wrote the following message on her whiteboard: “Kids— I love you and wish you the best in life! I have been fired because I refuse to give you a 50% for not handing anything in. Love, Mrs. Tirado.”
The next day, the district responded by explaining that the grading policy was not, in fact, the reason that Tirado was fired. A spokesperson for the district said, "Ms.Tirado was released from her duties as an instructor because her performance was deemed sub-standard and her interactions with students, staff, and parents lacked professionalism and created a toxic culture on the school’s campus” (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-news-florida-teacher-fired-no-zero-policy-20180926-story.html). They also explained that she wasn't fired for this particular stand that she took, but that there were other reasons as well.
Ten days after her last day at Port St. Lucie, she reflected about the responses she had received, and largely, remained staunch in her original position. Though she acknowledged that teachers “provide numerous attempts to get the work collected so they can give a child a grade,” she also pointed out that our traditional grading scales have "been around for a very long time.”
After seeing her story circulating around social media, I posted a quick response that essentially disregarded her points, claiming that she was simply in the wrong. The responses I got didn't surprise me one bit; nevertheless, I'd like to address them one-by-one.
#1 - Zero work = Zero grade.
First of all, Mrs. Tirado's biggest flaw is that she is essentially being asked to still give out the equivalent of a zero, just in a slightly different form. The problem with the "traditional" grading system is that there is one "degree" of A (from 90% to 100%), one "degree" of B (80-89%), and all the way down the line. That is, until you get down to the F, which has six degrees (from 0% all the way to 59%). Is there a reason that we need six degrees of failure and only four degrees of success? We must remember that these are arbitrary percentages, which we fallible humans once assigned meaning to (and haven't seemed to question since).
My biggest criticism with this line of thinking, however, is that it seems to equate work with success. If zero work = zero grade, does 100% work = 100% grade? Does work automatically equate to learning? Clearly, students can try their absolute hardest but still come up short. My perspective is that we should be measuring learning, not work. Conversely, no evidence of learning does not necessarily mean that no learning has taken place.
#2 - “Kids need to be preparing for real life.”
Though I do acknowledge that part of school is to prepare the next generation of citizens, it's also important to acknowledge that they are not there yet. If their ability to eat depended on their grades, this would be more analogous. Additionally, students' brain development plays a significant role in this argument as well. The frontal lobe, the area of the brain responsible for the understanding of actions and consequences, doesn't develop until the late twenties. When we are speaking about the "real world," we are speaking about adulthood, and kids, by definition, aren't adults. They are incapable of even thinking like adults.
Even still, in the real world, employees are evaluated based on outcomes, not simply the work they put in. My wife was in sales, and the higher-ups at her job were not interested in how hard she tried to sell advertising; they were interested in the sales themselves. In other words, though her effort was encouraged and appreciated, she was not able to keep her job without actually enrolling clients in the desired services. If she could meet her monthly goals without putting in much time or energy, she would still be compensated for her achievements just as someone who spent twice the hours at work to reach the same objective. Similarly, teachers, like employers, should be interested in outcomes, not effort alone.
#3 - "We shouldn't be rewarding kids for not trying."
This argument makes the assumption that they didn’t want to do the work, or are somehow choosing not to. The longer I teach, the more kids I see who have factors in their lives that simply prevent them from fulfilling their full potential in school. Some students are homeless; others are physically or sexually abused; more still have mental illness that prevents them from doing their schoolwork. Certainly there are students who also have no such afflictions, but one must recognize that grading policies such as this one affect all classes of individuals, regardless of the outside factors affecting them.
Do teachers sometimes bend the rules for students who they feel need it most? Of course. Regardless, the handbook policy gives them a baseline for decision making; it's the default position. When teachers feel that they are put in a morally-questionable position, the standard policy is what they fall back on for determining the right course of action. Unfortunately, the number of students affected by trauma is outgrowing the number of times that teachers feel justified in bending the rules. This means that it's time to change the rules.
To be clear, a 50% is still a failing grade in this scenario; it's just not a failure to the extent that a student may not be able to recover. Even teachers in Tirado's own school acknowledged that they had witnessed students who receive a few zeroes just give up on the entire semester because they are facing such mathematically insurmountable odds (https://www.wndu.com/content/news/School-responds-to-no-0-policy-that-resulted-in-teachers-firing-494527621.html). So again, a 50% is not a reward; it's just not a failure to the sixth degree.
#4 - "We've always done it like this. Why change it?"
No. Just, no. This is a textbook logical fallacy (an argument from tradition, to be specific). Just because we've always done things a certain way does not mean that we should continue to do them that way. If this was logically valid and sound, then we would have never established freedom of speech or abolished slavery. We need not explore this one further.
#5 - "Effort should be a large factor in grades."
The biggest problem here is that including behavioral objectives in an academic grade leads to grade inflation or deflation. Students who work hard but don't actually learn the material get their grades padded by extra credit or sympathy points. Conversely, students who often don't turn in work can sometimes master learning targets on a regular basis, but their poor habits or home lives get in the way of proving it.
A grade should be a reflection of what a student knows or the skills that he or she can perform. It's as simple as that. Grades reflect learning. The more factors we throw into a student's grade, the more clouded it becomes. If we say that grades should represent a student's learning and their effort, what's to prevent us from adding in additional desirable factors such as moral character or physical fitness? I think most would agree that these are important in preparing citizens for future success or well-being, but they should be reported in some other way. This is my argument for reporting effort separately from the academic grade.
Plus, there are benefits to reporting them separately. As teachers, it's a huge red flag when a student's effort is tremendously high and his or her academic grade is dishearteningly low. It's true that in most cases, the two are positively correlated, but seeing this disparity may be a signal that the student has a specific learning disability. Any edge we can get in identifying these problems as soon as possible is valuable. Additionally, by passing on inaccurately inflated or deflated academic reports from year-to-year, we are doing both teachers and students a disservice.
Disclaimer
Clearly, I think Mrs. Tirado should shoulder the brunt of the blame here, but the school isn't free from responsibility either. Port St. Lucie took a stand to correct a wrong that's been a much-needed paradigm shift in education for decades. Nevertheless, they've taken only a half-step in the right direction. Rather than shifting to standards-based grading, a system which sets learning targets on a rubric from 1-4 and does away with points and letter grades entirely, the school appears to have tried to correct the six shades of failure without taking the other steps to reframe assessment practices around meeting objectives, rather than earning points. My contention is that had they simply made the full transition, they may have avoided the backlash of conflating the foundational principles of mastery grading with the numerical expressions of traditional grading. Thus, the school is also at fault, but to a significantly lesser degree than Tirado.
I remember myself as a new teacher, and the first project of the year for my students was an introductory speech worth 100 points. I justified this because it was about the easiest potential topic possible (themselves), because I saw public speaking as a valuable skill, and because I gave my students a chance to redo the speech as long as they first presented their speech in front of the class. For the vast majority of my students, I saw favorable results; they conquered the task and earned an easy grade to begin the year. But there were always a handful of students who simply refused to do the speech, some of whom later told me that they were simply terrified of standing in front of the class and exposing themselves to their peers in this manner. All of those who refused to give the speech and subsequently receives zeroes went on to fail the first quarter of class, and most of them failed first semester.
It wasn't until this article was released that I began to truly question my former speech policy and the zeroes I had once felt justified in handing out. Did the students deserve to fail their entire first semester because they succumbed to America's number one phobia? Is giving speeches to over 25 peers even a practical skill that most students should master to consider themselves prepared for the workforce? Most importantly, was I doing right by my students by enforcing this policy?
The answer, of course, is no. And neither is Tirado. Stay tuned for my next post about standards-based grading and why it is the superior system for reporting student grades, progress, and achievement!
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