During the Board of Education discussion on Grading for Equity Tuesday night, I heard Board President Phil Kim say something incorrect that bears a closer look. He said, “Oh, Grading for Equity — that’s the same thing as Standards-Based Grading.”
Unfortunately, this is a misunderstanding. While Grading for Equity clearly grew out of Standards-Based Grading (SBG), the two approaches could not be further apart. For one thing, SBG is rigorous. It’s focused on mastery. Grading for Equity is based on its own ideas about equity.
And in spite of staff claims about SFUSD teachers’ ignorance of these systems, I’m pretty well qualified to offer a technical critique of this kind of framework based on my seven-year journey through its much more rigorous precursor SBG. It’s worth understanding why this kind of system holds some appeal from an educational standpoint, even as it is completely unsustainable over the longer term.
Starting back in 2010, I became part of a nationwide working group of math teachers across North America who focused on adopting and adapting SBG to our real-world classrooms. Through our conversations — which took place through pseudonymous Twitter accounts, pseudonymous blogs, live and recorded podcasts, and in-person conferences and workshops, we focused on the practical and implementation aspects of teaching for mastery.
Through this work and these collaborations, a number of us (including me) became sought-after presenters on SBG at national and statewide math education conferences, workshops, and programs. I led workshops and taught other teachers what I had learned about how to make it workable.
The theory was that breaking down a course’s curriculum into a manageable checklist of discrete and masterable standards would improve access, equity, and outcomes. A course covers a body of knowledge to be mastered, but the state’s standards-based framework doesn’t clarify for students and parents exactly what a student needs to know and be able to do to be judged as crossing the threshold into a foundational level of genuine mastery. Students needed a way to understand what topics and skills needed to be mastered as well as what that level of mastery was objectively going to look like.
That foundational level of genuine mastery relied on a rubric. By my second year of SBG, I had refined my rubric to better communicate what this means to a learner, and I use the same rubric to this day. Students like understanding what points mean and where they come from.
But two things quickly became apparent to us all. The first was that mastery of academic standards was only a small fraction of what students needed to learn and be taught to adapt to this system. The second thing was that most students needed a lot of support in developing the metacognitive self-monitoring skills that would be necessary to assess their own understandings, both receptively (i.e., at the level of first hearing) and productively (i.e., what it takes to use that skill competently and with sufficient self-awareness to build upon it). For most kids, grades or scores are still simply a game of maximizing the number of points that seemed to them to have been arbitrarily assigned. While students were eager to improve their grades, they were often not open to changing — or even noticing — their work habits. In spite of having been in school for 10 or more years, few of them had a clear understanding of what a grade or a score actually meant.
So we threw ourselves into addressing this problem. It led us to deep conversations on how to teach students how to use the checklist and the rubric. They would need both direct and experiential instruction on how to use these tools. I created lessons on how to use the rubric to understand learning progressions and we all shared our experiences to refine our practice.
As experienced classroom teachers, none of us were surprised by any of this, though it clearly had not occurred to the curriculum or framework authors or state legislators. Teachers have decades of experience framing and reframing textbook topics or sequences to meet the needs of the unique human students sitting in front of us. Kids are not interchangeable machine parts. What works with one year’s cohort almost never works the same way with every subsequent cohort. No one approach works all the time with every student. Classroom teachers become masters of adaptation and improvisation.
Grading for Equity starts from a good intention but imposes its own bewildering maze of obligations onto teacher assessments and grade reporting.
A more urgent reality became obvious for those of us who teach in urban public schools — and that had to do with using this system at the scale of public schools. Unlike my private school colleagues, I teach anywhere from 150 to 180 students per year. That means that on any given day when two kids are absent in each of five class sections, that generates 10 new extra appointments for me. Five days a week, 38 weeks a year, these add up. This quickly became unsustainable.
So the first casualty was unlimited reassessments on any standard. Remediation and reassessment required me to use my unscheduled time to take on these new obligations. I had to create new assessments ahead of time for every reassessable learning target. Tutoring and reassessing started taking over lunchtimes, prep periods, and any other nook or cranny of unscheduled time I had. They were eating me alive. During years four and five, I thought about quitting teaching a lot.
A colleague in Brooklyn came up with an improvement — students would need to apply to reassess. The assessments reservation system required them to explain in email what they had done independently to improve their learning on a given skill. We put limits on the number of times a student could reassess. Three seemed reasonable.
The numbers were still killing me. Too many standards always led to a crush at the end of the semester or marking period. Updating the gradebook was a nightmare. Students lost their standards tracking checklists. The system became a goat rodeo.
The end of every marking period just broke me.
As with so many things, the system collapsed under the pandemic, though for me, it had broken down a few years earlier.
So where does this leave me now?
There were things in SBG that I valued and have hung onto, even though my assessment and grading practices have evolved. Using a clear, thoughtful rubric as the ground for teaching metacognitive self-monitoring and self-assessment was a game-changer.
Occasional retakes reinforce the development of new planning and practice habits
Giving partial credit for incorrect answers — even on a multiple choice test question — just made sense. Combining regular homework completion grades as the steady bass line through which students could accumulate points while they improved their work habits helped me to help them learn executive function. So did offering grace and flexibility under extraordinary circumstances. Teaching students how to write a professional-sounding business email to their teachers also helped prepare them for college and career realities.
But there are things in Grading for Equity that offend me. Some of what students are learning in high school is academic, to be sure, but a lot of it is practical or social learning for the world of adulting. We teach the whole child. Zeros in the gradebook represent no work performed. They’re also reversible because these are children, and children are learning how to fit into society and become citizens. Late fees are motivating. Grades should reflect whole-child learning, not just an arbitrary subset of characteristics.
Grading for Equity starts from a good intention but imposes its own bewildering maze of obligations onto teacher assessments and grade reporting.
Its absurd restrictions and distortions on assessment and reporting violate both the teachers contract and the Education Code.
In my view, its misleading portraits of student learning jeopardize teenagers’ actual preparedness to launch into the adult worlds of college and career readiness.
And it does all of this while creating an unsustainable additional pile of extra work for teachers.
Grading for Equity is exactly the kind of feel-good academic shell game that SFUSD has become addicted to and needs to cut itself off from.
SFUSD’s teaching and learning community deserves better.