College and career readiness (CCR) is San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD) major goal and benchmark for high schools, but there seems to be a lot of confusion around what CCR really requires.
One of the most important CCR goals that high school teachers focus on is helping students develop a clear understanding of accountability in their learning. This is a kind of experiential learning — it doesn’t come from top-down district policy. While SFUSD and the Board of Education have the authority to mandate a specific grading scale, it would be both illegal and developmentally unwise for them to try and impose some kind of uniform grading “policies” on teachers — particularly the kinds we are hearing discussed, including the failed initiative known as “equitable grading.”
As pioneering developmental psychologist Jean Piaget showed us, all children — including teens — learn how reality works through a repetitive cycle of trial and error plus hypothesis refinement. Children make choices, observe the results of those choices, and refine their theories in light of the results they obtain from their choices. This is the experiential learning cycle kids use to cultivate a repertoire of behaviors and responses that are calculated to seek satisfaction or avoid pain or both.
It’s natural that as they learn and progress, they are constantly acting out mistaken hypotheses about reality as they build out their mental models of how reality works. Some of their mistaken hypotheses are endearing, some are just wrong, and others are outright dangerous. That’s just the normal trajectory of personal growth.
If we parents and teachers handle the experiential part of children’s learning well over the course of their K-12 educations, students will slowly but surely develop the kinds and levels of self-regulation and self-efficacy skills that combine with mastery of academic subject matter to be what we deem “college and career ready.” That means they’ll graduate from high school with a clear-eyed understanding of what reality expects from them as young adults — and what they have to do to obtain the results and opportunities they’re trying to move toward as they age out of our educational system.
This is one reason why we teachers work so hard to make sure we are providing the kind of compassionate but structured feedback that can help older children learn how to succeed — not only academically, but also socially, emotionally, and career-wise. You may not like having to set your alarm and actually get out of bed in the morning every day, but that is the reality you have to adhere to to get paid for showing up at work every day at the correct time, ready to perform your job duties.
This is also why it’s essential that we structure our feedback loops at schools in ways that are clear, consistent, and noncoercive. By the time they reach high school, children need to experience a kind of radical truthfulness about their work quality and results. They not only need this to make academic progress; they also need this experientially as a signal that they are approaching the end of their childhood learning runway.
We need to distinguish this framework — known in developmental psychology as the system of natural and logical consequences — from punishment or retaliation. Grades are part of the essential K-12 framework of experiential learning. To be meaningful, feedback needs to be fast, accurate, and informative.
By the time they graduate from high school, older children need to understand that after they cross that threshold into adulthood, they will not be able to expect the same levels of deference they received as minor children. College is a place to experience adult learning as an adult. The workplace is a place to use your skills and knowledge to help accomplish someone else’s goals (even if you’re a part of that group of “someones”).
By the time they reach high school, children need to experience a kind of radical truthfulness about their work quality and results.
The failure to understand this by the time high school graduation arrives has a name: failure to launch. Failure to launch happens as a result of failing to understand how natural and logical consequences work in both your inner and outer worlds. Viewed through this lens of developmental psychology, for example, the spring “tentifada” protests at colleges and universities across the country revealed a profound and widespread lack of clarity about how adult life, natural and logical consequences, and democratic society all work. Somehow, a large number of these young adults made it through our K-12 systems with a rigidly formed belief that success at elite colleges — including the UCs — will involve throwing tantrums, not fulfilling school requirements, destroying property, and then making unrelated demands in addition to demanding that they be excused from their academic and societal obligations.
As a high school teacher comparing notes with other high school teachers around the country, I have found this an incredibly alarming demonstration of the failure to launch into adulthood. It’s a complete withdrawal into the tactics of the discouraged child — tantrums, disruptions, refusal to engage constructively, bullying, physical violence — but at the adult level. These young adults have not mastered the basics of accountability; instead, they are sharing notes on how to go on unaccountability benders at the expense of their parents and taxpayers.
Something has gone seriously wrong here, and I think it has something to do with the insane forms of deference politics we have been playing at around grading and accountability in high schools.
At its best, the gradebook can be a deep conversation with a teenager. That’s why the suggestion that 0 percent should instead be made equal to 50 percent makes no sense — it’s a distortion of the reality about how much work has been performed, and that’s a dereliction of our responsibility as adults to teach older children how the adult world actually works.
That’s not to say there’s no room for grace or course correction. In my own high school math classroom, a large number of points come from daily work because that’s how the research shows we learn math. If you engage diligently and with purpose in the learning experiences I create for you day after day, week after week, the simple fact is that you will learn the math we are doing and studying. As Dogen Zenji, the founder of the Zen lineage of Buddhism said, “When you walk in the mist, you get wet.”
If a high school student were missing 50 out of 70 assignments, that would be a reflection on the student. And that would also be an important lesson — that you can fall behind and also dig yourself out. That’s a critical part of the learning. We want children to learn about the importance of daily, consistent work.
We also want them to learn that when they hit total overwhelm to ask for help so we can help them and show them some needed grace.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t still need to learn the general law of reality that digging yourself out of a hole is less convenient than keeping up.
Zeroes can be reversed in my gradebook, but there’s a small late fee because that’s how reality works. And if you try to turn in a picture of a cheeseburger instead of your work, that will be noticed and understood as a statement of your seriousness and intent.
True college and career readiness means that we need to teach teenagers how to become successful, functioning young adults. It means teaching them that as adults, nobody else will own both their problems and the opportunity of their own motivation. Nobody’s going to chase them down and force them to come to their college classes — that’s on them. To help them learn these experiential lessons, as a teacher, I will provide encouragement, opportunities, support, feedback, and more encouragement. But I will not accept a collapse into toddler levels of helplessness and I will not “rescue” them from their own obligation to learn how to become a functioning adult.
We need to stop robbing SFUSD students of their chance to learn these lessons while they’re still minor children in high school.
