Q: Doug, when and how did you become interested in exploring inequities in grading practices?
During my teaching career, I was aware that different teachers had had wildly different grading policies. It was unfair that students – for the same performance – could get different grades.
Even though I had read the research, when I started doing the research, it became deeply alarming. The seminal piece of research was when I would take the same set of student scores, and I’d ask teachers what’s the difference between who gets A’s and B’s and who gets D’s and F’s: they would tell me work ethic, or work completion, or parental support, or intelligence – but it wasn’t any of those things. The distinguishing element was the grading scale the teacher used, which is the very definition of inequitable and unfair practices.
Q: Can you tell us about one of your biggest ah-ha equity moments?
When I was teaching, a lot of my students were new arrivals to the country. When a child entered the class halfway through the semester, and they didn’t have a cumulative folder under their arm, we would accept them as they were and proceed from there. But if another child with the same achievement profile had been with me the entire semester, that child would get systematically punished whereas the new arrival would get rewarded with a clean grade slate.
Q: Equity in education is such a frequent topic these days. What was the watershed moment for turning our attention towards equity?
I don’t think we’ve had it yet – we still have a deeply inequitable system. I’m from Topeka, Kansas, the home of Brown vs. Board of Education. People think everything must have gotten better after the case when, actually, things got worse. My father knew people involved on both sides and a number of schools serving African American students were not only shut down – some staying that way for an entire year – but, as many as 40% of African American teachers and administrators lost their jobs. Consequently, we know their descendents are under-represented in the teacher leadership pool. It’s not unusual for people who look like me to have two or three generations of teachers in the family, but when your memory is that your grandmother or grandfather, or maybe even a parent, was laid off in 1954 after Brown v. Board of Education, that doesn’t leave a very good taste in your mouth. I don’t think we’ve had a watershed moment yet – we’re still working towards equity, not very wisely in some cases.
Q: What do you think prevents us from having the watershed moment?
Deeply entrenched attachment to the bell curve of blue birds, robins, and blackbirds, specifically the people who are served very, very well by the present system. The people who most fight grading reform are not teachers – I think that’s an unfair reputation – but are privileged parents of privileged kids who see more kids qualifying for scholarships and more kids qualifying for college admission, and they don’t like that competition. I see that all over the United States.
Q: What are two key teaching moves you would love to see happen in every classroom in America?
#1: calling on students rather than asking students to raise their hands. The rule should be you raise your hand to ask a question, not to answer a question. Relying on raised hands to answer questions is a mark of grave inequity. Some people call this move ‘cold calling,’ but I would just call it good and fair engagement. You can do it with a smile, you don’t have to humiliate or embarrass anybody – there’s always time to phone a friend, give a student a minute of think time, or ask for a partial answer. What’s not okay is to have kids who are checked out, and kids check out when they know you’re not going to call on them. So #1 is calling on students fairly. #2 is evaluating students based on how they finish the semester, not the average.
If I could just pick two, those two things would be solid moves towards classroom equity.
Q: Let’s talk a little more about getting rid of the average. What are the steps a teacher would take?
The first topic I want to be clear about: I’m not saying to leave the gradebook blank – have all that practice in there, have the evidence in there. It’s all worth knowing and communicating. Oregon was an early adopter state, and has had standards for twenty year, and the essence of standards is that they are evaluated and then the grade gets rewarded.
You don’t assign a grade for the average achievement between the beginning and end of the standard. It’s just a fundamental principle of accuracy: if I am going to grade someone accurately, I grade them based on how they perform against the standard.
Think of it like this: we’re coming up on track season. If at the state track championship, a kid is wins and the race, but we take away his medal because he had some bad times back in February, that’s ludicrous.
If that student is proficient in May, yet we continue to grade them down for the mistakes they made earlier in the year, that’s inequitable.
The typical journey of a student is to struggle and struggle and then have a breakthrough. The breakthrough is that learning typically happens because of content or feedback delivered by the teacher. If we really believe in resilience and perseverance, if we really believe in social-emotional learning, then we ought to be rewarding the breakthrough. When we use the average, we say breakthrough doesn’t matter and resilience doesn’t matter, because I’m still going to punish you for what you did 2-3 months ago.
Q: We have been coached that can not evaluate according to standards unless we set it up appropriately in the system, and we can’t set it up in the system until we are trained how to do that. How do you respond to that?
In every grading system I know, teachers have the ability to override the algorithm that generates the automatic grade and enter their own evaluation on the final grade. In most systems, we’re talking about nothing more than disabling the average function. I think it’s good if teachers have a fundamental understanding of why the average is bad, and why the hundred-point scale is bad, but that doesn’t really require extensive training.
Q: So, you are arguing that teachers should have the gradebook as a piece of information but then, at grading time, enter their own evaluations?
That is exactly what I’m saying. It’s how you finish the race that counts.
Q: And then, for concerned parents, how do they defend those choices?
When you encounter those privileged parents that want to talk about someone else’s grade: how could that child earn the same grade as mine? Or when those same parents reach out to your administrator, the two of you have to be unified in your response: “Mrs. Jones, I’m not going to talk to you about anyone else’s grade besides your own. Number one: that’s unethical. And number two: we’re a standards-based district in a standards-based state.”
So you don’t need to defend how you grade someone else’s kid, you only need to defend how you grade that parent’s kid. And to the extent there is a hint of imperfection, those parents almost always find it to their advantage that you take into account how your child finished instead of letting the grade be held back by some of the challenges along the way.
Q: What are some of the pedagogical lessons you have learned from Covid-based education you hope to see brought forward to in-person classrooms?
The biggest lesson is relationships, relationships, relationships. Some of the best practices I saw during remote learning were teachers leaving their houses and going to find their students. Of course, they couldn’t do home visits, but they could do sidewalk visits or window visits. Some teachers used the telephone. The teachers that did that had the greatest impact. I saw schools that had 50% attendance rates in the fall of 2020, get up over 90% attendance with the same kids and the same parents. It was all about the human connection.
We also learned there is no way that technology can teach a six-year-old how to read. The promises of technology have always been overblown. All you have to do is look in the faces of students and teachers who came back in March and April for the first time in a year, and you saw what human connection can do. And not just in the classroom. In extracurricular activities, in play, in all of these other things that are the reason kids come to school…those are the social connections, and those are the things that really matter.
Finally, the lesson we should have learned, but I don’t think we really have is that not every standard is equal. This nonsense that says we’ll make up for lost time, by talking really fast and trying to frantically cover every standard. All you have time for is content exposure and there is zero evidence that says exposure leads to learning.
At the secondary level, schools are following one of two paths: path #1: in the fall of 2021, they are going to have the same schedule, the same time allocation they had in the fall of 2019. They are essentially saying: We learned nothing. I can not push strongly enough against someone who thinks we can have the same schedule in the future as we’ve had in the past.
Path #2: some schools are building interventions into their daily schedules. They are not afraid to identify the issues and recognize what we already know: if you don’t build interventions into the day – if you hold them after school, on Saturdays, or during the summer, the kids that need those interventions most, won’t come. There are schools who are building an hour, or two, or whatever is necessary, of content-area support into the daily schedule.
Let’s face it. We have students who are behind. But we had students who were behind before Covid – now they’re even more behind. Obviously, there was a large learning loss experienced by all but the most privileged students. The one question is: what are we going to do about it?
Would you like to learn more about these important topics? Here are some resources Doug recommends.
- Here is the professional organization led by Dr. Reeves. In it you will find articles, research, videos and more. https://www.creativeleadership.net.
- Karin Chenoweth‘s work includes a seminal collection of research entitled It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools, which studies 15 disparate schools from around the country and identifies the characters they share. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677223._It_s_Being_Done_?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=NEqJ6fIIYB&rank=1
- Caitlin Flanagan wrote this article for last month’s issue of The Atlantic. In it, she discusses an unsettling adversary in the equity fight: parents. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/what-college-admissions-scandal-reveals/586468/
