Grades! Oh My God, GRADES!!

I'm going to be careful, especially since I'm trying this for the first time. 

So I'm reading the L.A. Times, and there on the front page is an article on districts moving toward  "mastery" grading. The title is "Schools embrace new ways of grading" and the subhead is "Teachers say pandemic showed flaws of point system." I don't know where to start.

The article maintains that the pandemic revealed to teachers the true nature of our students' lives--as if we had been oblivious--and presto! we realized that the points system discriminates against poor kids, and most especially kids of color. To which I and any teacher worth a damn should respond: no freakin' shit. We are not oblivious. This is not an unknown unknown.

Even though the equity lens for re-examining grading practices is relatively new (thank you, Joe Feldman), the limits of a points system and the value of mastery grading (once upon a time--standards-based grading) is not the Revealed Truth brought to you by our friends at SARS-CoV-2. It's old news. Hell, I did a quick Google search and found an article in the New York Times from 1971. 

The article is by By Paul L. Montgomery (March 30, 1971) and is titled, "At John Dewey H.S., a Student Can Go at His Own Pace." In addition to students being able to go at their "own pace," students were given schedule flexibility and multiple chances to complete their work--all in a Brooklyn public school with a "side arrangement" negotiated with the union. And get this: "The grades given at John Dewey are M for mastery, MC for mastery with, condition, MI for mastery in an Independent study course and R for rete[n]tion. Those who get an MC, or who get an R ... must repeat the course, are given detailed analyses of their performance as a guide to future study by their teachers." Sound familiar?

There is a ton of other writing on this issue, but everybody I knew in the business was already familiar with it and we didn't need the pandemic to bring us to our senses. For years before I retired, I and every one of my immediate colleagues had implemented many of the features of this "new" way of grading. Everyone who carries a roster knows that you grade on the work, not the behavior, or attendance. Hell, we were all ecstatic just to get the work. And any teacher who doesn't permit re-tests or multiple attempts on a project or revisions of essays--well, their grading system isn't the equity problem. They are.

Another word on that. In his 2019 article for Phi Delta Kappan (online),"Beyond standards-based grading: Why equity must be part of grading reform," Feldman claims that "[g]rading for equity... protects grading from implicit individual biases and it counteracts the institutional biases in traditional grading." There is, it seems to me, a clear case for NOT averaging a student's performance over time (a bias some teachers, myself included, have attempted to address through variable weighting) and thus tackling that particular institutional bias. 

However, I am having trouble seeing how mastery Grading for Equity safeguards grading from the implicit biases of the teacher, who is, after all, tasked with assessing mastery. If mastery grading itself pushes teachers to confront their own implicit biases, then that of course is all to the good. However, it seems to me that this claim (found elsewhere, as well) rests primarily on the assumption that behavior is being folded into a points-based grade, an unsound approach I discussed above. The work's the thing.

Another word on that. As I've been reading through the discussion of mastery née standards-based grading, I keep wondering not about how students show mastery, but how they achieve mastery. If a student is unable to participate in the process, or if they decline to complete the intermediate steps, how will they "master the standards"? How will they learn if they don't do? Do they have to already have a command of the material before they enter? Talk about equity. 

That was fun. I know this is long, but now that I got that off my chest, let me just discuss a couple of the things that drive me absolutely batty about edumedia. Writing about teaching and schools and schooling is generally atrocious, as I'm sure you are aware. However, lots of it is atrocious in the same ways. 

The L.A. Times article for example, is subheaded "Teachers say" blah blah pandemic blah blah points system. Well, the ONLY teacher mentioned or quoted is Joshua Moreno, from Alhambra High School. Now, I don't know Mr. Moreno, but he seems to have done what many if not most of us do: He thought about his class and his interactions with his students, and he revised one of his procedures. Good Job. 

Yet, as far as I can tell, he is the only teacher saying anything in the article (except for one education professor who arrives in the twenty-ninth paragraph to offer a tepid caution). The rest of the interviews/quotes are from authors, consultants, and administrative personnel from a principal to district execs. Apparently using Mr. Moreno's conversion as a stalking horse, a celebrity endorser out front to lend credibility to the "growing trend," the article spends the rest of its inches pumping the new miracle cure. Not only is it inadequate journalism, it's misleading. Not surprising for a major media organ with an agenda. I read the L.A. Times a lot, and I follow their education reporting closely, and I must admit I am never not disappointed. I wish they were the exception.

Which brings me to my final point (applause!). Anybody who has ever worked in the Los Angeles Unified School District -- or, I'm quickly finding out and am saddened to report, almost anywhere else -- will recognize the following melody. First, the district recognizes it has a problem (in this case, too many Fs and Ds). Second, using their big brains and vast network of authors, consultants, and district inductees to the Peter principle Hall of Fame, the district concocts a solution. Third, the district dips the solution in a solution of rationalization and recrimination. Et voilà! A new star is born, ready to take its place on the reform-a-go-round. 

I suppose I should emphasize that I love grading for equity. I believed in it before the pandemic. But teaching during the pandemic helped me understand it. That's more than I can say about most of the people talking and writing about it.