- Standards-Based Grading Must Die - May 18, 2020
- For Students Who Can’t Read, Computers Won’t Help Them- But Teachers Can - April 28, 2020
- The New Normal: Teaching is as it Should Be - April 18, 2020
- The Ideal School Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic - March 30, 2020
- The Lost Identity of Teachers: The COVID-19 Story - March 16, 2020
- Schoolhouse Crisis: Teachers Exiting - March 6, 2020
- Teach Hard History. We All Need It - March 2, 2020
- Battling Teacher Exhaustion: 5 Do Now Tips! - February 14, 2020
- Accountability is a Joke - January 9, 2020
- Restorative Practices, Exhausting Teachers - January 2, 2020
For those unaware, standards-based grading is a popular evaluation system designed to simplify teaching, learning, and assessment. It strips a student’s grade down to their ability to meet the announced standards. The idea is that students will learn more easily if teachers grade based upon very explicit and clear standards. Moreover, by standardizing the grading process, each student, regardless of the teacher, will be graded identically, thus, eliminating bias and preferential treatment.
To be fair, there are several worthy components to standards-based grading. It eliminates the opportunity for affluent, well-resourced students to improve their grades by providing classroom tissue boxes for extra credit; it ends petty, frivolous concerns like frilly edges of paper influencing grades, and it helps teachers focus their instruction. Still, standards-based grading must die.
Still, standards-based grading must die Click To Tweet
The devoted standards-based graders insist that done right the learning process becomes so clear and concise that students simply fall in love and eagerly consume the standards. This might happen, but it’s not the standards the kids care about. It’s their teacher, investing herculean amounts of time into their students, that they care about.
Standards-based grading doubles down on the belief that education is a destination. A student’s value is determined by their product. It treats education as a cul de sac ignoring the connecting street. The hope is to level the playing field, but it doesn’t.
In reality, adhering to standards-based grading with fidelity is counterproductive and leads to a lowering of expectations. I’m thinking specifically about Carlos. I taught Carlos in an elective class in the fall of his 11th-grade year. Carlos and I hit it off, and he did really well; I wanted him in my AP Economics class the following year.
Carlos was on no one’s list to be in an AP class, but I introduced the idea. He scoffed. I persisted, and after a series of months, I convinced him to try it. If I had followed a strict rule of following standards and prerequisites, Carlos would have never seen any AP class.
In light of that, he wasn’t ready for that first AP assessment the following year. He didn’t have a true appreciation for what was coming. Despite all our preparations, he wasn’t quite there.
So, as I graded Carlos’ first assessment, I could have stuck to the standards. I would have crushed him. And, since Economics is a graduation requirement in my state, very easily, I could have pushed him to drop AP Economics. Adherence to the standards wouldn’t have made him better off. So, I fudged it a bit. He didn’t get an A, but he didn’t fail either. He stuck around–earned a 2 on the exam–and kept working harder than he ever had.
The moral of the story is that educators are in the business of developing people, not managing autonomous learning machines. Click To TweetThe moral of the story is that educators are in the business of developing people, not managing autonomous learning machines. For Carlos and other students, it’s not about taking AP classes, or the standards of any class. Those are not the measure of a kid or school’s value. Teaching and learning is a process of pushing into uncharted territory, and that doesn’t happen because the standard is foremost. It happens because the kid is.
For those inclined to think Carlos would have been better served in a standard Economics class because it fit his zone of proximal development better, maybe? But, this attitude flies in the face of consistent research that indicates the single biggest factor in a student’s learning is the teacher. Arrogantly, I was best positioned to teach Carlos Economics that year, no matter the level of rigor of the standards. And, to quote Carlos, he “appreciated the effort [I] put into teaching.”
The learning process is defined by the people involved in it, not the standards being studied.
But, let’s not get muddled in Carlos and I because this is a story that extends beyond one teacher and one student. If we want to measure student–and teacher–success by standards and ability to demonstrate knowledge, fine. That’s what standardized testing is for. However, relying on such exams to judge the learning process makes many bristle. Imagine that instead of a once or twice a year occurrence, the mentality of the standardized test was cemented as an everyday occurrence. Even though standards-based grading cloaks itself in the language of equity and fairness, that’s what standards-based grading seeks to achieve: a daily version of the standardized test.
The problem with education is not that we lack standardization; it’s that we have too much. Click To TweetLearning is an endless, lifelong process. There are no exams outside of school. Once students leave school, the test is whether or not they can navigate the process of confronting a new problem, gathering information to understand and solve the problem, evaluating that information, and executing the best solution. It’s a process. Standards-based grading ignores the process, which means standards-based grading must die.
You couldn’t be more wrong about the intentions, the methods and the effect of SBG. Starting with the second line, “The idea is that students will learn more easily if teachers grade based upon very explicit and clear standards.” you begin to set up a straw man that you use to paint a false narrative about SBG. That is NOT the “idea” behind SBG. The idea is that if we establish some clear learning goals, we can report meaningful learning. SBG isn’t designed for motivation, although it does provide it. It’s designed for honesty in reporting.
And no, kids in SBG classrooms don’t get discouraged and drop out of challenging classes because of SBG. They are instead encouraged to revisit their learning and try again, because their grade is not based on some arbitrary time cut off for learning. It’s based on how much they learn.
And no, no, no, no SBG is not “the standardized test … cemented as an everyday occurrence.” Nothing about SBG resembles standardized testing. It’s personal, it’s criterion-referenced, it depends on the teacher-student relationship.
But you saved the worst for last. “Standards-based grading ignores the process,” is so utterly false that it makes me wonder how you ever felt you had the authority to write on this subject, since you clearly don’t understand SBG. SBG is ALL about the process. Teachers who use traditional grading look for right answers and adherence to the norms they taught in the lessons. As an SBG teacher, when I grade I am thinking deeply about how the student arrived at the answer and how that though process does or doesn’t meet the standard and then the student and I have a conversation about where their thinking might shift to master the learning target. And many, many, many times as an SBG teacher, I’ve rated a student as proficient who got a wrong answer because nearly every meaningful learning standard is written in terms of process. So a silly mistake that has nothing to do with the standard can be easily ignored with no lack of integrity.
Unfortunately, a link to this article has been posted by Peter Greene and hordes of teachers are going to come read this and think what you are describing is SBG. That’s sad. Stick you what you know.
Good on you Dave I am also worried about the Peter Greene effect here. Too many folks in ed. are just too tired to separate out the wheat and chafe. Pete are you
Listening? Did you do your due diligence at least run it by Diane et. al.?
Well said – you don’t mince words. I never quite believed that those who develop the standards are teachers…or include them in the decisions about what happens in a classroom. Thanks for posting this!
Maybe I’m missing some context here, but I don’t think understand how this anecdote supports your argument. When Carlos demonstrated growth but fell short of mastery, you rightly recognized mastery as a “destination” and gave him a middling grade. He went on to earn a 2 on the exam. Then he, having internalized your message that mastery is a destination, “kept working harder” to get there.
This almost sounds like an argument *for* standards-based grading. Many teachers I know working under the traditional grading system would have given Carlos an A for effort even though he had a long way to go toward mastering the content (inevitably setting him up to bomb the exam). Under a well-implemented SBG system, there should be less pressure to artificially inflate grades because the focus is on getting the student toward mastery rather than counting everything toward a big meaningless average at the end of the term.
The subtext here seems to be that your admin asked you to apply standards in a way that would have hurt kids, and you refused to do it. Good for you! But I am not sure it has much to do with SBG as a broader concept, unless I’m just ignorant of some important background info.
Standards Based Grading turns learning into a game for too many students. Combine that negative with poorly written and/or subjective standards, and the required (unsustainable) intensity and you have a recipe for SBG failure, soon to be found on the smoldering ash heap of unworkable edu-babble.