TUESDAY, MARCH 1 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
BY VALERIE STRAUSS
AND DONNA ST. GEORGESixteen-year-old Sam Luo
nearly panicked when he learned
about his Advanced Placement
English Language teacher’s grad-
ing system at his California high
school. Gone was the 100-point
system he knew well. Homework,
extra credit, behavior — they
would no longer count.
His teacher, Joshua Moreno,
among a few other instructors,
grades students on a 50-point
scale — 10 points for each of the
A-F letter grades — a change
from giving so much weight to a
failing grade, with Fs ranging
from 60 points down to zero.
Students can retake exams and
redo assignments but only after
scrutinizing their own mistakes.
The goal is to measure only
whether the student has learned
the material.
What he and other educators
are doing is part of a revolution
in grading, one that started
years before the coronavirus
pandemic in some school dis-
tricts but that has taken on new
urgency as educators around the
country think twice about as-
signing those judgmental letters
A-F to students whose schooling
has been disrupted for two
years.
Instructors typically penalize
children for late, incomplete or
sloppy work, finding many op-
portunities (via homework and
incremental tests) throughout
the semester to do so, scholars
say. These strictures, studies
have shown, unfairly privilege
one type of student — the kind
with means, a supportive family,
good nutrition, mental well-be-
ing and a peaceable home life —
over others who may work after
school, have a defective laptop,
or lack a desk and a quiet space
to spit-shine their schoolwork
every night. And though many
districts handed out technology
to students and beefed up Inter-
net service during the pandemic,
the digital “homework gap” is
still affecting low-income fami-
lies far more than families earn-
ing more.
Districts around the country
— from California to Virginia
and more — are experimenting
to level the competition and
focus on what experts think
matters most: What should a
grade represent? How can
grades be used to motivate stu-
dents to learn and retain infor-
mation? How can grading be
equitable? The change has
sparked headlines decrying the
elimination of D’s and F’s. But
many teachers had already
stopped giving those grades dur-
ing the pandemic.
“We’re aligning the letter
grade with actual learning,” said
Moreno, who works in the Al-
hambra Unified School District
in Southern California. “It’s sad
that it had to be for a worldwide
pandemic to get people to look at
this, but at the same time, it’s
good that it’s happening. It had
to.”
Some, such as Santa Fe Public
Schools in New Mexico, are mov-
ing to standards-based grading,
which measures student per-
formance on benchmarks, some-
times with number grades from 1
to 4; teachers there will use new
specific standards set by the
state’s education department to
assess student performance.
“A grade should represent
learning, not behavior,” said Nick
Hoover, principal of Cantwell’s
Bridge Middle School in the
Appoquinimink District in Dela-
ware, which is just starting an
overhaul of its own policies.
“Look at someone who gets a B. It
could be an A student who
turned in work late, or a student
who averages out at 88 percent in
academic work but turns in work
on time. That grade doesn’t real-
ly represent how much that stu-
dent has learned.”
He added, “We still want to
report behavior” — meaning
punctuality and other parts of
performance — but said it
shouldn’t shape how a student is
judged on a transcript.
Patrick Truman, a science
teacher in Montgomery County,
Md., since 2013 and an educator
for more than 20 years, offers a
hypothetical: Consider a student
with marginal motivation who
gets 30 points — an F — on their
first test. “If you get a couple of
really poor grades, you can’t
recover,” he said. “Kids give up.”
Grading experts say that since
the pandemic closed schools in
March 2020, they have been
bombarded with requests for
help from administrators seek-
ing to change what has been
common practice for genera-
tions. One of these experts is Joe
Feldman, whose book “Grading
for Equity: What It is, Why It
Matters, and How It Can Trans-
form Schools and Classrooms”
(2018) has become a bible for
many revising their practices.
Feldman said that schools “per-
petuate very antiquated and
ineffective and even harmful
ways of grading,” because there
is no or little training on how to
grade for students in teacher
preparation courses.
The old ways are not without
their defenders. Some districts
have encountered pushback
from teachers and parents who
worry the new approach is too
easy for students, or too difficult.
That’s what Luo thought when
he walked into Moreno’s AP
English class. Because grades
are based only on certain tests
and assignments, he said he
feared it was “a high-stakes sys-
tem that would cause a lot of
anxiety.”
Moreno said his grading ap-
proach is intended, rather, to
make students own their learn-
ing. There is “a misunderstand-
ing that this is not as rigorous as
the traditional system,” he said.
He likens it to sports. In Eng-
lish classes, all writing — in and
out of class — is for practice. No
points. “When it’s time for an
essay or a presentation or a
Socratic seminar, I call that game
time,” Moreno said. “You get
points.” But a competitive season
is “not just one game. If you
aren’t happy with what hap-
pened in that game, I say, ‘Let’s
meet. Let’s conference. Tell me
how you are going to work to
learn what you missed.’ We can
do another game.”
Luo said that the most impor-
tant change for him in Moreno’s
grading system has been that,
instead of focusing on format-
ting his assignments correctly
and punctually, he has been
forced to think about his learn-
ing more deeply and, as a result,
he absorbs more information
and gets graded on his best
work. He observed that he wit-
nesses kids ask their English
teachers every year, “How do I
write a thesis? How do I write a
body paragraph?” — even
though they’ve ostensibly
learned this skill every year
starting in middle school. “With
this, as we improve, we are
internalizing this information
better.”
Still, Luo said, he doesn’t think
the system will work for every
student. “For students who want
to slack off or are not motivated
to learn, this class will probably
be very enticing. Assignments
aren’t graded. Due dates are soft.
They will think they can get away
with things.”
Other concerns about this
kind of grading system were
raised by teachers at Wakefield
High School in Arlington Public
Schools in Northern Virginia af-
ter administrators there an-
nounced that they were consid-
ering a new assessment system
that would eliminate graded
homework and make other
changes. One of them may be
that any “remediations” of a
grade could be undertaken only
with a formal one-on-one ex-
change between student and
teacher.
In an open letter that was
unsigned, teachers said such a
system places new burdens on
them. For example, they don’t
have time to talk to each stu-
dent about every grade change.Teachers are already over-
worked. They face large class-
es, have little planning time
and, with the pandemic, often
take over classes for sick col-
leagues.
The letter also says having
nongraded homework makes it
more difficult to foster good
behaviors and nonacademic
skills in students.
“The changes, if implemented,
will ... result in the decline of
high expectations and rigor in
the classroom,” the Arlington
teachers said. Students need in-
centives to “develop organiza-
tional, time and stress manage-
ment skills and grow as responsi-
ble, civically engaged, and con-
siderate young adults.”
Bridget Loft, Arlington Public
Schools’ chief academic officer,
said officials are now consider-
ing what to do “without making
it feel like it is something being
forced upon people. We are
thinking about what might be
better for students in the long
run and how to bring in more
equitable experiences.”
Rick Wormeli, a former Na-
tional Board Certified teacher
and now a consultant on class-
room practice and grading sys-
tems, and others said that report
cards should capture academic
and nonacademic performance
in different ways. A-F grades
should be academic, and other
habits and behaviors can be
recorded through notes or other
numerical or alphabetical sym-
bols.
That doesn’t mean, Wormeli
and other grading reformers say,
that students can get away with-
out doing work. With the new
systems, they can still flunk, and
they are still responsible for
making academic progress.
“I would never want to remove
the burden of a child’s learning
from his or her shoulders,”
Wormeli said. “They have to do
the work. But if we read the
research about executive func-
tioning — how do you instill
moral fiber, time management,
perseverance, tenacity? — none
of it, not one bit of it, says, ‘Yeah,
use your grades to do it.’ ”
Each element of grading
changes presents challenges.
Truman allows students to re-
take exams. “Many things in life
are reassessable,” he said. “Can
you imagine if you had one shot
at your driver’s license? That’s
not the real world.”
But in college, many students
don’t get that opportunity. Tru-
man said he has heard about
University of Maryland profes-
sors who feel they need to re-
mind students from the state’s
largest school system that col-
lege rules are less forgiving:
There are no do-overs. Similarly,
he’s heard of students asking
professors: “When is the reas-
sessment?”
Another example is softening
deadlines of assignments, allow-
ing students to turn them in
when they can. Opponents say
this practice harms efforts to
instill responsibility in students
and leads to students falling
behind in their work. Supporters
say that students often don’t
turn in work because they don’t
understand it, or have after-
school or night jobs, or lack
adequate technology or Internet
service to complete assign-
ments. But in class, they are
forced to move ahead with work
they haven’t mastered, making
things worse.
The issue of equity runsthrough the charged conversa-
tion about grading. The Wake-
field teachers said that some of
the proposed changes in Ar-
lington would have “a detri-
mental impact” toward achiev-
ing educational equity in part
because “we are providing
[lower-performing students]
with a variety of ex c uses and/or
enabling them to ‘game the
system,’ prompting them to ex-
pect the least of themselves in
terms of effort, results, and
responsibility.”Wormeli and others said the
opposite is what happens — that
students are motivated when
they feel some ownership of the
learning process.
At Wakefield High School,
teacher Nisha Sensharma said
she began experimenting with
different grading systems about
seven years ago, after she real-
ized how stressed her students
were about grades.
She began to relax due dates
for assignments to give students
more time to complete them,
and, she said, she found that it
“helped a little.” Then, she said,
she cut back on the amount of
homework and found “the kids
were happier” and learning just
as much. She began teaching
mindfulness.
“I really got into social-emo-
tional learning. What bothered
me was motivation. And when I
asked kids to answer ‘ Why am I
in school?’ and ‘What do I want
to get from school?’ there was a
lot of silence for a long time. And
then they say, ‘I want to get the
best grade. I want to get into
college.’ ”
So she changed her curricu-
lum to create lessons “that
really connected with the kids.”
And she began to look at ac-
countability in different ways.
“If I expect kids to use social-
emotional skills and be self-di-
rected and meet due dates, I
need to make some changes,”
she said.
She experimented with how
she assigned grades and home-
work. She began giving more
feedback to students about their
work and behavior, hoping that
they would use the information
to improve their mind-sets and
learning process. Unfortunately,
she said, about half of her stu-
dents don’t look at her feedback
and are still overly concerned
with grades.
“That’s the grading system we
created,” she said. “I think if we
all made a change, that would
make a big difference for kids.”Teachers abandon letter grades in search of a fairer way
MORIAH BALINGIT/THE WASHINGTON POSTAcross nation, educators
are experimenting with
a more tolerant s ystemTeachers at Wakefield
High in Arlington, Va.,
raised concerns after
administrators there
announced that they
were considering a new
assessment system that
would eliminate graded
homework.Take The Post shopping
Washington Post podcasts go with you everywherewpost.com/podcasts
Politics • History • Culture • More
S108 3x*Limit one offer per household. Applies to purchases of 4 or more Classic or Designer Glide-Out™ shelves. Expires 4/30/
Lifetime warranty valid for Classic or Designer Solutions. Learn more at shelfgenie.com.Schedule your FREE design consultationCALL NOW!50% OFFINSTALL*Simplify storage with custom shelf systemsfor your existing cabinetsCD
CS
AFE
TYGUIDE
LINES
W
E’REFOLLOWIN
GLocally Owned andOperatedHOME SWEET ORGANIZED HOME12NO
INTEREST
NO
PAYMENTS*On Approved Credit*MONTH202-734-