3 discusses how grading issues and student issues abut directly with student achievement.
Once we address the fundamental shift in thought, part II offers strategies for implementing forward-thinking approaches to assessment and grading within real school contexts. Chapter 4 explains the benefits of standards-based grading. Chapter 5 reveals how homework can help instead of hinder achievement. Chapter 6 presents a plethora of schedules, from elementary to high school, including alternative schools, that enable teachers to provide the support students need. Each chapter ends with reflection questions. Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction to access these free reproducibles.
This book is for educators—administrators and teachers—who are serious about going beyond grades to increasing educational achievement for more students.
Where to Go From Here
Of course, variations in curriculum standards implementation, widespread differences in teachers’ experiences, and local community expectations generate differing interpretations and lively discussions of grading practices. In this book, you’ll encounter several in-depth examinations of grading practices and principles, discussions and examples of grading policies with varied effects on academic achievement and student success, and descriptions of many factors associated with student achievement and grading practices.
Throughout this book we suggest and describe specific actions that school personnel, with support from multiple stakeholders, can implement to increase the chances that more students will not only graduate from high school but also will be fully prepared to lead financially independent lives. The following lists the major actions educators should do to support such efforts and to attain those goals.
■ Implement student grading practices that fairly and honestly indicate what a student has learned and what remains for the student to master.
■ Reassess the major purpose of grades. This change, at a minimum, will require schools to separate reporting instruments into nonacademic and academic reports, and the academic reports must focus on mastery of content and skills.
■ Increase structural support for students throughout the school day. In the United States, more than 50 percent of our students come from low-income families. Different elementary, middle, and high school schedules can provide student support during the school day as illustrated in chapter 6 (page 71).
■ Apply resources to accelerate literacy achievement in the early grades. In the United States, fewer than 40 percent of students leave grade 3 proficient in literacy (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2015a). Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for literacy data.
You can see that we have a lot to think about. We will address these issues and many more in the remainder of this book.
Assess Problems With Traditional Grading Practices
PART I
We have reason to implement standards-based grading because it assumes most students, given the right support, can master content. It is time to review grading practices and assessment issues, especially how we calculate and determine grades, and what they communicate to students, parents, and teachers about individual learning and personal effort. Grading issues are not limited to local school districts’, states’, or provinces’ policies and practices. In classrooms, individual teachers may calculate students’ grades based on many variables, such as averaging grades earned throughout the grading period, including or excluding homework grades, carrying over grades from the previous grading period, and so on. All these factors are a major source of different interpretations of grades. For example, is it professional and reasonable for one mathematics teacher to count a student’s homework as 40 percent of a grade while another mathematics teacher does not consider homework at all in calculating final grades? Should one teacher count a project as 50 percent of a student’s final grade while another teacher counts the same project as 20 percent of the final grade?
The variations in grades given by teachers who determine their own measures and values often reflect uneven treatment of students. Such variations in grading primarily affect low-achieving students whose work is inconsistent rather than the high-achieving students who can rely on strong support systems outside of school and, therefore, consistently perform well (Morsy & Rothstein, 2015; Van Horn et al., 2009). Therefore, inconsistent grading practices remain a troublesome issue, as 21st century schools are expected to educate a larger, more diverse student population. We’ll dive into these issues in the following chapters.
CHAPTER 1
Why It’s Time to Reassess
Ranking students based on their grades became a prominent function in public schools not long after compulsory education became mandatory in 1918 (WiseGeek, n.d.). Ranking students by sorting and selecting them made sense when jobs were available even for those with very little schooling. As long as the U.S. economy was built on low-skilled labor, sorting and selecting those students who should continue on to the next level, be it grades 6, 9, 12, or college, was an important and expected role of teachers and schools.
But the world is different now. Graduating from high school has become a basic step in finding employment. Our own economic survival may well depend on our performing this function at a higher level than we have in the past. There is ample research that it makes financial sense to significantly improve literacy in grades preK–3 (Allington, 2011; Karoly & Bigelow, 2005); and that improvement is critically important if we expect to reduce the number of students struggling with deficits in literacy and mathematics. Increasing the achievement of students living in poverty could be the most cost-effective way to reduce poverty, which in turn could reduce government social services and crime (Gould, Weinberg, & Mustard, 2002). It is cyclical.
Now is the right time to re-examine teaching and grading policies. The job market is different. Education, employment, and poverty are proven to be linked. The grade inflation occurring in many high schools contributes to increased college dropouts (Goodwin, 2011). Standardized assessments make it easier to transition to this change. But first, take a look at how school’s purpose has changed over time.
Education, Employment, and Poverty
U.S. schools began using standardized grading systems during the early 20th century. During this time, attendance became legally mandatory, and the number of public high schools grew from five hundred to ten thousand (Lassahn, n.d.). Personalized descriptive student reports became less feasible. Schools began using percentages and letter grades, which introduced many grading debates around criteria variations and grading-scale variations.
With more students entering public schools and the shifting focus on efficiency, grading in essence became a selection tool to determine who would fail and who would progress to the next educational level. The sort-and-select practice was advantageous for a society that required a relatively low- or semi-skilled labor force. Sorting between the labor force and higher education levels became a public school function.
But now it’s time to reassess our grading practices. By contrast, public schools of the 21st century do not have the luxury of high failure rates. Because of the outcomes—high failure rates and a glut of uneducated employees in a high-skill market—traditional
