Regarding Standards-Based Grading
(SBG), an article by Joy Pullmann entitled “Common Core Even Affects
Letter Grades” reveals:
“Teachers have used standards-based grading
almost as long as U.S. schools have been required to conform to centrally
determined standards, or for approximately 20 years. But the practice—in which
teachers give students not the familiar A-F letter grades or 0-100 percentile
grades, but numbers or letters like 1 through 4 or S, M, P—has ticked upwards
since 46 states adopted national standards in 2010, says said Ken O’Connor, a
Canadian consultant who has worked with hundreds of schools across North America
on this topic.”
…O’Connor
also said that “In a pure standards-based system you would have only two
levels: proficient and not proficient.”
Another educator dubbed it “UNgrading”.
In her October 6, 2014 comments to the U-46 school board, parent Colleen Ottens
described a teacher who supported SBG, who observed that “In his traditional
method of grading, he had some of grades from As to Fs. When he changed to SBG,
his grades all tended toward the mean. While he got rid of his Fs, he also got
rid of all As and most Bs, with most students receiving Cs.”
The tendency for SBG to push all
students to the middle, or average, is a well
recognized drawback of SBG. With its tendency toward egalitarianism,
it is no wonder why so many high performing U-46 students, including U-46
student board member Megha
Bhattacharya, find it objectionable. Megha’s peers at other U-46
schools also voiced their objections. Streamwood Senior Hunter Roark came to
the board representing 200 of his fellow classmates, with similar comments. Further, as reported
by Dave Gathman at The Courier News,
“South
Elgin High sophomore Allie Dunsing complained to the board at its last meeting
that “with the new system, it’s almost impossible to get A’s.”
“… Jordan Stibal, a Streamwood High
senior, complained that she recently finished one assignment, got zero items
wrong on it, but still earned only a “3” grade on it because the teacher said
that a “4” would indicate a mastery of the entire course content.
“Being in the top 10 (of her graduating class) means the
world to me. But this grading system has made it impossible to get 4’s,” Stibal
said. “This is making my life an utter mess.”
Nick Del Giudice of Streamwood High said the system will
hurt U46 students trying to get into desirable colleges because they will be
competing against students from schools where A’s apparently are easier to
earn.”
Students at U-46 and across the
country (here is an example in a Minnesota school district) rightly
complain that it is harder to achieve high grades, not because they are not
willing to work hard, but because of how the system is set up. And this in turn
is affecting them at a time in their lives when they are trying to get their
lives launched by getting into the colleges of their choice. One parent posted
a letter from the University of Kentucky
she received regarding the important of un-weighted GPA in college
admissions, indicating that U-46 students receiving lower SGB grades will be
competing with students across the country NOT having to deal with them.
Despite the objections voiced,
board members Amy Kerber, Traci O’Neal Ellis and Jennifer Shroder re-affirmed
their support of SBG at the September 29, 2016 U-46 board meeting. Interestingly,
one local superintendent told me that his district ISN’T implementing SBG, and
that SBG ISN’T required to meet Common Core standards.
I haven’t even gone into depth regarding
other objections to SBG, that it discounts homework (I was told by one U-46 teacher
that next year, it is likely in U-46 that homework will not count toward
student grades at all), that kids and parents don’t understand what the grades
mean, that, like the previous short-lived 50% grade for zero effort system, it
also arbitrarily pulls up students who are not performing. (One student
commented that his peers could basically turn in “anything” and get a “1”).
But my biggest objection to the way
SBG has been implemented here is its tendency to pull student grades to the
“average” or middle, to make everyone the same, more or less. This kills
incentive on both ends - the high performing and the low performing. It’s like
everyone getting the same prize when finishing a race, even though everyone
knows who came in first and who came in last. There is no incentive to reach
for anything.
The old system of percentages and
A, B, C, D, F grades wasn’t perfect. It was unequally implemented (like SBG!).
But high performance was usually rewarded. Non-performance was usually
penalized. And when those outcomes didn’t happen, parents and educators had a
common ground on which to converse. Given the collateral damage to students in
this district, especially highly motivated, highly performing ones, I believe a
temporary or perhaps permanent return to traditional grading is in order - if
not permanent, at least for long enough for proper change management to be
implemented by a competent board.
