Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Grading practices

Teachers and schools are increasingly rated/ranked based on "closing achievement gaps" and "closing excellence gaps." While ideally this may support extra teaching efforts and approaches to encourage the lowest performing pupils to increase learning growth and demonstrate grade-level-proficiency, this may also incentivize teachers and schools to cap the growth of students at the top. Regardless of actual growth achieved and knowledge demonstrated, it is the recorded grades which matter, as these recorded grades provide the data utilized to rate/rank teachers and schools.

When research finds that some students perform above grade level, are "equal outcomes" possible, without capping growth at the top?

Concerns regarding teachers being incentivized to assign grades which indicate "equal outcomes" include:
- grades not providing pupils with honest and meaningful feedback on growth throughout the term
- falsifying records to signal that all pupils are performing at the same skill level
- some students may receive inflated grades (exaggerating demonstrated knowledge)
- some students may receive deflated grades (downplaying demonstrated knowledge)
- there is a ceiling beyond which growth is not measured
- growth beyond the ceiling is capped, thwarted, discouraged
- there are a growing number of grading practices in use to ensure the reporting of "equal outcomes"
- truth, honesty, integrity fall by the wayside when essentially measuring with a rubber ruler to report "equal outcomes"
- students may fail to develop "internal locus of control" (but instead take a passive role in their education)
- rather than the onus being on the student for his/her learning, students do not take responsibility for their learning
- the traditional teaching/learning partnership between educator and pupil is replaced with a model in which the responsibility for "learning" is transferred from pupil to teacher. The teacher is held accountable for both teaching and learning.

There are a number of old threads which have discussed standards based grading and related means of assigning grades, including
- grading based on subjective expectations for a given child,
- selective redo opportunities,
- subjective grading based on a teacher's expectation for that student (not based on a standard or rubric which allows comparison amongst students),
- level of mastery for testing out,
- Competency Based Education (CBE), based on achieving mastery, regardless of number of repetitions or length of time required, which may tend to make all accomplishments seem indistinguishably the same among students of the same chronological age,
- differentiated task demands,
- differentiation in task demands -vs- variability in work products produced.

Because grading practices listed in the above roundup make all students appear to have achieved the same outcomes, some may wrongly infer that all students are performing at the same level. With student grades (from preschool on) permanently stored in statewide longitudinal data systems* , the grades assigned may have lasting impact. Grades which are contrived to show equal outcomes by all students may:
- inaccurately represent student growth and progress,
- skew GPAs and class rank,
- influence college admissions,
- demotivate gifted students,
- give an inflated sense of accomplishment to students assigned an "A" grade for lower levels of work.
Some may say the widespread adoption of such grading practices by US public schools, combined with data collection P-20, changes these classrooms into a taxpayer-funded lab for studying the results of these practices upon our children.

Related posts:
- list of grading practices
- policies which lack transparency

By contrast, grading practices often used to consist of a set of:
- pre-test grades, reflecting prior knowledge or inbound knowledge,
- formative grades, reflecting uptake of the material whilst one was working through the course,
- summative grades or post-test grades, reflecting retained knowledge or outbound knowledge at the end of the course.

Studies such as the NWEA - Fordham Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? (Sept 2011), indicate that some students may become "descenders" within a given one-third of their class. Unfortunately, this may inspire some schools to seek strategies to intentionally create "descenders," in order to close gaps and achieve equal outcomes.
1) One heinous method:
- Enroll students in a particular class.
- Have selected student(s) actually attend a different, higher class.
- The selected student(s) will learn more and outperform those attending the class for which they enrolled.
- By comparison, the students attending the class for which they were enrolled are now "descenders."
2) Another toxic gotcha:
- Quiz students on their study preferences (listening to background music, etc)
- Divide students, presumably by preferences.
- For some student groups, loudly play upsetting, discordant, attention-distracting music during tests. Note that students do not choose the music or control the volume. Students taking tests under these conditions are now "descenders." Teacher and school defend the practice as an "accommodation" requested by students.
3) Another demotivator:
- Document and publish a plan to tally student participation points.
- A predetermined number of students with the highest tallies will "earn" an opportunity to attend a student senate conference.
- When the tallies are in and verified, change the rules, ignoring the students with the highest tallies of participation points.
- Tell the students with the highest participation points that you have selected other students in order to better ration opportunities. Tell the high-tally students that their only reward is the satisfaction they derived from their work. [Consider whether the teacher saying this would accept satisfaction in their work to be their only reward, if their promised paycheck was withheld from them and given others.]
- The duped students learn not to trust the system. The students who received the reward without working to "earn" it learn a sense of entitlement. Neither group of students develop "internal locus of control" from this experience.
4) More examples may be found in the thread Toxic Educational Practices - a rogues gallery.

Summary:
Grading practices and grades recorded provide honest/insightful or less-honest/less-insightful feedback to students.
Recorded grades also signal performance level to families, teachers, schools, institutions, programs.
Recorded grades provide input to research studies.
By these various means, grading practices impact teacher ability to remain employed, school ability to access funding, realistic-or-unrealistic student self-concept, college readiness, college acceptance, college grade inflation/deflation, and ultimately even the value of degrees conferred.

Unfortunately, concerned parents are not the only members/readers of this forum. It is my understanding that this forum is also frequented by personnel from schools/districts looking to perpetrate this type of disservice toward top pupils in order to cap the growth of students at the top and thereby close gaps... achieving equal outcomes. Their goal is to improve their own teacher/school ratings, rankings, scorecard.

* web page of statewide longitudinal data systems archived on WayBack machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20210809095250/https://www2.ed.gov/programs/slds/factsheet.html

Adding a link to another post with negative classroom practices which, unfortunately, may be utilized to undermine the gifted. A tip for parents: Please be alert to these practices in your child's classroom...
and consider embracing learning-from-mistakes at home.

More examples of stumbling blocks for the gifted in this old post, and in this old post (which exists in a thread of Toxic Educational Practices).

With Common Core, data collection, and equal outcomes, the government schools which children attend today are significantly different than the public schools which their parents may have attended more than a decade ago. This post is primarily to raise awareness among newer parents to the forum... especially those who may be bewildered by the classroom experiences their child reports, and/or whose child may be suddenly inundated with homework, unhappy, and/or suffering a lack of positive self-esteem, and/or underachieving, and/or exhibiting school refusal.

DS8 is in an all gifted third grade class. In math they take a topic pretest, set a goal (like “I’d like to improve my pretest score by 25 points”), list steps to reach that goal, take a post-test and then reflect on whether they reached their goal and why or why not. The packet is sent home and the parent has a place to sign and send back comments. If a student does really well on the pretest they are allowed to work on enrichment math and if enough students do well on the pretest, they skip it and move to the next topic.

DS11 is also in an all gifted class. He’s 2e and math is really hard for him. His class does something similar (minus the goal setting and parent form). I know he has to get 75% to move on from a topic. Otherwise he keeps taking tests on the same topic. And since he needs extra time, it takes a lot of missed recesses to get through a difficult topic.

So I could see how it another student gets an 80 on her first try and DS11 gets an 82 after three attempts where he only got 72s, that would be unfair if there were rankings. But in fifth grade I don’t think they care about rankings so both students would be marked as a 3 which is that they met standards.

Agreed.

There are rankings. Lifelong rankings. Pupils may not be ranked immediately, in a manner apparent to the student/parents. But once data is stored in the Longitudinal Data System, it may be extracted at any time over the years to be rated/ranked by any number of entities and/or researchers, for a variety of purposes.

I'm not a fan of data collection because I am aware that:
- the extensive data collection is usurping lifelong privacy, and thereby evaporating personal freedom and liberty
- the data collected can be "gamed"
- the data chosen for collection may be considered to have been selected or "cherry-picked" from a broader variety of data available
- subsequent uses of the data can provide skewed statistics
- subsequent uses of data can become weaponized
- parents (and eligible students) routinely experience difficulty in obtaining the data stored
- parents (and eligible students) are therefore not able to correct data although 1) this is a FERPA right and 2) "quality, validilty, reliability" of data is a stated requirement of data collection

Storing accurate data may alleviate these concerns, to a degree. For example:
- recording scores of all assessments (both original and redo(s)) 72 - 72 - 72 - 82
- simply acknowledging that the final score was not the original score but was achieved on the nth attempt 082,n

San Diego Unified School District Changes Grading System to 'Combat Racism'
Alexis Rivas
October 15, 2020
NBC San Diego
The SDUSD VP decries practices of: formative and summative grades... downgrading late assignments... zero tolerance for cheating.

Observant readers will notice and question the reporting, including:

- Failing grades by demographic group:
....."30% - English Learners
......25% - Students with Disabilities
......23% - Native Americans
......23% - Hispanics
......20% - Blacks
......07% - Whites"
...This totals 128%, Several students may belong to multiple demographic groups.
...The first two demographic groups do not reveal the student's race/ethnicity.

- "Disparities due to cheating..." appears to not hold students accountable for their choices to break the rules...
...but rather removes the rules. What precedent does this set, what message does this send for managing expectations that
...students learn the importance of compliance with other rules in society?

- "... teachers fail minority students more than White students " casts the students as passive entities,
... rather than acknowledging that grades were based on actual learning and demonstrated knowledge.

- "...citizenship grade...", a term referring to student behavior, including cheating and late assignments.
...More accurate, descriptive, and readily understood terms may be "deportment," "decorum," or "behavior."

Thoughtful readers will remember that correlation does not imply causation: A student with a failing grade and who is a member of a demographic minority is not the same as a student being given a failing grade because s/he is a member of a demographic minority.

Unfortunately, there is a movement away from holding pupils accountable, and toward blaming the system.

The announced changes, when put into widespread practice, appear designed to inculcate poor study habits which will not serve students well throughout life. The new path to good grades appears to be: defer turning in your assignments long enough to cheat, copy another student's work, and receive credit. Essentially gaming the system to achieve a grade which indicates success.

There are a number of topics under consideration by this large district (faced by most diverse districts), frequently conflated (disproportionality, student vs teacher vs parent responsibility, school-to-work/college preparation, high standards for all, etc.). I won't comment on all of them at once, as that real-world discussion is complex and multi-faceted.

But I will note that, some time ago, we tried the experiment of year-long grades (not averaging term grades), no penalties for late work (unlimited extended time for all students), and additionally not penalizing for homework. That experiment was widely panned by nearly all stakeholders (school, home, students), as one unintended consequence was that students simultaneously felt no incentive to keep up on work (holding unrealistic expectations for being able to do it all "later"), and also felt overwhelmed by the volume of work to be made up when they did try to dig out of a hole. The students who were most likely to be able to take advantage of these polices were those who had the familial resources to be tutored through months worth of back work, and who did not have to prioritize their time for essentials, such as working a job to contribute to household maintenance.

In other words, those who benefited most from the intended-to-be-inclusive policy were those who were already most advantaged. Needless to say, that similarly well-intentioned experiment has come to an end.