Tag Standards based grading

Standards (De)Based Education

Dusty Leave a comment

All right. It’s time.

Let’s talk about standards.

I won’t say I appreciate or admire the people who picked the word “standards” to describe their prescription for education in this country. But I will acknowledge an absolute masterstroke of rhetoric, which is what that was. “We have high standards,” they could say. “Don’t you think schools should have standards? Don’t you have any standards for your students?” they could ask teachers who objected.

What can I do but hang my head in shame, and agree to teach THE STANDARDS?

I’ll tell you what I can do: I can, and do, object to the standards as they are written. I object, too, to the very idea of standards: but let’s take one thing at a time. And the less radical, first.

It’s not too far out there to object to the standards, at least in one way: pretty quickly after the Common Core were adopted in most states, they received the approval of the Obama administration – and therefore the whole-hearted hatred of the Republican side of the country, particularly during the Tea Party boondoggle. So if I say I hate the Common Core, I at least have allies – though they’re not necessarily the allies I want to have. But I’ll take them, because they are correct in essence, if not in attribution of causation.

Backing up. First, what are the standards? According to the Arizona Department of Education, they are this:

These standards define the knowledge and skills students should have within their K-12 education careers so that they will graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs. The standards:

  • Are aligned with college and work expectations;
  • Are clear, understandable and consistent;
  • Include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills;
  • Build upon strengths and lessons of current state standards;
  • Are informed by other top performing countries, so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society; and
  • Are evidence-based.

Standards are a list of skills and knowledges that students should have when they graduate high school. Jim dandy. Seems useful to know what a student should know.

Quick question: who decides what a student “should” know? And how do we decide that? What is the basis for picking a specific skill and saying a student “should” know that before graduating high school? That knowledge of X, Y, and Z is necessary to “earn” a high school diploma?

Hang on: first let’s look at the sales pitch for the standards.

Critical Message about Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards – English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics

· The purpose of the new standards is to provide a consistent set of English Language Arts (ELA)/Literacy and Mathematics expectations that prepare all students for college and career options.

· The standards are designed to ensure that our students remain competitive in the global market of the 21st century.

· Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards – English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics standards include Arizona additions. Arizona’s adoption of these standards ensures a more seamless education for high mobility students since grade level standards and expectations are consistent across 46 participating states.

· The creation of the English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics standards was a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governor’s Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).

Okay: a consistent set of expectations that prepare all students for college and career options. Cool. Equity of access and opportunity is important, it is a fundamental promise of this country, and it is also one of the best ways to assure the general welfare of our people; so yes, all students should have access to the same preparation for college and career options.

I mean: they don’t. There are several other factors involved in educational outcomes, primarily the students’ socioeconomic status and family educational levels (which are also, of course, socioeconomically influenced if not determined). And because education funding in this country is primarily a factor of local district tax base, it ensures that students in the richest schools have access to the best educational opportunities and resources, and students in the poorest schools do not, and that system will survive that way as long as we keep the same archaic, institutionally-racist and classist funding structure.

But yes, surely all students should meet a certain minimum set of expectations. I’m with that. Standards, right? We have standards, and students have to live up to our standards, or we won’t accept them.

Umm…not sure what that means. I mean, if someone I go on a blind date with doesn’t meet my standards, then they go off to find someone else whose standards they do meet, and I go home alone, But what does it mean when a child – when a fellow citizen – doesn’t meet our standard? Does it mean they don’t get to live in this country? Don’t get to be citizens? Does it mean they have to struggle for the rest of their lives, because they weren’t good enough according to our standard?

You ever think about what it says about a student – a child, that is, since I’m talking about K-12 education, and the majority of students are still under 18 when they graduate high school – when we say that student doesn’t deserve a diploma? Hasn’t earned an education? Didn’t prove themselves to be good enough? If all education meant was the achievement of a specific set of skills and knowledges, then it would be appropriate to say those things (though the implication of merit in words like “deserve” and “good enough” is questionable if not outright wrong); but it doesn’t just mean that. We attach quite a number of value judgments to people who “earn” a diploma, and withhold them from people who “fail” to “earn” one. Those who don’t meet our standards, that is. Those children, we determine and decree, will suffer and struggle, because they’re not good enough. Never mind that there are countless ways to live, and live successfully, without ever mastering the skills and knowledges that “earn” one a high school diploma. Never mind that high school diplomas don’t necessarily show that one has or has not mastered the skills and knowledges: a diploma shows that one was able to prove one’s mastery of skills and knowledges to the satisfaction of those who decide who earns that diploma – me, in other words, as a teacher who gives grades, who determines who passes and who fails my classes. Me and all of my fellow educators. We decide who gets a diploma, who has shown to our satisfaction that they have mastered the skills and knowledges we chose for them to master, to our standard, on our assessments.

I think about my wife, who is one of the smartest and most capable people I have ever known (And I’ve known a hell of a lot of smart people), who was not allowed to earn a diploma because she called her principal an asshole. After he told her that she wasn’t good enough to graduate from his school, because he thought she was lazy and disrespectful. She was expelled from the school. She got a GED, a Graduation Equivalency Diploma – hang on; that’s not it. I just looked it up, and it actually stands for General Educational Development test. Huh. Did you know that’s what it was? Maybe I’m the only one who didn’t. Anyway, she earned her GED certificate, and also a high school proficiency certificate, by acing those two tests (because she is incredibly intelligent, if I didn’t already make that clear – they wanted to skip her two grades in elementary school. TWO GRADES. Nobody ever suggested I skip any grades. I’m not jealous, though.) and then went to work: but she couldn’t get a job, because she wasn’t yet 18 and so wasn’t allowed to work in most places in California during the regular school day. She was also told that the GED wasn’t as good as a diploma because she hadn’t shown she had the work ethic to complete the normal schooling program.

So I guess it isn’t just about showing mastery of the skills and knowledges required for college and career readiness. Huh? It’s also about showing oneself to be the kind of person our society approves of. It’s about winning the good regard of teachers, who are by nature and training judgmental. I mean, I’m a swell guy, and surely all of my judgments of my students’ characters are right on the money, and totally should have a significant impact on the lives of all of the students who pass through my classes. Some of those other teachers, though… pretty sketchy.

My wife’s story – this point I’m making about teachers and our generally subjective judgments of students – is one of the arguments behind standards, of course. Because CHUDs like the guy who told her she wasn’t “Aptos High material,” and she’d never amount to anything in her life, shouldn’t be the ones keeping the gates and refusing entry to our citizens. If students can show that they possess the skills and knowledges we expect them to have, then that should be enough: and no individual with their own biases and prejudices should be able to torpedo any person’s progress into productive citizenship.

I agree with that. It’s the one argument for standards, and for standardized testing, which I agree with and support whole-heartedly. My wife got the shit end of this stick because she was what this guy saw as a “troublemaker;” maybe because she is a woman, maybe because she was not in the same socioeconomic class as many students at that school (Though not all the students at the school were wealthy, not by any means), maybe for any of several other reasons. But there are millions of kids who suffer this same sort of fate, being prevented from achieving not because they lack the skills, but because someone in charge doesn’t think they’re good enough: and the most common reason, of course, is racism. I have heard people who know better than me point out that standardized tests, while imperfectly anti-racist themselves, are at least objective and colorblind in their allocation of success or failure: which means a student with racist teachers can still pass the test, can still prove they have met the standards, and therefore should be able to earn a diploma no matter what their racist teachers think. I appreciate that argument, and I therefore wouldn’t want to argue that all standardized tests and grades and so on should be removed, at least not until we can ensure no bias in the people acting as gatekeepers.

I will argue that we should remove the idea of gates, and specific standards of achievement.

But hold on: before I argue against standards entirely – before I show that I do not, in fact, have any standards – I want to finish my point about the standards we all have right now. They are no longer the Common Core standards, which became politically tainted during the 2010’s; though if you think they are appreciably different from those Common Core standards, you don’t know education: we don’t like changing things, we like keeping the old things – or even better, resurrecting the older things – and giving them a new name. The Common Core State Standards look like this: “By the end of grade 10, read and comprehend literature [informational texts, history/social studies texts, science/technical texts] at the high end of the grades 9–10 text complexity band independently and proficiently.” And the all-new, all-improved Arizona College and Career Readiness Standards look like this: “By the end of grade 10, read and comprehend informational and functional text, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts, at the high end of the grades 9–10 text complexity band independently and proficiently. (AZ.9‐10.RI.10)” You can see for yourself how Arizona is independent, and not still following along with that whole socialist Common Core mandate. WOO! States’ rights!

So my question is, still: who decided what were the skills and knowledges required to graduate high school? Who determined what students “should” know?

It’s not actually a simple question to answer – neither the one about what students should know, nor the one about who decided it. The issue with deciding what students should know is deciding what we think students should be ready to do. Do we think they should be ready to go to work? Do we think they should be ready to go to college? Do we think they should be capable of teaching themselves? Or do we think they should already know everything they will ever need to know? What mixture of those four things is correct, job/college/already know/can learn? But then there are more questions: what should students know to be ready to go to work? What kinds of jobs are we talking about? And what does “ready” mean? I haven’t ever been “ready” for any job, if “ready” means “already capable of every aspect of the job required.” I have always had to learn on the job. Do we want them ready for entry level, or ready to move up to the top echelons of management? Do we want them ready for local jobs, or do we want them to be ready for any jobs? Please note that if we decide to make our students ready for any jobs, then they’re going to be learning a whole lot of things that seem like they aren’t important, because those students will look around their part of the world, look at the people they know, and they will think, “Nobody in my town knows physics, or needs to know physics. Why do I need to know physics?” If our only answer is, “You might find a job somewhere else that requires a knowledge of physics,” we’re not going to convince a lot of students to try very hard in physics class. But also, if we decide that nobody who goes to school in this town needs to know physics, then we are sentencing those students to live only in places and have only careers that do not require any knowledge of physics. Maybe that’s fine: we decided, pretty unanimously, that none of the students in American schools need to be familiar with Mongolian folk dancing; we therefore cut them all off from careers involving Mongolian folk dancing.

Pretty fucked up, guys. Denying our children that avenue in life? Who were we to decide that for them?

But also: how much time and energy do we want to dedicate to teaching Mongolian folk dancing, on the expectation that some number of our students will pursue a life that involves Mongolian folk dancing?

And before you scoff too hard at that: recognize that almost all American students were, at some point in the last several decades, taught how to square dance. We thought that was a valuable use of time and resources. And I, for one, would rather know Mongolian folk dancing than how to do-si-do.

This is amazing.

(Let me also point out, though this is off topic and too large a subject, THAT WE SHOULD NOT FOCUS EDUCATION ENTIRELY ON THE ABILITY TO MAKE STUDENTS PRODUCTIVE AND CAREER-READY. LIFE IS NOT JUST ABOUT YOUR JOB. STOP TELLING STUDENTS THAT EVERYTHING THEY LEARN AND EVERYTHING THEY DO IS GETTING THEM READY FOR “THE REAL WORLD OF WORK.”)

But okay, we’re really only talking about English/Language Arts and Mathematics. (Hey: who decided those two were the most fundamental skills? I agree that communication is vital in essentially everything; but is English the only way to learn to communicate? What if we decided instead to teach every student to be fluent conversationally in three different languages other than English? Or what if we decided that proper communication required an understanding of our context, including our cultural context and the context of our interlocutors, and therefore all students must master 12 years of social studies including sociology and psychology? AND DON’T GET ME STARTED ON MATH.) So surely the expectations of what should be mastered in those subjects is more straightforward. Right?

It may be. I object to a number of the standards – for instance, I am supposed to dedicate considerable time and energy to this one: “Analyze various accounts of a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a person’s life story in both print and multimedia), determining which details are emphasized in each account.” (AZELA Standard 9-10.RI.7) – but I can’t argue against the ones which say students should be able to read proficiently and independently, or that students should cite evidence for their claims, or that students should know how to analyze complex characters. And all of the different sets of standards were all written with input from various teachers and teacher groups and other educators.

But not only teachers.

Common Core, for one example (And there are lots of examples, of course. Education is a very profitable business. Lots of companies get involved in trying to create educational resources, and then trying to sell them to the very large market of schools and teachers flush with all that gummint porkbarrel money), was written by the Council of Chief State School Officers, which is essentially all of the various Superintendents of Instruction from each of the 50 states. They took input from the National Council of Teachers of English, the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, the NEA and the AFT (the two largest national teachers’ unions), and various other teachers and educators. I suppose I should point out that most of the chief state school officers have education backgrounds, though not all of them; but more importantly, I think, is that the CCSSO was not the only organization involved: it was also the National Governors’ Association, which certainly has a stake in education at the state level, but generally includes a whole lot fewer educators; and also, a certain non-profit group founded in 1996 called Achieve. (Don’t be too impressed, by the way, by this group being non-profit; the College Board is non-profit, and they’re the ones who make all of the AP tests, and the ACT, and the SAT. And then charge millions of students hundreds of millions of dollars every year to take their tests. But they’re not profiting from it.)

That last one is the interesting one. Because you figure the CCSSO and the teachers’ unions are going to represent what the educational establishment wants: what is best for the current school structure, and for the teachers. And the Governors’ association will represent the will of, if not the people, at least the constituents who have the ear of the governors; which surely includes parents’ groups and the larger constituency special interests. I think it’s safe to say that both groups, the CCSSO and the NGA, of politicians would represent the interests of the monied class in this country: since that is who commands the attention if not the obedience of politicians.

So who did Achieve represent? Maybe the students? The ones who have the most skin in this game, so to speak, the ones most affected by all of this wrangling, and the ones who, as lacking votes and money in general, do not have the attention and obedience of the politicians?

Of course not.

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Achieve’s website tells us this: “Achieve is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit education reform organization dedicated to working with states to raise academic standards and graduation requirements, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability.”

Very nice! That sounds great. But…who are you?

I couldn’t actually find a list of the board of directors on their website (I admit I didn’t look too hard, as I expected to have to go outside of the organization to find what I wanted to know), but I found one on Ballotpedia, interestingly enough; seems like Achieve has some involvement in politics, as well as in education. Well, they said they work with the states, right?

Here are their directors, according to Ballotpedia (Which got the list from the Achieve website, accessed in 2016; unfortunately when you follow the same link to the current list of the board of directors, you get this:

Achieve is led by governors, business leaders, and influential national leaders committed to improving K-12 educational outcomes for all students.

Created in 1996 by a bipartisan group of governors and business leaders, Achieve is leading the effort to make college and career readiness a priority across the country so that students graduating from high school are academically prepared for postsecondary success.

Cool, thanks.)

Here’s the list from 2016:

  • Mark B. Grier, Vice chair
  • Michael Cohen, President
  • Craig R. Barrett, Chair
  • S. James Gates Jr.
  • Governor Bill Haslam (R-Tenn.)
  • Governor Jay Nixon (D-Mo.)
  • Governor Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.)
  • Former Governor John McKernan Jr. (R-Maine)
  • Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Chairman Emeritus

Sorry to use out of date information, but also: Mark B. Grier is listed by Ballotpedia as the current top executive at Achieve, and while he has also moved on to a director position at Freddie Mac, his profile there still lists him as a board member at Achieve, so I’ll take this list as representative if not current.

Who are these people? Glad you asked.

Dr. Sylvester James Gates, Jr., is a badass. An award-winning and influential theoretical physicist, professor, author, and documentarian, his involvement with Achieve could only improve their work. Not sure how much sway he actually has, but his presence on the board is the best thing I found. (He’s also the only African-American on the board, but surely that’s neither here nor there.)

Michael Cohen, president (Not THAT Michael Cohen) is actually an educator (Though he worked for Bill Clinton, so he’s a neoliberal educator). He is also the only one with a page readily available on the Achieve website – though to be fair, their Search function is not currently available, and the website hasn’t been updated since 2021. Craig R. Barrett, chairman, is the former CEO of Intel. Mark B. Grier, vice chair (and maybe current chair) is the former CFO at Prudential. (Also: “Grier’s leadership on the board continues Prudential Financial’s longstanding commitment to improving education outcomes.  Former Prudential Chairman Art Ryan served on the Achieve board from 1999 to 2008, and as the chairman from 2005 to 2008.” So again, if the list isn’t current, it’s at least representative. Mark Grier to Lead Achieve Board | Achieve) Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Chairman Emeritus, is the former CEO of IBM, and the former chairman of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm. Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee  is also the former president of Pilot Corp, a petroleum company that owns the Flying J rest stops. Former Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri is one of the Democrats on the “nonpartisan” board, and is a lawyer turned politician rather than a corporate overlord, so he wasn’t too bad – but did hand control of Ferguson over to the state highway patrol and later called in the National Guard to put down riots after Michael Brown was shot and killed. Maggie Hassan (The only woman on the board, but surely that’s neither here nor there) and Jock McKernan are also former lawyers turned politicians, Hassan the current embattled Democratic senator from New Hampshire, McKernan the Republican governor of Maine in the late 80s and early 90s (And the husband of Senator Olympia Snowe, if that matters), and are generally not offensive.

So that’s who wrote the Common Core. Teachers – but also politicians, and business executives. And who do we think had the most influence, the final say? Probably not the teachers. And definitely not the students.

But is that so terrible? I think I hear you ask. What’s wrong with business executives promoting the standards? Well, inasmuch as they were simply people who understood complicated systems and processes, and who live in this society and therefore may have a stake in its success, nothing. But that’s not all they are. Businessmen, especially executives of these sorts of large, international corporations, are not particularly loyal to any one society; they are loyal to the bottom line: shareholder value. I cannot believe that these men created Achieve, and pushed for the Common Core standards to be accepted nationwide, for any reason other than they knew it would be good for business.

From what I can see of the standards, and the intent of those who wrote them, they are very good at producing exactly what businesspeople seem to want: conformist rule-followers who don’t think very originally, and who don’t question authority, but who are very good at mindless, repetitive tedium, and who seek simple entertainment and satisfaction at the end of the very long work week. Good workers (Remember how the work ethic is as important if not more important than mastery of the skills?) who are also good consumers. Good employees, and good customers.

How do standards do that? In a number of ways. Partly because they are standard: the goal is to make every student the same as every other student, capable of all the same things. If we see those things as a baseline, and give schools room and resources to reach beyond that, then there’s no problem; but that’s not how the school system works – and again, that is because of the same people wielding the same influences. Because the other part of the push for common standards is – the push for accountability. It’s right there in the Achieve mission statement. “Achieve is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit education reform organization dedicated to working with states to raise academic standards and graduation requirements, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability.” (Emphasis added)

See, we can’t have universal standards unless we can be sure they are adhered to. Right? We have to make sure these schools, and those wacky tree-huggin’ hippie teachers, are doing what they’ve been told to do. So in addition to creating new standards that will define what is taught, we will create and implement test after test after test after test, to make sure that the teaching is – well, meeting the standard.

Do you know what happens when you create an entirely new system of curriculum, and a new set of assessments? Particularly during a global recession, when state education budgets are being slashed and burned like virgin forests in logging country? (By the way, Jay Nixon of Missouri was also called the “cutter-in-chief” for all the cuts he imposed on the Missouri state budget. But he did also support investment in education when things started turning around, so. Good and bad, I suppose.)

The schools fail, that’s what. New curriculum takes time to figure out and make functional. New assessments take time for students to get used to them. Even in the ideal testing situation, the whole idea is that you take the results of the test and use it to inform the next year’s instruction in order to raise the scores: which pretty much requires that the first year’s scores are going to suck.

And so they did. And do.

Which opens up a lot of options for those who want to control the education system in this country, say, in order to produce better worker drones and more consumers to buy products.

Any time the school does not meet the standard, any assessment that shows the students are not showing the specific evidence asked for which proves they have mastered the chosen skills and knowledges to the extent and in the manner determined by the people in charge, then the school is failing, the teachers are failing, the students are failing. And when a school is failing, we will sanction it in some way, and follow one of a number of alternative courses: we could use that  failing school as evidence that a current politician has failed their constituents, and thus push for the candidates we like; we could use that failing school to argue that the school system in general is failing and therefore we should promote vouchers for private schools; or to argue that the school system is failing and therefore the state needs to loosen the requirements for charter schools; or to argue that the school system is failing and it is the fault of those damn teachers’ unions. So many options!

We could also argue that the school system is failing, so there needs to be greater emphasis on achieving the standards. Now that we have these lovely standards written, we can push to have them adopted across the country (Maybe in conjunction with a huge federal mandate, which rhymes with Moe Wild Heft Refined, which also mandates accountability…), and then use that to impose more expectations that schools will adhere to the standards, so that every child in every state can have the same results! Won’t that be wonderful? If … Moe wild is heft refined?

(Sorry.)

Once we decide that the school is failing and the most important thing is to make sure that students MEET THE STANDARD, the stage is set for the process we have watched play out across this country: we start teaching to the test; and more devastating, we eliminate everything that is not teaching to the test. Electives are cut, because the students need more remedial instruction in math and English. Which frustrates the students, and makes them feel like the system is not helping them but is instead out to crush their spirits (because it is), and of course they resent it, and so of course they rebel against it: they don’t try as hard as they could on the tests, because fuck the tests, man!

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Which means the school does not meet the standard: and so we can go through another round of whatever-flavor-of-damage-we-want-to-inflict-on-the-system.

My school knows that I’m a good teacher. It’s hard not to: my students generally like me, their parents generally like me; the surveys the school does of parents and students always reward me with sterling reviews. I was even named in a Google review of the whole school as one of the reasons why my school is worth going to. And, if I may presume, I think that anybody who comes and watches me teach will see that I am good at it. (I mean, I’m not always sure I’m good at it, but that’s because I have imposter syndrome and a certain amount of anxiety over my abilities. Never mind. It’s not important.)

But what the school tells me, every single time they evaluate me, (Which in this environment of hyper assessment, is every goddamn year; also I live in a “Right to Work” state, for a charter school, which means there is no teacher’s union to represent me, and therefore no tenure. Can’t let them lazy goddamn teachers just relax and teach! They need to worry about losing their jobs all the time! That’ll keep ‘em in line!) is that I need to provide documentation that I am teaching the standards. I need to write objectives on the board. I need to review those objectives with my students, every class. I need to align my instruction and my assessments, and now my grades, with those standards. I need to write daily lesson plans that show I’m focusing on the standards. I need to give common formative assessments, five times a quarter, to show that my students are progressing in their mastery of the standards.

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That’s what my job has become. Standards-based instruction, with (eventually) standards-based grading. Everything standardized. Which makes the businesspeople happy: and since my charter school is run by a corporation, and therefore by businesspeople, they will be happy, too. They’re pretty dang sure that creating a laser focus on the standards will achieve the results they want: proof that all of our students are meeting and exceeding all the standards, because all our teachers do all day long is try to get them to learn and master the standards. Because, we are told, that is how the school is assessed and graded by the state: according to our ability to make our students meet the standard of mastering the standards on standardized tests.

Yeah, it stopped meaning anything to me, too. Quite a while ago now.

You know what might be the most insidious part? There’s still an argument to be made for standards. As I said, there is nothing wrong with a baseline of ability that all students should be provided an opportunity to reach. I still think we should not tell a child that they are “failing” just because they can’t pass fucking Algebra or whatever, but I do think that a general education is a good idea, and that there are things that should be included in everyone’s education. Yes to that. Assessment of student achievement and ability is an important part of education (Though there are YEARS worth of caveats and qualifications in that. Most of which I’ve already written about, and I’ll get to the rest.), so assessment of a student’s mastery of a standard is a valid pursuit.

Here’s the thing that kills me about standards-based education: you get what you measure. You find what you are looking for. If what you want is to see if students have mastered a standard, and you teach to the standard and then assess the standard, then students will show that they achieved mastery. If you focus harder on the standard and teach it more, they will generally do better. If you point out to the students, by writing it on the board and going over it with them every day, exactly what they are supposed to learn and which standard they have to master, then they will do as they are told: they will focus on that idea, that knowledge, that skill, and they will master it. Which means the student data in that class will improve when you do things like write the objectives on the board and go over them in class every day. It works. And, as I have also written about for years, teachers are so hungry for proof that what we spend our lives doing is worth something, when we see those results, see those data points march upwards, know that students are passing the assessments: we like it. We want more of it.

So we do it. We teach to the standards. We use standards-based curriculum, and standards-based grading. It works, after all; and it’s what’s expected of us.

We stop questioning where the standards came from: they’re just the standards, and we have to teach them, so we do. We stop thinking about how dumb those standards are. We forget about the things we used to teach that weren’t measured by the standards – those things are long gone, and after all, they’re not part of the test, not part of the assessment of the students or the teachers or the school. They can’t be that important.

But they are important. All the things that aren’t in the standards are the things that matter most. The things that inspire people, that make them love learning, that make them grow and change. Things like real literature, poetry and novels and plays. Things like learning, for the first time, the history of the oppressed people and the non-dominant cultures – especially important if you happen to be part of one of those cultures, one of those people. Things like relating to and empathizing with other people. Things like school spirit, and community service, and even sports, goddamn it. These things still exist: but they are fading. Students are losing access to sports because they have to spend their after-school time in tutoring, because they haven’t mastered all the standards. Clubs and service organizations are less active, less involved, because there’s not enough time for all of that: students have to study for tests. Teachers can’t give the lessons and assign the projects that become part of a student’s life and personality, because we have to focus on the standards. All of that gets lost by the focus on the standards. Not least because the standards are, by design, simple, measurable nuggets of information. There’s no standard for the intangibles.

You get what you measure. And you lose everything that can’t be measured.

There’s a guy I used to teach with who I think is wrong about almost everything he’s ever said: but there was one thing he said which I thought was 100% accurate. He said that there should only be one standard, one expectation, one guiding goal that drove all of education: Students will learn to think critically. I would actually add to that something more human, like “Students will learn to love their world and themselves,” but I don’t know that schools should consider that a definite and intentional goal, so I’m willing to keep mine as an unspoken purpose, and focus only on the one.

What else is there? There are a dozen ways to learn to think critically, and all of them are valuable. Every subject, every class, can help students to do that. That one skill, with all of the myriad aspects that contribute to it, is the most important thing that people today should have – and that too many of us today can’t do.

And the best part of all? It can’t be measured. And it can’t be standardized.

That’s something that meets my standards.

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Don’t Worry

Dusty Leave a comment

So first, here’s a sneak peek of what’s coming up on the blog:

More ranting about education.

But you knew that already. More specifically, I will be posting about standards, because I hate and oppose those little buggers, and I think more people both would and should if they thought about them the way that I do. I will also be posting about how school administration imposes new expectations and demands and responsibilities on teachers, in the form of new programs that get added every year, without ever taking away any programs or recognizing that teachers are already overwhelmed. Both of these posts are intended as foundations for a post I want to write about censorship in schools: because my colleague recently had to fight to get In Cold Blood by Truman Capote approved for her class for seniors.

Why did she have to fight? Because the administrators worried that the book would be too graphic and disturbing for students. That’s right. The book written in 1965, which does describe the murder of a family and the crime scene afterwards, is somehow going to be upsetting to students — seniors — who listen to true-crime podcasts, who watch horror movies and cop shows and more true crime documentaries. And that book is somehow more objectionable than 1984, with its scenes of torture, and Night and The Diary of A Young Girl with their (also historical and non-fictional) accounts of the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust, and every Shakespeare play ever with all of the murders and suicides and dirty jokes (And sexism and racism and so on, but that’s beside the point, right?), and The Iliad and The Odyssey with all of those multiple murders and sexual assault and misogyny and cannibalism and Hell and so on; and The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, which is about the Vietnam War and includes a scene where two soldiers have to scrape the remains of their friend off of a tree after he gets blown up by a mine. All of those books are on the approved reading list.

I was trying to decide between the first two options, standards or new programs, when something happened: and it combines both problems. As part of the fallout from the tussle over In Cold Blood, there was a meeting yesterday with the faculty of my school and the academic team, who preside over all curricular decisions for the whole charter network, which comprises seven schools in two cities.

Now I have to write about that meeting.

So here’s the deal. The school system I work for is moving to Standards-Based Grading. At all schools, at all levels. The move has been discussed frequently for the past couple of years, always with caveats where I and my fellow high school teachers were concerned: Don’t worry, we were told. It won’t happen for a long time, we were told. It’s only going to be the elementary schools that do it. Welp, there’s been a change in leadership, and now the decision has been made: all schools, all levels. Next school year. So I guess that shows you how much you can believe people who tell you not to worry.

Standards-Based Grading, referred to in the acronym-manic pedagogy system (Hereafter to be known as AMPS) as SBG, is the idea that students’ grades should reflect their learning and their skills: not their work. The basic idea is that grades, rather than being applied to the level of completion of assignments — “You did half of the problems on the math homework sheet, Aloysius, so you get half credit. Sorry.” — should be applied only based on level of mastery of the specific standards for the class, according to a single summative assessment (Though there are caveats there, too. Don’t worry.): “You got 80% on the quiz, Nazgul, so you achieved Proficiency in the standard. Kudos.” Whether Nazgul completed the homework or not is irrelevant; she was able to show proficiency on the standard, and so she gets a passing grade for that unit, for that standard. If she continues to show mastery of the standards, she will earn a passing grade for the class, regardless of the work she completes other than the actual assessments.

Now. The idea of this is to make grades reflect the students’ actual learning and mastery of the key skills, the standards. How the students reach mastery is not the point: which means, proponents of SBG say, that a student is not penalized if they cannot complete work for reasons other than ability (such as they have too many other obligations, too much other homework, they get sick, they don’t have materials, etc.), and students do not have to waste time doing homework when they already know the information, have the skill, mastered the standard; which in theory streamlines education and stops making it feel like a waste of time and an endless grind for the students. The academic team was big on advocating for those poor, poor students who are ahead of the class, and who are bored with work when they already understand the concept and have the skill in question. (By the way: boredom is good for you.) It would also reduce the workload for teachers, because we wouldn’t have to grade all that homework and stuff; and as a sop to teachers who don’t like being told what to teach or how to teach it, with SBG we would have freedom to use whatever content and whatever teaching methods we wished, so long as the assessments and grades for the class focused on mastery of the standards.

That’s the ideal. And in some cases, it works: there are examples (usually cherry-picked, but nonetheless real) of SBG being effective. It is more common at the elementary level, because it makes more sense there to have students’ grades focus on mastery of skills; elementary report cards always have: remember how you got ratings in various traits, which were added up sometimes to a letter grade or the equivalent? But there were no percentages, no test scores averaged with quiz scores averaged with daily bell work scores. Just “Dusty does not play well with others. Dusty’s reading is exemplary. Dusty’s Nerdcraft is LEGENDARY.”

So what they want is for me to teach students, say with a short story, but really (they tell me, adding, “Don’t worry”), it could be anything, a poem, an essay, a full novel, about how to Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme. Or as we call it in the biz, Arizona Reading Literature Standard 9-10.RL.3. And then after I have taught them — or, really even before I’ve taught them, because one of the selling points of SBG, remember, is that it allows students to avoid doing unnecessary work when they already know the information or possess the skill — so before I teach them, I would give them a pre-assessment (They like the term “assessment” much more than the word “test,” and they are quick to tell us that the assessments don’t have to be multiple-choice quizzes, Don’t worry,) to see if they already know the standard, and then teach them, and then give them a post-assessment to see if they have mastered the standard after the instruction. Those who master the standard, on either assessment, get a passing grade.

See how nice that looks? How simple it is? Just two required assessments, and you have a complete picture of which students learned what they were supposed to learn, and which did not. None of that muddy water that comes from Student A who does all their work and yet can’t pass the test — but passes the class because they do all their work, and then graduates from the class without having mastered the actual skills — and Student B who does none of their work but who can ace the assessment, either before or after, because they already know how to analyze how complex characters develop over the course of a text. (Don’t think too much about the students who pass the pre-assessment and therefore don’t need to do any of the instruction in the unit, and who would therefore sit and be bored… there’s a whole lot more to say about this aspect, and I will.)

So that’s SBG. And according to my district academic team, it is coming, soon, and it will affect every teacher, including me. And, they said, they hope it will make things better: it will give us a laser focus on the standards. It will make grading more representative of students’ actual growth, as measured by mastery of the standards. It will simplify grades, to the satisfaction of all concerned, teachers and parents and students as well as the state Department of Education, which mandates that all schools teach mastery of the standards they set, and assess a school’s success rate using standardized tests of standards mastery — in our case, as a high school in Arizona, using the ACT, one of the College Board’s premier college application tests (the other is the SAT), which tests all 11th grade students in Reading, Writing, Math, Science, and Writing again (The first one is a multiple-choice exam of grammar and style questions; the second writing exam is an essay the students write for the exam.). They’re sure this is the right way to go.

Don’t worry.

As you can tell (And if you’re a teacher who has heard of or dealt with SBG, you already knew from the moment I mentioned the topic), I am worried. Very worried. As were the majority of my colleagues, from all subject areas, who came to the meeting. The purpose of the meeting was for us to ask questions and voice our concerns with this move to SBG, and we had a lot to say.

The academic team, however: not worried at all. They are confident. And every time a question was asked or an objection was raised — and there were several, which I’ll address here — the response from the academic team was, essentially, “But that’s not really going to be a problem, so — don’t worry.” Or, “That potential issue won’t matter as much as this improvement we expect to see, so — don’t worry.” Or, “We think that question shows that you don’t understand what we’re talking about, or that you are somehow against students learning, so — shut up.”

That last sort of response? That was an asshole response. It happened more than once.

But that’s not the issue here.

The issue here is SBG. The first question, the first worry, is: why are we doing this? Why make a change away from traditional grading, and why is this a better system? The answer according to SBG proponents is what I said earlier: SBG focuses more on student achievement of the standards, rather than completion of tedious and repetitive homework, like math worksheets of hundreds of similar problems, or English vocabulary assignments that require students to just copy down definitions or memorize spelling. SBG is simpler and more streamlined. There is also a stronger focus (“Laser-focused” was the phrase that our chief academic officer kept using; but he has a doctorate in optics, so of course he would enjoy a laser metaphor. [If you’re wondering why our chief academic officer has a doctorate in optics instead of education, well. I can’t talk about it. Or my head will literally explode.]) on the standards themselves, rather than on old models that focused on content: as an “old school” English teacher (Sorry; that made even me cringe), I think of my class as organized around the literature: the first quarter we focused on short stories, and now we are reading To Kill a Mockingbird; next semester will be argument essays featuring Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and then drama, most likely The Crucible, and poetry. What SBG will do, it is to be hoped, is force me to focus instead on the standards: because proponents of standards believe that standards should be the goal of education, rather than completion of units, rather than a goal based around something amorphous and unassessable, like “Students will understand and appreciate great literature.”

I have a response to that. And when I write about standards, and why I hate those evil little gremlins, I will explain.

For now, put it aside: SBG proponents believe that focusing grades on the standards will focus both the teachers and the students on the standards, and therefore improve the students’ ability to master those standards, because the instruction will be more targeted and specific, and because the students will be more aware of what is expected of them, and therefore will try harder to achieve exactly that. Obviously if mastery of the standards determines their grade, then they will try to master the standards.

Our academic team, when my colleague asked why we needed to change to SBG, said that it was forward progress. When she asked more explicitly what in the current system was broken, what was wrong, which necessitated this change, she was told that nothing was wrong; this was simply a better system, for the reasons listed above.

She was also told (along with the rest of us, of course, because we were all in the same meeting) some bullshit: we were told that traditional grading systems are unfair, because the standards that define a grade for a specific teacher are malleable and individually determined. If you give five teachers the same assignment, those five teachers will grade it five different ways. One will focus on the correct answers; one will focus on the student’s process for reaching the answers; one will focus on the neat presentation of the work. All different standards, all different grades.

Remember how I said that they told us not to worry because not all assessments for mastery of the standards had to be multiple-choice-type quizzes or tests? Right. That was because more than one teacher asked about assessments like essays, or labs, or long projects, or large unit tests, rather than single-standard, short, multiple-choice style tests. “Of course you can use any assessment that you like,” we were told. “Don’t worry, we don’t want to force you all to give nothing but multiple-choice tests to the students.”

Shall I mention here that the curriculum which the academic team purchased and imposed this year features short, five-question multiple-choice tests as assessments for all of the standards? Shall I also mention that this curriculum doesn’t apply to any subjects other than math and English — also known as the tested subjects? No, you know what, I’ll wait until later to mention that. Forget this paragraph for now.

We were also told, when my friend also objected that the purpose here seemed to be test preparation, that of course we should be focusing on test preparation: the school is rated according to the results of the ACT (and other standardized tests for other grades); and research shows (They are big on research. Less interested in actual experience teaching, but they do love them some research. Our chief academic officer has also never taught. [Head. Will. Explode.]) that one of the best ways to improve student scores on standardized tests is test practice: exposure to the system of the test, familiarity with the format of the questions and the means of providing the answers (Bubble sheets vs. writing numbers in boxes vs. clicking on options on a screen, and so on, so on). So if one of our goals is to improve the test scores (And the administrator answering this objection asked my friend if she wanted to have our scores go down, and then the school’s rating would go down, and then we would lose students and close, and did she want that? Which, of course, is a belligerent attempt to turn an uncomfortable question back on the person asking, using a strawman argument. It’s bullshit. It’s not a response to a question, it’s not what it looks like to hear someone’s concern. Because the academic team doesn’t listen. Did I mention that the point of the meeting was, ostensibly, for the academic team to hear our concerns and answer our questions?), and test scores are improved by practice with similar testing format, and the assessment test in question is the ACT, which is a multiple-choice test: guess which type of assessment is going to be favored by the academic team?

It ain’t essays. Or projects. Or labs. Or large unit tests. Well — essays will get some respect, because one of the sections of the ACT is an essay. But there aren’t any, for instance, poetic recitals, or creative writing, or music performance, or any of the million things that teachers and schools create so that students can do something more than just bubble in A, B, C, or D. You know: the assignments and projects and grades which mean something, which give students a chance to make something important to them, something authentic, something real.

So this is why what they told my friend was bullshit: because if they really meant that we could use various other forms of assessment, so long as those assessments focused on the assigned standard, then they were lying about SBG being intended to make grades more fair. If their argument is that different teachers will focus on different aspects of the same piece of student work, and make different grading decisions about that same work, then the exact same thing will still be true if we grade according to a standard. Because it is still up to an individual teacher what it looks like when a student achieves mastery of a standard. Also true for a multiple-choice quiz, by the way: because what is “mastery?” 60% right? 80%? 75%? Different ideas of proficiency, individual standards of success. Which, by the way, reflects everything else in life, because our success or failure is generally determined by individual people with individual standards of success. And the way we deal with that is not to try to standardize everyone into adhering to a single standard: it is making sure we understand what the measure of success is, and how we can achieve it. You know: learning what your boss wants from you and then providing it? Does it matter if the bosses at two different jobs have different expectations of you? It does not. So why would it matter if two different teachers have different expectations of you? It does not. To be sure the grading is fair, we need to make sure that the teacher consistently applies the same standards to all of their students. That’s fair.

You can address that issue, by the way, if you want all of your teachers to grade according to the same criteria and the same success expectation. But SBG is not how. You need to bring your teachers together, give them the same piece of work, and discuss with them what grade (or proficiency measure, or whatever you want to call it) that piece of work should receive, and then make them practice until they all grade approximately the same way. It’s called “norming,” and I’ve done it several times, in different contexts. It’s actually good practice, and I support it.

But it doesn’t answer my friend’s question about why we are changing to SBG. Because you can (and should) norm while retaining traditional grades. Using the need for norming as a justification for changing the entire system? Bullshit.

There’s another aspect of the change to SBG which I should maybe mention now, though I realize that this post is getting too long. (It was a long meeting. There were a lot of concerns. I have a lot of worries about this.) They are also intending to eliminate the usual percentage-based grades. There are four levels of mastery of a standard, as determined by the Arizona Department of Education: Minimally Proficient, Partially Proficient, Proficient, and Highly Proficient. The academic team wants to use those four as the new grade scores, for the purpose of averaging into a final grade for a course: 4 for Highly Proficient, 3 for Proficient, 2 for Partially and 1 for Minimally. The student’s class grade will therefore be something like a 3.23, or a 1.97, etc. Sure, fine, whatever; it’s not like I need to use A, B, C, D, and F.

But see, they want to translate those numbers back into letter grades. Because students and parents like letter grades. Because (As was mentioned, as yet another concern, by yet another colleague) colleges, and scholarships, use letter grades — or, more frequently, the overall GPA, weighted and unweighted, that is the standard across this country. So that’s fine, right? We can just translate the proficiency numbers directly: Highly proficient, A, 4.0. Proficient, B, 3.0. Partially is a C, Minimally is a D.

There’s the first issue, by the way. Not Proficient is not an option. Which means there is no F. As long as a student takes the assessment, they will pass the class. Or so it seemed to me: I admit I didn’t ask that question or raise that concern; in fact, other than a few outbursts under my breath, I was silent throughout the meeting. Because I knew if I started talking, my head would explode. That’s why I ranted at my friend for a full 30 minutes after the meeting, and why I’m writing so damn much right now. So they may intend to include Not Proficient, or simply Failing, as a possibility; say if someone takes a test assessment and gets a 0, then they might earn an F. But maybe not. It’s a concern.

But the other problem is this: the academic team has a conversion chart they want to recommend for how to turn this 4-point proficiency scale into a letter grade: and it’s not what you think. They think that a 3, a proficient, should be an A-, a 90%. 4, Highly Proficient, should be an A+, a 100% or close to it. The B grade range should be 2.5-2.99, the C would be 2.0-2.49. D would be 1.00-1.99. (F would, presumably, be 0-0.99, but if there is no score less than a 1…)

I mean, sure. You can set the grade breaks anywhere you want. They did point out that any college asking for our students’ transcripts and so on would be given an explanation of how we arrive at their letter grade, so there would be transparency here. But how many colleges or employers or grandparents looking to give money prizes for every A would actually read the breakdowns? When they are handed a simple overall GPA, in the usual format?

I also have to say, because bullshit pisses me off, that one reason the academic team gave us for the change to SBG was that traditional grading leads to grade inflation: because students who do extra work get extra credit, and therefore score over 100%, which makes no sense if we’re talking about mastery of standards, because once you master it 100%, that’s it, there is no more, and how much work you did to reach mastery doesn’t matter. The standard of mastery to earn a particular letter grade, in this paradigm, is watered down by the inclusion of grades for practice work, what are called “formative assessments.” Think of it like a rough and final draft of an essay for English: when I get a rough draft of an essay, I give feedback on the draft so the student can improve it for the final draft. I give credit for students who completed the rough draft, but it’s just a 100% completion grade: because I want to encourage them to try, and to turn in whatever they complete so they can get feedback, even if it isn’t very good. So I don’t grade the rough draft on quality, just completion. The rough draft grade is a formative grade; it’s just to recognize the work a student put into the rough draft. The final draft grade is the one that “counts,” because that’s where the student shows how much they mastered the actual skill and knowledge involved. That’s called a “summative” grade. SBG would only count summative grades into the final grade for the class. And in order to fight back the grade inflation they see in me handing out 100% grades to students just for turning in a pile of garbage they call a rough draft, they want to change to — this system. Where a 3 is magically turned into a 4, and there is no 0. Nope, no grade inflation happening there, not at all.

And that’s my biggest issue here. Again and again, the academic team told us that the only thing that should matter for a grade is mastery of the standard. Nothing else. No work should ever be graded, because how a student achieves mastery is not the point: only mastery. (Sure. Ask any math teacher if how you get the answer matters, or if it’s only the answer that counts.) They told us that grading for work completion is a waste of time, and essentially corrupt; because it made it possible for a student to pass without mastering the standard.

The essential assumption there, aimed without saying it outright in the face of every teacher in every school, is that the work we assign does not create mastery of the standard. The assumption is that when I give vocabulary homework, it shouldn’t count in a grade because whether a student does it or not makes no difference to their mastery of the standard. In other words, all the work I assign is bullshit, and any grade I give based on completion of it is bullshit.

That. Is. Not. True.

More importantly in terms of what is coming for my school, if a student is told that the homework, the practice work, the rough drafts of essays, are not counted into their grades, they will stop doing them. Of course they will: we just told them those things don’t count. All that counts is the final assessment, whatever that is. It wouldn’t matter how much practice I gave them, how much feedback I wanted to give them; I would have to give all my students an opportunity to show mastery on the final summative assessment, and if they showed mastery, they would get a grade for that standard. A high one, if they showed proficiency. Now, they will have a much harder time reaching that proficiency without the practice work I assign in class: because my assignments are not in fact pointless busywork, I fucking hate pointless busywork and I try very hard not to have any in my class; but regardless of the value of my assignments, if my students don’t get a grade for them, they won’t do them. Period. Except for a very few students who want to try hard, who want to learn, who want to do their best. But those students already succeed, so they’re not the ones we’re trying to help here, are they?

You know what the rest of them will do? They will sweat out the final assessment. They will focus on that. They may study for it, but they will have so much pressure, and so much stress, before any test I give them for a particular standard, that they will not do as well on them as they would with traditional grades and grades for practice work and my own non-test assessments. (Because generally speaking, I also hate tests and try very hard not to have any in my class. I like essays. I like personal responses to questions that ask the students to relate to the literature, to connect to some aspect of it, and to write maybe a paragraph or so. I like annotations on literature, so students interact with the text. I think high school English students should write, as often as possible, and when I ask students to do work in my class, I want to recognize their effort by giving them credit for it in the form of a grade. But I guess that’s unfair grade inflation, right? Busywork? Assignments that don’t show mastery of the standard and so shouldn’t count in their grades?)

I also have to point out that a lot of my students, given the opportunity to do literally no work and then take one assessment to determine their grade in the class? They will guess. Some of them may guess well, but they will guess. Stories will spread of the students who guessed their way to an A on a difficult assessment in a difficult class, and others will try to repeat the feat. I know: I’ve seen them do it. I’ve watched students lie about getting high grades, when they actually got low grades, when they guessed on a test, and that lie made other kids try it. I’ve watched brilliant students describe what they do on tests as “guessing,” when what they mean is that they picked an answer they weren’t 100% sure about: after reading the question, the answer options, using the process of elimination and their generally excellent knowledge to narrow it down to only two good choices, they “guess.” And score high, because that’s actually a really good way to “guess.” But when they say they guessed and got a good score, other students, who are not as brilliant, guess by completely randomly picking a letter, and hope to get the same result — and so ruin their chances of getting a good result, or a realistic result, which they would have gotten if they just tried.

This will make that problem worse. I guarantee it.

And what problem will it solve?

Will it make grades more fair? No: that would take norming.

Will it make grades actually reflect learning? No: students will try to guess and get lucky, or they will cheat. They already cheat, sometimes, but SBG in this model will make it worse because there will be so much weight on single assessments.

Will it make students focus more on mastery of the standards? Maybe, but it will also make them more likely to ignore the work that would actually help them master the standards. You know: the stuff that educates them. Which, yes, is sometimes tedious. Kinda like taking multiple-choice tests several times a week, in all of your classes. But I guess if that helps them score higher on the ACT, then the school is going to look great. Right?

Right?

Don’t worry.

There’s more. Here’s where I should bring up that the curriculum they bought and imposed doesn’t have any material for several of the subjects in the school. That’s sort of a separate issue, because any teacher can create their own curriculum using SBG or not; but whenever teachers asked how we were supposed to implement this, we were pointed to the curriculum and the resources that came with it: which only applies to math and English. The tested subjects. There are also classes, such as my AP classes, and the new electives that we created this year, which don’t have any standards because they are not official Arizona Department of Education classes. And that’s why I like teaching those classes: but how will I do my grades next year if every class has to use SBG and the class has no standards?

Not only do I not know, but the academic team doesn’t know, and even John C. McGinley doesn’t know.

They also claimed that SBG would make grades and student learning more clear to parents, that parent teacher conferences would focus on what the student could and could not do, rather than the teacher merely saying “Little Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo is missing three homework assignments.” Of course, speaking for myself, when I have parent conferences, I EXPLAIN WHAT THE STUDENT SHOULD HAVE LEARNED ON THE MISSING ASSIGNMENTS AND HOW THAT LEARNING CONNECTS TO THE OTHER LEARNING IN THE CLASS, LIKE “When Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo didn’t do the study questions for the first three chapters, that means he probably didn’t completely understand those chapters, and that makes it harder to understand the rest of the novel.” (Though of course, I failed to point out the standard which little Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo didn’t master, so — my bad.) I can’t really fathom a teacher telling a parent the number of missing assignments and then not going on to explain what that means; but that’s how the academic team described our current practice, going on to say that SBG would make those conversations more helpful to parents because we would explain exactly what the student knew and didn’t know, exactly what deficits there are. Which means that their current (apparently, in their eyes, deeply incompetent teaching staff) would change our habit of explaining nothing to parents so long as we had better data to point to.

And one of the staff very intelligently and clearly pointed out that we would be setting students up with a different standard from all the rest of the world, even if everything they hoped for regarding SBG happened exactly as they hoped: because in college, they still use traditional grading, with work counted in the final grade, with individual standards of success and personal bias from the professor. They didn’t listen to her, either.

They told us that we teachers would be helping the academic team to chart the course, that our input would have an effect on the way this process moved forward; but since they didn’t actually listen to any of our questions at this meeting, and they told us that SBG is coming in 8 months regardless of anything we may say, here’s what I have to say to that:

The only times that the academic team agreed with anything the teachers said was when one of my colleagues, and then another, pointed out that parents and students — and teachers — would have a very difficult time adjusting to this entirely new system, and there would be a lot of problems in the transition, and a great need for support. “That’s true,” they said.

But you know what support we will get? We teachers, our students, their families, the whole school community?

“Don’t worry.”

I’ll be a little happier if they at least sing this. A little.