Beyond Grades: A Series on Grading and Feedback by Russ Walsh

BEYOND GRADES F R E E E B O O K ADOPTED F R O M T H E W E B SERIES O N G R A D I N G AND FEEDBACK

B Y RU S S W A LSH A U T H O R O F A P A R E N T’S GUIDE TO PUBLI C E D U C A T I O N I N T HE 21 ST CENTUR Y: NA VI G A T I N G E D U C A T I O N REFORM TO GET T H E BE ST E D U C A T IO N FOR MY CHI LD

C OP Y RIGHT © 201 8, B Y RU S S W ALS H PUB LIS HED B Y GARN P R E S S NEW Y ORK, NY

Contents

Beyond Grades Part One: The Mis-Measure of Schools and School Children

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Beyond Grades Part Two: “How Am I Doing?”

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Beyond Grades Part Three: “How is My Child Doing?”

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Beyond Grades Part Four: “How Are We Doing?”

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About A Parent’s Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century

by Russ Walsh

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Beyond Grades Part One: The MisMeasure of Schools and School Children

Free ebook adopted from the web series on grading and feedback by Russ Walsh, author of, A Parent’s Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century.

Currently, at least 14 states grade their public schools on an A-F scale. Educators are correct to point out that this is a stupid way to hold schools accountable. Three reasons pop out right away when we think about the idiocy of giving schools a letter grade and then publicizing this grade through the media.

1. A letter grade cannot possibly capture the complexity of the learning society that is a school. So many factors go into what makes a school high functioning or low functioning that letter grades, leaning heavily on standardized tests, are suspect from the outset.

2. Letter grades, again based largely on standardized test scores, narrow the curriculum and encourage poor instructional practice based on test preparation 3. Low grades given to schools where teachers, administrators and students are working hard at overcoming the odds, destroy 3

morale and inhibit motivation, while high grades may encourage a false complacency.

So, yes, all educators should fight against these short-sighted, narrow-cast attempts to assess their work on a school-wide basis.

Unfortunately, we teachers cannot claim the moral high ground here. Teachers, after all, invented A-F grading and for the past 150 years or so have been working to convince parents, students, and community members that grades are a legitimate way to assess a student’s knowledge. This is a lie. It is a lie that the public has bought into wholly and now the public, in the form of state legislatures and departments of education, is coming to punish us with our own invention.

1. Letter grades for students have all the same flaws as letter grades for schools, except that instead of the damage being institutional it is personal.

2. Letter grades for students, we all know, are woefully inadequate measures of the complexity of individual student learning.

3. Grades narrow learning by creating a “grading orientation” rather than a “learning orientation.”

4. While high grades may motivate students to want to achieve more high grades, low grades are demoralizing to lower achieving students and destroy motivation.

We tend to pack too much into grades: test and quiz scores, homework completion, attendance, classroom participation, effort and on and on. Many of these things are only tangentially relevant to actual achievement, but all get packed into a grade. I was recently a 4

part of a discussion on assessing writing. The teachers were working on a rubric, which tried to capture all the aspects of a constructed response essay. At one point, the principal pointed out that the rubric score was not to be considered as a grade. In fact, a student with a “4” out of “6” on the essay, might get an A if she were in a low track class or a C if in a higher track class. The teachers generally agreed. Immediately, we have to ask, what is being graded – the student’s ability to write or the student’s perceived overall ability?

Obviously, the grade does not reflect, in this scenario, writing ability, but some aspect of writing combined with effort, combined with teacher perceptions. And so it is with all grades. They lie. They do not provide useful feedback, but we have convinced the public they are meaningful.

Alfie Kohn has argued for years that grades diminish an orientation towards learning. A “grading orientation” as he calls it, causes students to focus on getting a grade rather than learning new and interesting information. A grading orientation leads to a desire to choose the easiest possible task, because that easier task will lead to the better grade, not necessarily to better learning. Students become efficient grade acquirers. For example, when assigned a reading task with follow up questions, the efficient grade acquirer will go straight to the questions and answer them, only reading what is absolutely necessary to complete the graded assignment. A grading and testing orientation narrows students focus on the trivial and takes them away from the larger questions and broader understandings in any area of study.

In a Psychology Today article, Schwartz and Sharpe argue that “if we corrupt students’ souls by convincing them that the main motive 5

for learning are high grades and honors, we end up de-motivating, and de-moralizing, those students who have little chance for the top rankings. It is true that studies have shown that grades can be motivating for high achievers, but often, as discussed above, this is at the cost of deeper understanding.

I had a group of so-called “college bound” 8th graders many years ago in an American History class. The students in this class were used to getting As on all there work. They understood the school “game” well and were bright and capable. I had a habit of including one or two essay questions on my tests and quizzes along with map identification and multiple choice questions. These students regularly Aced the map and multiple choice questions, but struggled mightily with the essays, which tended to read like a list of highlights from the text, rather than well reasoned arguments. Some of these students started getting Bs or Cs on their tests. They were incensed. We had a lengthy discussion about what it meant to think like an historian, but the students felt I was changing the rules on them. They were A students after all. How dare I? If I had had a little more experience (and tenure) in those days, I might have told those students what I tell my college students now, “All of you in this class are smart enough to get an A, so I am going to give you an A right now. Now let’s get on with the actual learning we have to do.”

I know nothing I say here is going to change grades and grading in the near future, but I do want us all to understand that when others seek to grade us, we have only ourselves to blame. In subsequent chapters I will discuss better ways to assess student learning.

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Russ Walsh is the author of, A Parent’s Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century: Navigating Education Reform to Get the Best Education for My Child ON SALE: Paperback book 30% off on Amazon, $13.95. Visit www.garnpress.com for more information.

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Beyond Grades Part Two: “How Am I Doing?”

Free ebook adopted from the web series on grading and feedback by Russ Walsh, author of, A Parent’s Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century.

In the previous chapter, I argued that we need to move away from grades for reporting student achievement. I argued that grades are ineffective in reporting student learning, encourage a grade acquisition orientation rather than a learning orientation, and destroy the motivation of lower achievers. But if I am going to argue against grading, I need to be ready with suggested replacements for grades.

I begin an attempt to do this below. I would appreciate it if you tell me what you think of my ideas.

First, I think we need to decide what our goals are for reporting out on student achievement. I would argue that there are three reasons we wish to assess and report out and all of them have to do with providing feedback to stakeholders. First, we want to report on student learning to the student so that the student can answer the question, “How am I doing?” Next we want to provide feedback to parents, so that parents can answer the question, “How is my child doing?”

Finally, we want to provide feedback to the school/district to inform curricular and instructional decisions moving forward and to answer the question, “How are we doing?”

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In this chapter I will address the first question; the one related to reporting out to the student.

How Am I Doing?

Learning is a process of adding new information to information you already know. Any assessment program should inform a student about what she already knows and what she needs to learn. Reporting a grade to a child provides only a vague notion of what is known and not known. Better to give more specific feedback. Let’s take reading as an example. Here is the information that a child needs to know about reading progress.

• What am I doing well in reading right now that I should continue doing?

• What aspects of reading do I need to work on?

• What do I need to do to improve in these areas?

• What are we going to work on together to improve in these areas over the next few weeks?

Ideally, students participate in this assessment through their own self-assessment. In my reading classroom, my students and I would periodically brainstorm a “criteria chart” of reading behaviors that we had learned about in class. After developing the chart, I would ask the students to identify on a T-chart those things on the list they were doing well and one or two things they still needed to work on. I would then sit individually with the students to discuss their strengths and weaknesses (sometimes lists would change based on 9

my input) and then develop goals for the next few weeks.

OK, I think I know what you are thinking. This may be fine and good for a skill based subject like reading or writing, but what about a content-based subject like science? Again, I think a similar strategy would be most effective. The key will be identifying what you want the children to know and be able to do in any particular science unit. The assessment/feedback loop must be focused on the knowledge you want kids to acquire and feedback on how well they have acquired that knowledge.

Let’s say we are in a fourth grade classroom studying a unit on Earth Science. The objectives for the unit are as follows: • Students will be able to identify various ways that land forms change rapidly and slowly.

• Students will be able to identify the elements of the rock cycle.

• Students will learn that rocks can be identified by their properties and will be able to to identify various types of rocks.

• Students will be able to identify the differences between rocks and minerals.

• Students will be able to work like a scientist by conducting experiments in crystal formation and rock formation.

Through authentic assessments (in-class activities where students get a chance to demonstrate their understanding), observations, written work, quizzes and tests, the teacher gathers knowledge about what the student knows and is able to do. During the unit and at the 10

end of the unit, occasional conferences, often brief and informal, occasionally a bit longer and formal, are held to provide specific feedback to the students. By the end of the unit teachers report to the students on their success in achieving the objectives. In this scenario the questions would be as follows.

• What do I know about land forms, elements of the rock cycle, rock identification, and the differences between rocks and minerals? What gaps in my knowledge have I shown in these topics? What can I do now and in the future to fill in these gaps in my knowledge?

• To what extent have I shown the ability to think and work like a scientist by conducting experiments? What do I need to work on to make more effective use of scientific problem solving?

• What are my strengths and challenges in reading science content?

• What progress am I making in acquiring science-based vocabulary?

• What are my strengths and weaknesses in writing about science content?

This kind of direct and specific feedback is much more helpful than a vague, imprecise grade, which tells me almost nothing about what I have learned and what I need to work on. If one reason for grades is to provide feedback to children, surely some system like the one described above provides far superior and much more useful feedback.

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Perhaps you are thinking that this is all well and good, but parents will never accept it. Parents want grades. Parents believe grades have some meaning, primarily because we have tried to convince them that they do over the past 150 years. We all know better. We need to tell parents we were wrong, We need to show them there are better ways to report on learning. In a subsequent chapter, I will address how we can best answer the parent question, “How is my child doing?”

Russ Walsh is the author of, A Parent’s Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century: Navigating Education Reform to Get the Best Education for My Child ON SALE: Paperback book 30% off on Amazon, $13.95. Visit www.garnpress.com for more information.

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Beyond Grades Part Three: “How is My Child Doing?”

Free ebook adopted from the web series on grading and feedback by Russ Walsh, author of, A Parent’s Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century.

In previous chapters in this series on grading, I have argued first that grades fail to motivate genuine learning and second, that they provide only vague unhelpful feedback to students. But what about parents? Many teachers say that they must give grades because parents demand them. It is true that most parents view grades as useful feedback, primarily, I believe, because we teachers have sold grades as effective feedback for 150 years. Parents want an answer to the question, “How is my child doing?” For most parents, grades seem to provide the answer to that question.

But what if we showed parents that that question is only poorly answered by a letter or number grade and that we can provide them with much richer information? What if we could provide parents with the answer to that question and at the same time let them know what we can do together to help the child achieve even more? The transition might be bumpy, but ultimately, I think parents will see that a different approach to answering the “How is my child doing?” question will be much more rewarding.

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First, let’s understand that the question, “How is my child doing?” is a complex one. Parents want to know how their child is doing academically, but they also want to know that their child’s social and emotional needs are being met. Educators have long recognized that a grade on a report card can’t provide all this information, so we have typically been given a checklist of behaviors to tick off like “Works well with others” and “Participates in class discussions.” Still grades and checklists or written comments carry a fuzzy picture of a child’s progress. We would do better to answer a few questions that are suggested by the complex, “How is my child doing?”

In a skill based subject like reading, what are the questions we want to answer for parents? I would suggest the following.

• Is my child reading at, above or below expected reading level for grade and age?

• Does my child enjoy reading and read for increasing lengths of time?

• Does my child read with adequate fluency (decoding, expression, rate) for age and grade level?

• Does my child understand what is read at an adequate level for age and grade?

• What strengths does my child exhibit in reading?

• What challenges does my child have in reading?

• What are you doing in school to help improve my child’s reading?

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• What can I do at home to help improve my child’s reading?

I would discourage sharing with parents a specific level of reading or a specific grade level score in reading. This is information for the professional and not necessary for the parent. At, above or below level seems adequate for parent information.

In content based subjects the questions to be answered change a bit, but the goal of actionable feedback stays the same. Let’s take a social studies example.

• Did my child demonstrate a knowledge of the social studies content in the curriculum?

• To what extent has my child shown the ability to think and work like a social scientist?

• To what extent has my child shown the ability to read and comprehend social studies materials?

• To what extent has my child shown the ability to conduct research in the social sciences?

• Is my child developing an adequate social science vocabulary?

• What is being done in school to help my child improve performance in social sciences?

• What can I do at home to help my child improve performance in the social sciences?

At first glance this may seem like a lot of information for the teacher 15

to gather, but on closer inspection I believe that the answers to these questions are readily available to any teacher who has been observing the children in the class over several weeks. The answers to these questions come from running records, student in class work, anecdotal records of students performance taken by the teacher as students are engaged in a variety of activities, as well as from traditional tests and quizzes. The information is richer and more informative than any single grade or standardized test score could provide a parent. This approach also argues for the primacy of the teacher as being in the best position to assess a child’s abilities.

It may appear that reporting like this is best suited to a parent teacher conference, which typically happens once or twice a year in school. While a regular conference might be the best way to deliver this information. other methods could be just as effective. One alternative is the narrative report card, where answers to questions such as those above are shared with parents in a narrative format.

Teachers are provided with a report card template with question prompts to respond to in a narrative form. This approach would be time consuming, but perhaps less so than having 4 conferences a year. Another possibility is using technology, like Skype or Facetime, to make conferring more convenient for teacher and parent. Ultimately, technology may replace the need for periodic reporting out, with details of student performance available to (older) students and their parents as soon as teachers enter the information on a school database dedicated to the purpose and password protected.

Whatever the method of reporting, I think we need to admit that grades are a woefully inadequate form of feedback that actually does damage to the true motivations for learning. If we start from that 16

proposition, then problems related to changing the system become less daunting.

I am sure that my readers who teach middle and high school are saying to themselves that this may be fine for elementary teachers who have 25 students, but how can I do this when I have 125+ students?Well, we first need to remember that while elementary teachers have fewer students they are reporting on more subjects, so any class of 25 in elementary school with 5 subjects to report on is more or less equal to a secondary class of 125 with one subject.

There are issues with grade reporting in the secondary schools that are different, however, and I will deal with them in a future chapter in this series.

Russ Walsh is the author of, A Parent’s Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century: Navigating Education Reform to Get the Best Education for My Child ON SALE: Paperback book 30% off on Amazon, $13.95. Visit www.garnpress.com for more information.

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Beyond Grades Part Four: “How Are We Doing?”

Free ebook adopted from the web series on grading and feedback by Russ Walsh, author of, A Parent’s Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century.

In previous chapters I have argued that we need to move away from grades as a method of assessment because grades are a poor way to provide feedback to students and also a poor way to provide feedback to parents. In this last in the series on grades, I will argue that grades are also a particularly poor way to provide feedback to schools.

Throughout the country the grading of schools has become fashionable. Florida, under the leadership of reform minded Jeb Bush, was the first state to adopt A-F grading for schools. since that time 15 other states have hopped on this bandwagon. These grades for schools are largely based on student performance on standardized tests. Corporate education reformers have sought to use school grades as a whip to make what they see as struggling schools shape up. Grading schools in this way has great appeal to legislators, because it allows them to give the appearance of caring about the quality of education without having to actually provide any resources that might help improve education in places that are wracked by poverty and years of inattention.

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Grading Schools on an A-F basis is a bad idea for many reasons. The National Association of Secondary Principals cites several reasons in their white paper opposing school grades.

• No decision about a school’s performance should be based on a single data point or single test.

• A valid measure of school performance should be comprehensive, accounting for school processes, conditions, practices, and outcomes.

• Qualitative and quantitative measures should be used to measure school performance • Information from any accountability system should target school improvement, not high-stakes consequences.

I would add that grading schools in this manner leads to a narrowing of the curriculum to focus on tested subjects, the destruction of morale for low performing schools in high poverty areas and a false sense of security for schools receiving high grades simply because their affluent students score well on standardized tests.

Is there a better way to hold schools accountable? Of course. The trick is that providing schools with useful feedback requires time, commitment, vision and resources; things that simply assigning a grade does not require. The best way to hold schools accountable is to provide a dynamic assessment of the kinds of opportunities they are providing to their students. The school recognition program Schools of Opportunity* has developed guidelines for evaluating schools based on just such a concept. Currently, Schools of Opportunity is 19

a small, all volunteer organization working each year to recognize schools that are providing great opportunities for their children despite many obstacles. The Schools of Opportunity template is one that every state in the country could emulate to truly hold schools accountable for serving children. Here are the things that this group says good schools must do.

• Create and maintain a healthy school culture free of bullying and welcoming to all students and adults.

• Broaden and enrich school curriculum to include all core subjects, physical education, health and the visual and performing arts.

• Provide more and better learning time during and after the school year through extended school days, clubs and activities and summer programs.

• End disparities in learning opportunities reinforced by tracking.

• Use a variety of assessments designed to respond to student needs, inform teachers on instructional priorities, and to help administrators make programmatic decisions.

• Reassess student discipline policies to focus on keeping students in school.

• Support teachers as professionals through strong mentoring programs, professional development and time to meet and work with colleagues.

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• Provide adequate resources to support a well-maintained, clean, safe, school environment.

• Address key health issues through a professionally staffed responsive health facility.

• Build on the strengths of language minority students by viewing language minority students as assets from whom all can learn.

• Expand access to professionally staffed libraries and well-maintained and easily accessible internet resources.

I highlighted the “use a variety of assessments to respond to student needs” to emphasize the difference between a school grade approach and an “opportunity” approach. Since No Child Left Behind, standardized tests have been the key, and often the only, measure of school quality used to hold schools accountable. When NCLB came along in 2002, most schools used standardized tests on a limited basis, often 3 times in the life of a school child, to inform administrators and teachers how kids were doing based on a measure that had some generalizability across schools and school districts. After 2002 standardized tests spread to every grade level and were used for high stakes purposes such as retaining students, firing teachers and administrators, and even closing schools. The problems with using standardized tests for high-stakes accountability are many and have been recounted often. For a summary, you can read this document from Fair Test, a national testing watch dog group. Suffice it to say here, that standardized tests do little to help teachers adjust instruction or to inform students of their needs.

A “school of opportunity” needs a variety of measures to fulfill 21

its mission of designing an accountability program that provides actionable feedback to teachers, parents, and students. Standardized tests do have a role – a small one. Given three times during a child’s school career (and not used for any high-stakes decision making) standardized tests can help a school, a district, and its parents get a rough idea of how well the school is doing in meeting students needs.

Much more important to administrators, teachers, students and parents, however, would be the regular formative and summative assessments that are used by teachers working with students in the classroom each day.

One promising assessment tool that is appearing in more and more schools is the common assessment. The common assessment is a kind of half-way house between the formative classroom assessment individual teachers use in the classroom every day and the standardized test that is mostly disconnected from the actual classroom.

In a common assessment, a group of teachers who are teaching the same subject, say Environmental Science in Grade 9, from the same curriculum, work together to design an assessment based on what students at that school are expected to know and be able to do in Environmental Science. By designing the common assessment, the teachers agree on expectations for students and on how student learning will be measured. Teachers are free to instruct in ways most likely to help children to achieve the desired goals, so autonomy is maintained within the framework of the district approved curriculum.

The strengths of a common assessment approach are many. Most importantly, teachers get information on what their students know and are able to do that can inform future instruction and students get 22

feedback on their strengths and weaknesses based on a common set of criteria. Common assessments also give the teachers the opportunity to look at a variety of instructional methods for delivering the same content and then choose those methods that work best. This type of work gives a professional learning community real purpose and has a real impact as a professional development tool.

Common assessments also fit nicely into the arguments I have made in previous chapters about the weakness of letter grades in providing feedback to students and parents. These school generated assessments allow the teacher to tell students exactly what they know and are able to do and what they need to work on.

Of course many and varied assessments make up the full picture for any school. Common assessments deal with academic aspects of the assessment. Other measures are necessary to judge climate, inclusiveness, and equity in a true school of opportunity.

We must go beyond grading and look closely at what is happening in schools in order to provide our schools with useful, actionable feedback. That is what a true accountability system looks like. It cannot be done on the cheap and it cannot be done by a narrow minded focus on an A-F grade for schools. *Schools of Opportunity is a school recognition project co-directed by award-winning former public school principal, Carol Burris and University of Colorado professor, Kevin G. Welner. You can learn more about the group and also learn how to nominate your school for recognition by going to the group’s web site here.

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Russ Walsh is the author of, A Parent’s Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century: Navigating Education Reform to Get the Best Education for My Child ON SALE: Paperback book 20% off on Amazon, $15.95.

Visit www.garnpress.com for more information.

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About A Parent’s Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century by Russ Walsh

What is a parent to make of the current narrative about public education in the United States? We hear that our public schools are mediocre at best and dysfunctional and unsafe at worst. We hear politicians and pundits arguing that the country will fall behind economic competitors like China and Japan, if our schools do not improve. We hear education reformers, well-funded by corporate lions like Bill Gates and the Walton family, suggesting a smorgasbord of solutions from school choice to more rigorous standards and from increased standardized tests to test-based teacher accountability.

What is education reform and how will it impact schools, children and parents? What are charter schools and should I send my child to one? What is the impact of standardized testing on my child?

Should I opt my child out of standardized testing? How can I make sure my child gets a good teacher? What does good reading and writing instruction look like? How should technology be used in the schools and at home?

A Parent’s Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century is written to answer these questions and help today’s parents sort through the weeds of educational reform to make informed decisions designed to get the best possible education for their children. The book starts 25

from the point of view that public education is a vital institution, central to our democracy and economic independence, and then suggests ways that parents can not only get the best of education for their own children, but also support policies that will make the institution of public education stronger for future generations.

Reviews “Russ Walsh is a knowledgeable, insightful critic of the dogmatic school reformers who are driving American education back toward the 19th century instead of ahead into the 21st. His analyses are on par with those of Diane Ravitch, David Berliner, Yong Zhao … “- Dr. Don Ambrose, Editor, the Roeper Review “A clear, concise parent’s guide to school in the age of education reform. In a discussion that has been characterized by a great deal of heat, Russ Walsh sheds some light and cuts through the fog of propaganda and PR. This is a clear, fair guide to what is in the best interests of your child, and what is just baloney. Best of all, in a discussion that is filled with questions about what’s best for the nation, Walsh helps parents answer the most important question—what’s best for my own child?” – Peter Greene, Author of the bookCurmudgucation: What Fresh Hell, Author of the “Curmudgucation” and Education Week Teacher “View from the Cheap Seats” blogs “Russ Walsh’s new book is a distillation of years of experience and wisdom from an actual expert in the field. This is essential reading for any parent, teacher, school board member, administrator or 26

anyone who cares about the U.S. education system.” – Steven Singer, Pennsylvania educator and public school advocate.

“Just finished this. It is the BEST book on public education!! I will be sharing it with my ELL students’ parents and my student teachers. I am going to apply what I learned to my own children.” – (five stars) Amazon “Russ Walsh’s book arrived today by special delivery. That’s just what this book is: a special delivery to parents everywhere who want to be advocates for their kids in this confusing climate of so-called school reform. Mr. Walsh has touched a nerve! I thank him for showing up and speaking up to provide measured perspective and important research. This book is a winner!” – (five stars) Amazon “This book is what is needed in education right now. It is a parent friendly book that explains all the ins and outs of the school system and helps parents advocate for their children. It is a great read for teachers too and can be a great resource to share at Back to School Night or parent meetings. A Parents Guide to Public Education explains aspects of education that are often questioned by people outside the field. For example, Walsh explains how teacher tenure benefits students and how current high stakes tests are affecting schools. A great read that I highly recommend!” – (five stars) Amazon “A Parent’s Guide to Education in the 21st Century isn’t just for parents. It’s for anyone who wants to understand the “reform” agenda and what it has done to American public education. Call it “reform” 101. Walsh clearly outlines the ways that the “reform” movement has damaged the nation’s public education system and harmed 27

the education of children. The book begins with a Bill of Rights for School Children…which should be posted in every public school in the nation. For teachers, he identifies best practices. For parents, he describes what a good school and good instruction ought to look like. He includes informative chapters on standardized tests, the privatization of public education, and the Common Core. A must read.” – (five stars) Amazon

Russ Walsh is the author of, A Parent’s Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century: Navigating Education Reform to Get the Best Education for My Child ON SALE: Paperback book 30% off on Amazon, $13.95. Visit www.garnpress.com for more information.

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