On Sunday afternoon I watched the final hour of the Masters Golf Tournament. Besides being an exciting competition, it was interesting to watch several of the commercials that focused on the apparent sorry state of US education. The ads pointed to the country’s poor performance on international tests as the reason why we need to raise our standards. While raising the bar with higher standards is a part of the improvement equation, it is not, as the ads suggest, the bottom line to a school’s improvement efforts. I write this because a portion of our students do just fine with the standards that we now follow; they are successfully competing with the best and brightest.
To get all students to a point where they can better compete with the world’s students will require that we establish a highly reliable school district that does not let students fail. Too often we create a set of high expectations for a select group of students while dropping the bar to a lower level for others. (Please note that this level of expectation is set by both the home and the school.) Contributing to the lower expectations is our practice of accepting low performance as adequate. A student can earn a D or an A and the result is the same, they pass the task at hand. Because of the variance in expectations that exists upon reaching high school, some students are essentially not in the running for the upper academic classes. To undo the culture of low expectations (for some) will require that we rethink what we accept as satisfactory before a student is allowed to advance. I feel that this needs to happen right away in primary school and has to be embraced by the home. The current practice of accepting a poor performance by a student and then moving him on to what is next is the real issue with students not having more success on international tests. The TV ads that call for higher standards are not misguided- new standards will help us improve. Not accepting poor performance as sufficient to pass, however, is the more pressing needed change.
One Comment
Thank you for addressing this important issue of standards, expectations, and grading. As we work towards creating a “highly reliable school district,” one that prepares students for the complex demands of the world, I’m happy to see conversations getting started about how to undo a culture of low expectations and consider how we report achievement and performance. As you point out, whether a student earns an “A” or a “D,” the result is the same – the task or class is passed and the student moves on.
I would love to see the district provide more professional development opportunities for how to fairly assess and report achievement given the system we have, which at least at this point is time-based for most KPBSD schools. With all good intention, teachers are doing their best to provide justified feedback to students and their families regarding proficiency or mastery of the content at hand. Recent and current research documents very well the complexities involved in this task. Many classrooms average grades based on homework, quizzes, tests, projects, attendance, effort, participation, consequences for late or missing work, or any combination of these things. While all of these are important, and need to be reported in order to give valuable feedback to students so that they can improve, most grading experts agree that rolling them all into a single achievement grade does our students a disservice. (see research from Robert Marzano, Rick Wormeli, Dr. Douglas Reeves, Carol Ann Tomlinson, Tony Wagner…) The function of assessments; in other words, whether an assessment is formative or summative, needs to be carefully considered before, during, and after instruction and certainly when giving a final report of achievement.
My concern is how to provide specific feedback on content understanding while also recognizing students’ strengths and challenges in the skills they will need to be successful in the world: critical thinking, problem solving, collaborating, adaptability, initiative, effective communication, curiosity and questioning. These skills, in conjunction with content understanding, are the skills that employers are looking for. These are the skills our students need to compete globally. How then do we instruct, assess, and fairly evaluate these given the system we have?