Schools in Los Angeles and San Diego are overhauling the traditional A-F grading system in a bid to raise student grades and eliminate racial achievement gaps.
A number of Southern California schools and school districts, in a bid to boost student achievement levels, have directed teachers to apply grades based on “whether students have learned what was expected of them during a course — and not penalize them for behavior, work habits and missed deadlines,” the Los Angeles Times spotlighted.
Student grades have suffered nationwide as a result of school closures and online learning, and in California, only 46% of the projected class of 2022 is on track to meet the state university system’s admission requirements, compared to 59% of the class of 2019, the last full year of schooling before the pandemic.
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While the pandemic caused a major drop in student achievement, the racial achievement gap between white and Asian students compared to black and Hispanic students has been a primary driver in the push for what school administrators in Los Angeles and San Diego call “equitable.” “Equitable” grading practices include eliminating deadlines and allowing students to retake tests and revise essays for better grades.
LA Unified School District Chief Academic Officer Alison Yoshimoto-Towery said that traditional and commonplace grading practices “justify and to provide unequal educational opportunities based on a student’s race or class” in a letter to principals the Los Angeles Times cited.
Heavily cited in that letter was grading consultant Joe Feldman, who argued in 2019 that “equity must be part of grading reform” and that “continuing to use century-old grading practices, we inadvertently perpetuate achievement and opportunity gaps, rewarding our most privileged students and punishing those who are not.”
“When teachers include in grades a participation or effort category that is populated entirely by subjective judgments of student behavior, they invite bias into their grading, particularly when teachers come from a dominant culture and their students don’t,” Feldman wrote at the time. “Awarding points for behavior imposes on students a culturally specific definition of appropriate conduct that involves interpreting their actions through an unavoidably biased lens.”
But at least one conservative education expert wasn’t quite ready to dismiss some of the practices connected to “equitable” grading as necessarily harmful.
Allowing students to retake tests was one change that the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Hess told the Los Angeles Times was “sensible,” but he stopped short of endorsing the idea of eliminating deadlines and discounting student behavior in grading.
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“My concern is that by calling certain practices equitable and suggesting they are the right ones, what we risk doing is creating systems in which we tell kids it’s OK to turn in your work late,” Hess said. “That deadlines don’t matter … And I don’t think this sets kids up for successful careers or citizenship.”
