Holding K-12 Hostage

When I ask people to think about why we grade students, they tend to provide three reasons:

1. Motivate students
2. Rank and Sort students
3. Provide feedback for students

In short, we have no business using grades to do number 1 or 2 and grading has never done a good job of 3. I've written more about this here.

A fourth rational for grading comes up regularly. In fact, you might have even made this argument:

We need testsandgrades in K-12 so our children can get into post secondary education.

I have a couple responses:

• Some of the worst forms of teaching and learning exist in post secondary colleges and universities. The only anecdotal evidence we might need to prove this is for those who attended post secondary to remember their experiences in lecture halls that could fit 50 to 400 students at a time. Holding K-12 hostage to such pathetic standards seems irresponsible.

• While it's true that some universities look at some of the grades from a student's high school transcript, how many universities look at a student's grades from elementary? Middle school? or even grade 11? Because the only grades that post-secondary institutions look at is from the final year of high school, K-11 can and should be liberated from the clutches of post-secondary's obsession with testsandgrades.

• I know more than a couple university professors and I know a president of a local college, and I know that they would all far rather K-12 focus less on testsandgrades and more on inspiring students to have a love for learning. In other words, university folk understand that "a preoccupation with achievement is not only different from, but detrimental to, a focus on learning." (Alfie Kohn). The research confirms that an orientation towards improving your learning, rather than proving it sets children up for the most success. In learning oriented classrooms, students are less worried about looking smart and more about becoming smart. The most successful teachers and students understand that proving how good you are over and over again is an inferior use of your time especially when you could be using your time getting better.

• We have a dangerous pre-occupation with preparation. College does not begin in kindergarten -- kindergarten begins in kindergarten. Children in middle school are not simply miniature versions of high school or university students. Children of all ages have their own unique, individual needs. What might be appropriate for a high school student might be developmentally inappropriate for a middle or elementary student.

• In Alberta, only one-third of students attend university. Does it make sense to mold K-12 public education, which is for everyone, in the image of post-secondary education where  two-thirds of our students will not attend.

To sum up, I'm sick and tired of being told I can't innovate and improve my assessment practices in K-12 because of post secondary's archaic grading practices.

#comments4kids

I have found success with engaging students in reading and writing via blogging. 

Reading and writing are social activities that allow us to communicate with others. When we write something, we always have an audience in mind, even if it's ourselves. However, most of the time, students write for other people, and it's even cooler if those other people were more than just their teacher or their peers sitting next to them. 

This is why I have had success engaging even reluctant readers and writers in blogging. 

One of the hooks I often use is the world map widget that I have on my blog. This map allows a blogger to track the visitors and their locations. When I show this to students, they are often fascinated by how the written word can reach distances that are truly on the other side of the planet.

The red dots indicate the places people have accessed my blog while the ones that are blinking indicate people who are visiting my blog right now. I have yet to meet a child (or adult) that did not find this pretty darn cool.

I have helped a number of students start their own blog, and one of the first things I help them set up is this world widget. Once they have this widget, I get them to write up a blog post. Many of the kids are so excited to publish their post that they rush to their world widget to see if anyone visits - only to see nothing happen.

The problem is that publishing a blog post and waiting for visitors is like hitch-hiking in the Sahara -- no one knows you're there.

This is why it helps for the teacher to be a part of some kind of network. While there is no one right tool to tap into a network of connected people, I have found Twitter to be an excellent companion to blogging.

Once a student publishes a post, I then hop on Twitter and post a Tweet to the hashtag #comments4kids. After I do this, watching their world widget becomes a whole lot more fun!

One of the first times I did this, I had a student who blogged about wanting to get an Iguana, but wanted to ask others for their advice about Iguana's -- when I tweeted his post, he watched his world widget and shouted "someone from France is reading my post!" His smile was from ear to ear. This was a very reluctant reader and writer authentically engaged in reading and writing. Because these red dots kept showing up on the world map, our discussion turned into a geography lesson. When the kids themselves are asking the question, "where's Estonia?" you know you are doing something right.

Do I count how many visits they get on their blog? No.

Have I established a complex algorithm that combines their visits to comment ration? No.

Do I use a rubric that allows me to generate pre & post measurements that allow me to quantify the value added? No.

So how do I know this stuff is successful? If my students show a desire to go on reading and writing through blogging when class is over, then I know I'm on the right track. Where there is interest achievement tends to follow.

No testsandgrades required.

For more on how powerful comments for kids can be, read Kathy Cassidy's post It's Never "Just a Comment".

TedTalk on Finland

For more on Finland, check out these posts:

Paradoxes of Finland Phenomenon

Sahlberg's Ten Big Ideas on Finland

What Finland has *not* done

Irmeli Halinen on Finnish Curriculum

Pasi Sahlberg on Finland and Alberta

Accountability

Finland's Paradoxes

What Americans keep ignoring about Finland's school success

The Children Must Play

The Folly of Ranking Schools by Test Scores

This was written by Alfie Kohn for the Calgary Herald in February of 2005.

by Alfie Kohn

There’s bad news in today’s Outlook section. It’s not that the test scores listed there are low. It’s that the test scores are listed there at all.

As a rule, the less people know about education – and about exams like the Provincial Achievement Test -- the more willing they are to judge schools (and students) on the basis of such scores. It’s not that standardized test results don’t tell us anything. They’re very accurate measures of the size of the houses near a given school. As many researchers, including Todd Rogers at the University of Alberta, have shown, a school’s test scores can be predicted with reasonable accuracy if one knows the socioeconomic status of its students – and nothing about what happens in its classrooms.

But what if a school’s scores are rising over the years despite having roughly the same kind of students? In that case, the results aren’t meaningless -- they’re worrisome. Better results on the P.A.T. may actually be a bad sign because of what had to be sacrificed in order to make that happen.

Those numbers in the Outlook section do not reflect academic excellence. Indeed, teachers in Alberta and elsewhere often tell me that some of their most impressive students don’t perform well on these exams, whereas other kids get terrific scores just because they’re good at taking tests. The research confirms this: Three studies have found that high standardized test scores often go hand-in-hand with superficial thinking. What’s true of individuals is true of schools. Some of the best may not be at the top of those rankings precisely because they don’t stuff kids full of testable (and forgettable) facts. Rather than slavishly covering the provincial curriculum, teachers in great schools help children to discover ideas. Their students are learning what it means to think like a scientist or an historian, not merely memorizing dates and definitions.

Indeed, in visiting Saskatchewan and Manitoba, I’ve been impressed by the nearly complete absence of standardized tests there. They spend their time and resources on teaching rather than testing, and their schools are better off as a result.

Any attempt to reduce learning to numbers is misguided. Schools just can’t be rated like laundry detergents. As one U.S. educational researcher put it, “Measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning.” The damage is compounded when those numbers are test scores. Exams like the P.A.T. tend to measure what matters least.

Worst of all is using these scores not just to rate but to rank, such that the emphasis is on who’s beating whom. This encourages a toxic competition between schools. Educators are less inclined to work together to do a better job at educating all our children because they’re forced to worry about their relative standing.

There are only two explanations for the wretched ritual of publishing these scores. The first is simple ignorance. The second is some sort of political agenda – exactly the kind, come to think of it, pursued by the Fraser Institute, which wants to privatize everything in sight and privilege profit-oriented enterprises over democratic public institutions.

Frankly, if my goal were to make public schools look bad and pave the way for vouchers, I would do exactly what they’ve done: use the language of “accountability” to push for more emphasis on testing -- and set schools against one another.

But a right-wing think tank can’t accomplish this alone. It needs Alberta Learning notonly to force schools to give all those tests but to boil down the results into summary statistics that are ripe for publication. (The State of Connecticut refuses to do this in order to thwart those who would try to reduce schools to a single set of numbers.) Last week, Education Minister Gene Zwozdesky told a CBC interviewer that it’s “patently unfair to make comparisons between schools based on scores.” The question is why he is pursuing policies that facilitate just such comparisons.

The Fraserites also need newspapers like the Herald to do their dirty work for them by publishing these charts. The effects aren’t always easy to see or measure, but every year about this time, Calgary’s schools become a little worse because this paper leads parents and teachers to focus on test scores rather than on more meaningful indicators of quality.

Elsewhere, I’ve written at length about those indicators. Is the focus more on understanding ideas from the inside out (rather than on memorizing facts)? Do students experience their schools as caring communities? Do teachers create democratic classrooms so kids can participate in making decisions? Do children often learn together (rather than alone)? Do parents receive qualitative accounts of kids’ improvement (rather than traditional grades)?

By contrast, the most constructive thing you can do with those pages in today’s Outlook section is use them to wrap fish. The numbers printed there are not only meaningless but dangerously misleading.

One figure, though, is worth looking at: the percentage of “exams not written” at each school. When that number begins to climb, it will mean that Calgary-area parents are realizing that they’ve contributed to the problem by allowing their children to write the exams. When enough of them get organized and decide to boycott the P.A.T.s, Alberta Learning will ask nervously, “What if we gave a test and nobody came?”

That will mean the flourishing of grassroots democracy and a more sensible set of educational priorities. And that, finally, will be something worth reporting.

Grading Moratorium: Mark Skelding

Mark Skelding has joined the Grading Moratorium. Want to join? Here's how.

Professor at Southern New Hampshire University-Vermont Center’s Field-Based Graduate Program in Education, in Colchester, Vermont.












At what stage of abolishing grading are you?

I often wonder if the marking period during high school, when I deliberately tried for all B’s and no A’s, and succeeded, might have been the actual beginning of my fight against grading. I currently teach graduate level courses on formative assessment and grading reform for practicing teachers coming back to school to get their Master’s Degrees. As I tell my students in the grading course, I vowed years ago, after starting to uncover during my 12 years as a middle school teacher what I now know about grading, that I would never grade anyone ever again. Although our program could move to a Pass/Fail (which is still grading) system, school districts in our area still require letter grades as a measure for whether to pay for/reimburse a teacher for the courses they take. Consequently, we still give a final grade. But it is the only grade the teacher receives at any time during the course, and it is a standards-based grade based on their progress (growth) score which they are sustaining at the time the course ends … and I don’t give the grade. I will explain below.


Why do you want to/did you abolish grading?

One title I’ve given my work is “The Theoretical, Technical and Ethical Reasons for Abandoning Grading.” Grades and the whole notion of grading student learning are flawed on every level you can think of. Most obvious is the unfair subjectivity and arbitrary decision-making involved in the practice. But also, theoretically, systems thinking, constructivist learning theory, and cognitive science all reveal that learning is formative. Evaluation (grading) is summative, the antithesis of formative. Technically, practices such as averaging, weighting, composite grading and giving zeros are all unfair on varying levels. And ethically, and I would argue morally, grading and use of cut-score-scales is wrong because it is an inherently discriminatory practice. Please see my accompanying articles that explain each of these in more detail.

The overriding reason I want to abolish grading is because it is a social justice issue. I firmly believe that, whether knowingly, willingly or unwittingly, it is an insidious means by which we are helping reinforce and sustain a class system in this country.


What do you do in place of grading?

The system I’ve been teaching, and simultaneously using with our students, is a formative, standards-based progress scoring approach. Each of our courses is comprised of a set of standards which drives the instructor’s planning and instruction, and which students are given multiple opportunities throughout the course to continue showing growth in. The students are given a course standards checklist at the beginning of the course, the scoring-to-grade process is explained to them first thing, and once they understand how they will be getting graded they determine their own cut- score-scale from which their final progress grade will be determined.

From then on the instructor is responsible for designing learning opportunities that engage the students in those standards every step of the way, and the students are responsible for taking advantage of those opportunities to continue growing in those skills. The students know that their final grade will be based on their continuing progress. In order to be given credit for making progress, every time they are assessed they must show new evidence in their course portfolio, new and different from the body of work looked at for their prior assessment, that they have made progress in the standards since the last time they were assessed.

Periodically during the course the students, whether through self-assessment or peer assessment, share their accumulating body of work (course portfolio) and are assessed on whether their latest body of work shows that they have grown/progressed/ advanced in some way in each of the course standards since the last time their checklist was completed. Their course standard checklist is then marked accordingly.

At the end of the course a final assessment occurs, and it is that final assessment that then gets converted into a final grade (evaluation). And that grade is an individualized, criterion-referenced progress grade (as opposed to a norm-referenced attainment grade which typical cut-score-grading scale grades are) that is simply based on the number of course standards the student is showing sustained progress in at the time of reporting.

So for example, if there are 8 course standards and the student can show during the final assessment that she is sustaining progress in 6 of the 8 standards, she then plugs her progress score of 6 (out of 8) into her personal cut-score-grading scale she gave herself at the beginning of the course and gives herself a grade. If her personal cut-score-scale is 7-8=A, 5-6=B, 3-4=C, 1-2=D, 0=F, she would give herself a B, which we then submit to the Registrar’s Office.


What fears do/did you have about abolishing grading?

Now? Absolutely none. In the beginning I think my greatest discomfort was feeling like I was doing something wrong by not conforming to the system. I no longer have any of those feelings, especially with what I now know about grades and grading.


What challenges do you encounter with abolishing grading?

Although I still encounter some teachers who are set in their belief in the validity, reliability and fairness of grades and grading, most teachers I work with are begging for a better way for accounting for student learning. The biggest challenge for me in my current position is teachers feeling that there are systemic obstacles preventing them from moving forward. These obstacles range from parents wanting grades because that’s what they had when they were in school, to students wanting grades because that’s all they’ve known and in their minds the only thing that counts, to electronic grade books that force teachers to have to give grades (which we reveal during the course can be gotten around).

I remind them that if we can be doing what we’re doing with them at the university level, a level of schooling where typically there is an extremely conservative belief in/emphasis on grades, then they can be doing the same at their school.


Are you willing to provide contact information for others interested in abolishing
grading?

Yes. Please feel free to contact me at m.skelding@snhu.edu.

Opting out of Grading

My daughter will be attending kindergarten next year and I'm starting to think about how I will support her in making school a place that will nurture and grow her natural intrinsic desire to go on learning.

Let me be clear, I'm as vocal of an advocate for public education as you'll find, but I understand with crystal clarity what Sir Ken Robinson was getting at when he asked the question Do Schools Kill Creativity? or why John Taylor Gatto wrote a book titled Weapons of Mass Instruction.

As an educator who abolished grading in 2004 and initiated a Grading Moratorium, I have an acute understanding for how grading sabotages learning. Because of this, I have drafted this sample letter that could be used as a guide for a face to face discussion with a teacher.

Dear teacher, 

Margaret loves to learn and is very excited to start school this year.  

Because the case against grades has a wealth of anecdotal evidence and scientific research, I am requesting that Margaret's assessments and evaluations only include formative comments. This means that Margaret's learning would never be reduced to a symbol (such as a number or letter). This includes individual assignments, quizzes, tests and her report card.

As a family that plays an active role in Margaret's learning, the best feedback we can receive about her learning is to see her learning. No reductionist data is required.

 If you are interested in learning more about the case against grades, I would be happy to provide you with these resources, and if your school's assessment and reporting policies make this request problematic, I would like the opportunity to discuss this further. Feel free to e-mail me.

I look forward to working with you to support Margaret's natural intrinsic desire to go on learning. 

Sincerely,

Here is an updated version of this post.