The Grading Podcast

Jack Schneider: In some sense, I would say the next step is to use that opening to begin populating the ecosystem with other kinds of humane assessment technologies that will complement each other and that will really emphasize the importance of learning in education, such that people begin to get acclimated to a new kind of world in which, they aren’t being punished. They aren’t being manipulated. They aren’t being, you know, given inadequate information. They are suddenly a part of a process that feels humane and that feels educational and that feels more, more designed.

Boz: Welcome to the Grading Podcast. Where we’ll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students learning from traditional grading to Alternative methods of grading. We’ll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our students success I’m Robert Bosley a high school math teacher instructional coach intervention specialist and Instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA

Sharona: And I’m Sharona Krinsky a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles Faculty coach and instructional designer, whether you work in higher ed or K 12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week, you will get the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

Boz: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co-host, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: Well, it is. Week 14 of the semester. So I am focused very much on putting one foot in front of the other. I think I only have maybe 50 versions of exams to generate between now and when finals are done. So you know, just a few. And I’m getting a lot of questions from instructors on what’s going to be on the study guides. And I’m like, yeah, ask me again in 48 hours. I’ll know more then. So but yeah, we’re at the good part is I’ve passed my mid semester slump emotionally and I’m on , the black diamond downhill slope to the end of the semester.

Boz: You can see the light in the tunnel.

Sharona: I can and it’s not an oncoming train. How about you? How are you doing? How’s your job going?

Boz: The new job is still taking some getting used to. It’s got a crazy calendar lots of different places that I’m supposed to be, but more exciting is, this is coming out, this episode should come out the week of Thanksgiving where we’re exactly a week out and I’m getting everything set up to do my big deep fried turkey. So far I’ve done that several years without burning anything down. So hopefully I’ll remain an un 9 1 1 emergency calling from trying to

Sharona: And I’m pretty sure I saw on Facebook that you were offering for people to tell you if they wanted turkey. So can I raise my hand and say, I’ve never had your fried turkey for as long as we’ve worked together, which it’s been about eight years now. So can we get on that?

Boz: There’s never any leftover.

Sharona: Well, that’s a you problem. That’s clearly a mismanagement of your supplies. Anyway. But beyond all of that, all the bashing, we are excited. We have a super, I’m so excited for this guest. So we have a guest in the virtual studio today. I’d like to welcome Dr. Jack Schneider. Jack is the Dwight W. Allen distinguished professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He’s an award winning scholar. He’s an author of five books and he writes about education in the Atlantic and the New York times and the Washington post. He co hosts an education policy podcast called, "Have you heard?" And the reason we’re talking to him, I am super excited. He is the co author of Off the Mark: How Grades Ratings and Rankings Undermine Learning (But Don’t Have To). So welcome, welcome Jack. Is it okay if I call you Jack instead of Dr. Schneider?

Jack Schneider: Totally fine.

Sharona: We are so excited to have you here. Your book came out and you were someone who we were not connected with through our various alternative grading networks and your book came out and we went, Oh my gosh, we totally have to talk to you. And it just been sitting, I’d been reading it. But I definitely picked it up a little bit more recently. And so I’m super excited to talk about the book. But before we get started, we have a first question. Am I asking this one, Boz, or are you?

Boz: No, just you know, we always like to ask our guests when they come on for the first time, just kind of how did you get into this world of grading reform, or in your case, just education reform? Because you go way past just grading.

Jack Schneider: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think the main answer is that my co author for the book, Ethan Hutt, was my office mate. It’s hard to even use the word office to describe the dungeon like basement dwelling that we shared together in graduate school. And we both kept ending up working on things related to assessment. And, and I think it’s because assessment is always just beneath the surface with anything interesting that we’re talking about in education. It’s the secret infrastructure, you know, it’s not secret in that people aren’t aware of it, but I think lay people who aren’t educators who don’t study education just may not expect that Lurking underneath lesson plans, lurking underneath curricula, lurking underneath relationships between educators and students, right, always underneath is the the architecture of our assessments.

And I think Ethan and I kept coming back to assessment because it’s so fascinating in that regard. I’m also a former high school social studies teacher and had plenty of in class experience with grading and other assessment related challenges that sometimes drove a wedge between me and my students sometimes drove me up the wall in terms of what I was being asked to do. Never really felt inspiring or uplifting mostly, however, I didn’t question it. And, and I think that’s also something that has always intrigued me and intrigued Ethan. We were trained by historians David Lavery David Tyak and Larry Cuban at Stanford University and, David Tyak and Larry Cuban wrote an amazing book that if people haven’t read, they should run to the library and get right away called Tinkering Toward Utopia. And in that book, they talk about the grammar of schooling. And when I talk about the underlying architecture of education, I’m really just coming up with a different way of talking about the grammar of schooling, right? The things that shape everything we do in the same way that grammar is constantly shaping our language and grammar can also be invisible to us. And I think that the invisibility of grading to students and teachers, even while they’re experiencing problems with it by invisible, I don’t mean that they don’t encounter it. I mean, they don’t recognize that it’s planned, that it represents choices, that things didn’t always have to be this way, right? That A through F grades didn’t come down from Mount Sinai with Moses. That A through F grades are a relatively recent invention in the history of schooling.

And once we begin to recognize that, they stop being just a part of the water in which we swim and we can de-normalize them. And that allows us to have really more interesting conversations about like, what is happening in my class because of grades. I’ll wind down this little sermon by saying, I teach a 99 student undergraduate intro course at UMass, and my students start the year usually by being obsessed with their grades. And many end the year that way. But over the course of the semester, we invariably talk repeatedly about things like the fact that we live in a society where they have been told that the only way to get ahead is through accumulating the right badges and tokens. And they end up feeling like their transcripts are minefields that they need to clear of any blemishes in order to have a shot in life. And we talk pretty openly across the course of the semester about things like that. And by the end, we haven’t gotten rid of grades. We haven’t gotten rid of transcripts or test scores, permanent records, but we do clear a little bit of space for learning so that we all remember, oh, right, we’re here to do something more than just acquire tokens to be traded in for later. We’re actually here to do some intellectual work together. So the project is really at its heart about remembering why we’re doing what we’re doing and trying to recognize the ways in which assessment sometimes gets in the way.

Boz: So you mentioned something that I was one of the things I was really hoping I had a place to come in and ask about. Sharona has said on air that this book off the mark has the singles best source of the history of grading that she’s ever seen. And her and I do a lot of trainings and other things together. She always kind of takes that point on. She always is like the historian to kind of show just the grossness of where a lot of our grading practices come in. So for her to say, this is the single best source she’s ever, ever seen is saying a lot. What was it? And I don’t know if this was part that you took on or your writing partner Ethan took on, but like, what was one of the bigger surprises when you were diving into that history? Or what do you think people would be the most surprised at? With looking at the history of grading and how all that these traditional practices became traditional.

Jack Schneider: Yeah. Well, there were a lot of surprises. You know, you go rooting around in archival documents and you never know what you’re going to find. I’ll share a couple surprises. One was discovering that some of the earliest forms of grading came from Oxford and Cambridge, where their early equivalents of Latin honorifics. So this would be American colleges and universities, putting cum laude or summa cum laude on your diploma. Oxford and Cambridge both had an approach that was similar to that, and it was driven by a concern that some students wouldn’t be applying themselves that they needed to be goaded to exert their, best efforts. And it was surprising to us to see how a problem was being solved in a particular time and place and that because it had been solved in that particular way, that people stopped solving that problem and just started copying and pasting the solution. That’s always going to be a problem. How do we motivate our students when they’re mostly young people who often have other things calling at their attention? And especially, here in a system like ours where they are compelled by law to be in school for 180 days a year on average. How do we get them to see that this work is worth their time? That takes a lot of work and I bet we could come up with some answers here for how we’re gonna do it, but the quickest way to do it is just to say well do it or else. And that’s one of the things that the permanent record does. Equally quickly, you can say do it and there will be a reward, and grades serve as a motivator in that sense. So it was interesting to see that happen pretty early on in this history, hundreds of years ago. And to then see that get kind of locked into place, I would say another surprise was seeing that grades were also being used at different times in history in different places for totally different reasons. So grades were being used in little rural, isolated 19th century schools in the United States as a way of synchronizing. practices across vast distances where they didn’t have telephones, they didn’t have the internet, they didn’t have OneDrive or Dropbox to be sharing information with each other. And so they were trying to come up with basically early ways of sharing information in the same way that we would via a database today. And then similarly, we saw that in some places, and they often emerged earliest in larger systems, like urban systems, grades were being used as a shorthand to communicate with families. So the report card was a labor saving device for educators to communicate with families as they were dealing with more students in their classroom, so they no longer had face to face relationships with families. They didn’t necessarily have the time to write extensive comments for each student. And grades, which by the way weren’t just A through F, they were 1 through 10, 1 through 100, A through Z. Every possible combination was used in some place at some time, and not just one overall grade for the subject. You would get grades for behavior, you would get grades for effort, you would get grades for morality and, and so that was interesting too, to see, wow, grades are a tool that have been used to solve different problems at different points in time. And then at some point, they all get fused together. I sort of hesitate to use a Lord of the Rings metaphor because I’m no expert in middle earth, but it does kind of seem like an appropriate metaphor in that it’s one tool to rule them all. And then it becomes a. powerful device for motivating students, for communicating with families and other stakeholders, for synchronizing the system and feels, I think, kind of unchangeable and permanent. But then once you begin to realize, wait a minute. People made decisions at different points in time and they were using grades to solve different problems, we could probably solve those problems in different ways. And we can reach our own conclusions. We can make our own decisions today. I think it becomes less impossible feeling the idea that maybe we can try something different.

Sharona: Well, and what’s interesting, there’s so many things I’m trying to keep in my mind that I want to ask you about, but have you looked at you said that grades do these things and it becomes very powerful. Well, I operate in the university system. I cross over into K to 12, but I’m primarily higher ed based. And when you layer in the ways that grades are used at the university system, especially I’m at Cal State Los Angeles, it’s a majority minority. It’s a minority serving institution. We have over 75 percent of our students are Latino, Latinx and largely first generation. We have a very high number of students with housing and food insecurity. And so what happens with us with grades is if you’re not making satisfactory academic progress, you’re also now becoming ineligible for financial aid. Or if you drop a class in the middle semester and you drop below 12 units, you immediately could lose your housing. You could immediately lose your meal plan. So now we’re gonna take grades, which are supposed to be, in theory, a communication device. And we now are layering Maslow’s needs onto them, you know, food, shelter, clothing, you know, Oh my God. So there’s that. And then there’s your future earnings. But then I want to take one other question to you because now knowing you have this historian training, have you ever looked at, so we’re both in mathematics. So have you looked at, or do you know why, the sequence of math classes that we teach in high school is what it is. Like, why is it Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Trig? Have you ever looked at the history of that?

Jack Schneider: No, but if I had to guess I would guess that it was a late 19th century move that, that had to do with but I don’t know.

Do you know?

Sharona: You’re right there. You’re right there.

Sharona: Yeah. It’s actually a bit before that, I think I’m going to mess up my timing exactly, but it is the sequence at which Harvard required those classes for admission.

Jack Schneider: Yeah.

Jack Schneider: Yeah. Not, not surprising. Yeah. Charles Elliott was president of Harvard when he chaired the committee of 10 which established curricular recommendations for every high school in the United States. And the model there was elite high schools and elite colleges and universities. And, the impact that that has, and it sounds like the math curriculum was the same, is sort of what we were talking about earlier, that it establishes the default. The grammar of schooling, the water in which we swim, and people don’t question it, despite the fact that it was a decision made at a moment in time that may have made sense in those circumstances, but may not make sense a decade later, a century later, and, and because we don’t see it, because it is the default, because it is what a quote unquote real school does. We not only don’t question it, but we get really worked up when it’s not there.

Imagine how worked up families would be if a high school curriculum didn’t have geometry, algebra, math. Pre calc, calc, imagine how worked up families would be. We’ve seen it in schools that roll back homework. I want my kid doing an hour or two of homework a night. Well, the research doesn’t suggest that. Well, hey, listen, real schools give homework. So, so yeah grades, grades go hand in hand. with that story being pretty similar.

Boz: I don’t have to imagine what would happen when you tried to recommend those classes not being there. Cause I do, and I have, I have for years tried to get more pathways that are statistics based and data science based rather than Algebra, Geometry, Algebra 2, and yeah, the unbelievable amount of, I don’t know, disdain and almost hatred that people have at those ideas without having any clue why. They aren’t math people, they’re not in math education, it’s just, oh no. That’s how it’s done. You can’t change it. Like you said, like it was something that came down on some holy texts that your sequence must be this. So, but it’s funny how many different aspects of education have very similar pathways. Like you said, the sequence of the math classes, the grading itself, a lot of the ways that we assess, like there’s a lot of, Oh, it’s almost like history repeating itself.

Sharona: So I wanted to ask why now, this book? What was the impetus to actually write the book itself?

Jack Schneider: Yeah, I mean, a part of it was that we kept writing about. assessment and at some point felt like we had just kind of covered most of the territory for a book and that it made more sense to pull it all together. Most of what we had written was in peer reviewed journals locked behind paywalls. And I am a pretty motivated public facing scholar. And I think Ethan is as well. And even though the book has a price tag at 24 bucks or whatever, you can get it at the library or you can buy a copy and give it to a friend and tell that friend to pay it forward until the price per reader is down to a buck. The goal was to put it all in one place and to write it in a fashion that would be accessible to educators and families and anybody who has ever been interested in why test scores end up being permanent or how we ended up with transcripts that contain less information than a Twitter post, or, why grades are A through F with no E. And, maybe one layer deeper than that in terms of the kinds of questions folks might have, what are the the negative unintended consequences of assessment as we engage in it on a daily basis in tens of thousands of classrooms in the United States. What are the foreseeable consequences that, unintended though they may be, are a natural result of this and therefore things we ought to begin taking action on.

So that was a big part of the motivation for writing the book was just, we had been doing the work for about a decade and felt like there was a there there. And then I think that the last straw was the pandemic because the pandemic felt like a moment when. there could be a big shake up. The, we’ve talked a lot so far about the grammar of schooling, but the status quo had been shaken so badly that it felt like maybe, maybe there’s a moment here where the grammar of schooling could be altered. And sure enough people began wondering, well, hang on a second. How’s my kid gonna take his SAT test? And wait a minute, my daughter is in an AP class and I want her to get the score that she deserves. And hey, my kids have been doing all their homework throughout the pandemic. You’re telling me they’re not going to get grades for this? That the school district or the state is going to give either everybody an A or nobody a grade at all? There were petitions in places like Oregon with thousands and thousands of parental signatories demanding that their kids be given grades. And that’s when we began to see, wow, we really don’t have a lot of critical consciousness about this. And so the thought was, maybe we could raise some awareness. Maybe we could raise some questions with the book.

Boz: I do love that idea of trying to use the pandemic as a catalyst, because I mean, that really is, Sharona, when you and I. I mean, we’ve been in grading reform for a while, but that’s when we really get into doing PDs on how to redesign classes because it did cause so many people to stop and kind of examine and go, okay, we can’t do things as is cause it’s so different now.

But I was hoping, and I still am, that we’ll see some real reform that kind of started in pandemic as a catalyst and will actually take root. I am getting a little bit, disheartened with how many things that I were seeing that started to change that are starting to now revert back. So I’m hoping that’s not a trend.

I’m feeling like there’s enough synergy that I’m hoping that this bridge between college and the high schools might help drive it so I guess my next question is, what’s the reception been? Has the book had any traction? Have you been talking on this stuff? Like what’s been happening since the book came out?

Jack Schneider: Yeah. I think that, that most people who I’ve talked to, of course, I think people who hate the book and drop it off in a little free library to get rid of it aren’t seeking me out to say, Hey, I want my $24.95 back. But yeah, the reception has been good. And what has been most encouraging has been when people have said, I’m starting to have conversations with people in my community, whether that is a college, or university, or a school, or a school district about what we can do that is within our sphere of influence. What can we do that we’re able to control to minimize some of the unintended consequences like the stress that grades produce for students or the fact that grades often actually aren’t capturing accurate information about what students know and can do.

So some of these things we can actually solve at the classroom level as educators or at the department level using some of the powers that departments in higher ed have or departments in k 12 schools, or maybe it’s the school wide level. And in some cases there are school districts who are doing district wide reads to just try to get a little bit more critical. And even if that’s the only thing that happens, even if there’s no policy change that results from this, I think that being critically conscious is a huge win for educators and for community members and for students themselves.

My wildest dream would be that students would get exposed to this stuff. Maybe we need to write like a shorter version. Not that students couldn’t read this book. They’re perfectly capable. But I don’t know why they would want to. Maybe what we need is a fun graphic novel version of this so that they can get themselves organized and advocate for change because once students become critically conscious, it’s not merely that if they organized, they could agitate for change. It’s also that I think they feel more empowered about their own learning and they are reminded in a way that they haven’t been since they first started getting drawn into this game, that the game of grades is different from the process of learning. You asked earlier about what motivated the book and I think probably deep down what motivated it most was the fact that I am the parent of a public school student who loved school, loved, loved, loved school. And in kindergarten could not be drawn out of the classroom until her teacher threw her out and in the morning wouldn’t even say goodbye to me, would run from me to get into that classroom. What was happening in there, right?

Was she being given an F for the day if she was late. Was she being given an A if she stayed until the last possible moment? No, she wasn’t being graded. What was happening there was that a learning environment was being cultivated that felt so authentically meaningful to her that she didn’t need to be graded. She was giving a hundred in that classroom every single day. In fact, I didn’t need to see grades from her teacher because I happened to live across the street and this happened to be an extraordinary educator. And we would just have conversations about how my. Daughter was developing.

And then things slowly changed over time and she’s now a ninth grader and of course she’s obsessed with her grades. How can you not be if you live in America and you’re a young person. Is she motivated to do her work? Sometimes and sometimes not. What is the form of communication that we get? And this is not a slam on her teachers. We get a report card and the report card has grades on it. And then there are a couple of sort of pre made comments that teachers can select. And, I think we can do better. We can do better by each other. We can do better for each other. And and I think that if we remember that learning matters, that’s the mantra for this book is learning matters. I kept asking Ethan, why are we writing a book about assessment? This is so in the weeds. And the mantra was, wait a minute. If learning matters, and this is what maybe the major obstacle to all of us remembering that? Then it’s a project that counts.

Boz: Yeah. And I can empathize with you and your daughter. I have two daughters, but one of them that’s a senior this year, that had similar experiences. I mean, absolutely loved kindergarten and first grade and by the time she was a freshman, when we came back from pandemic, and the amount of times she’d come home, just crying and just absolutely nothing with learning, just chasing points, chasing grades. And yeah, it’s not a fun feeling, especially as a parent, but also as an educator to see someone that had such a love and joy for learning and it just kind of be beaten out of them. Not that she had bad educators, but just beaten out of her by the system.

Sharona: You said two things over the course of the last bit of time we’ve been talking. At the very beginning, you said grades underlie everything. And just now you said they’re an obstacle and you hit basically two of my metaphors. I don’t really think of grades as underlying everything. I actually think of as it as overlaying everything. It actually like it’s kind of smothering everything. But also I have a metaphor that I now use for, this is called the grading podcast. We use the terms alternative grading to mean all the things that traditional grading are not. But I view traditional grading, which is points, percentages and averages, as a concrete block wall at the beginning of an obstacle course. You know, the one that you have to climb the rope and you can’t see past it. And some people can get over fast and some people can’t get over at all.

To me, that’s traditional grading and alternative grading deconstructs that wall so that you can see the obstacle course. It doesn’t necessarily get you through it. It doesn’t get you halfway down the course, but it lets you see, and the obstacles are either the things you have to learn, or it could be systemic inequity, or it could be bias, but it lets you see everything. And if you can see things, you can solve it. And so I want to deconstruct traditional grading while recognizing that the things that grades were supposed to do, the things they were invented to do, many of them still need to be done. We do need to communicate to students whether or not they’re learning the things we want them to learn. And because we’re in such a vast schooling system, we do need to communicate somehow from one course to the next. If a student is adequately prepared or things like that. So we got to still do that. I’m not yet in. I mean, I love to live in a utopia where everything can be done through written narrative. But in our current world of financial constraint, I don’t think that’s possible. But I’d love to at least start by making those letter grades actually mean something. which I don’t think they do.

Jack Schneider: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We spend some significant time in the book trying to think through how can we continue to solve the challenges that we want to solve. So you identified communication as one. We want to still be able to communicate, not just with families and caregivers and students themselves, but also with other educators. Next year’s educators, for instance, to let them know what a student’s strengths and areas for growth are or other institutions when a student is moving schools or moving up a level. So communication, motivation, and then sort of synchronizing systems are the key problems that assessment technologies, as we call them, grades being the leading assessment technology, those are the problems that assessment technologies are solving. And as we currently use them they have these problems. They’re extrinsically motivating students, they are being weaponized in a way that makes school for our most advantaged students feel really stressful and for our least advantaged students feel really alienating. The kind of gaming that we see as a problem where learning is almost beside the point for students, the informational thinness of grades. So If grades are communicating something, they’re communicating very little to families.

What do I know about how my daughter is doing in geometry right now? I know she has an A, but does she understand stuff, or has she just done all of her homework? I’m not sure. And then finally, the inequity piece where we know that grades are not actually fairly reflecting what students know and can do because they so often are reflecting things other than talent and hard work. They’re reflecting the degree to which they can be manipulated. And so we try to think through these things and in the book to try to solve some of these problems by doing things like, for instance, making grades overwritable, right? So if, the whole thing feels weaponized to students, it’s because of the permanence of grades. You get it wrong, You’re wrong forever, right? You get an F on your transcript and it’s not going away.

And my students at UMass will be very honest with me and say, Professor, I know this quiz was on the syllabus and I know I should have been prepared. But I’m not. Can I not take it? Because if I don’t do well on this quiz, then the grade I’ll get is X. And if that’s the grade I get, then that plus this other grade that I got is going to have this impact on my GPA, where it’s like, Oh my God, you feel like your whole future is riding on this silly reading quiz that we have. And if we can make grades overwritable, the way that a hard drive can be overwritable, we can get rid of that feeling that we’re on the edge of nuclear launch.

Let me give you an example that that I like to give about why overwriting grades is so important. I didn’t know how to ride a bike, once upon a time. Imagine if you had given me a test in bike riding at age three and then put that on a transcript that I had to carry around with me for the rest of my life. People would look at this and go, this guy doesn’t know how to ride a bike. I happen to be a great bike rider. I’m very good at riding bikes. And I have overwritten that information. So when people say, can you ride a bike? I say, yes, quite well. Thank you very much. I don’t say, well, no, I can’t. Because once upon a time that was the case. So there are things we can do like making grades overwritable or for instance relating to the problem of extrinsic motivation, focusing on the use value of what we’re learning in class rather than just the exchange value of the token that you’ll get. So there’s a lot that we can do. And some of it is going to require systemic action. It’s going to require university systems, school districts states being involved, but some of it comes down to what we as instructors can do working on our own or working with each other.

Sharona: Yeah, we have these four pillars that we work with in our world, and one of them is reattempts without penalty. So that’s that overwritable nature and Boz, that also occurs to me with our triple P is essentially that as well. We have taken all of our work that is not checking for evidence of learning, that it’s opportunities to practice or participate. And instead of doing them as percentages, we do them as points of accumulation. Kind of like, it’s almost like a gamified thing where there’s a thousand points available, and we’ll make more available if needed, but you just got to get to a certain bar, like 700. And once you hit the bar, you get full credit for that piece of the grade. And so that lets you miss a quiz or make mistakes on a quiz because yeah, you didn’t get all 10 points on the quiz, but you got six towards your 700 or you got whatever. So it doesn’t bake those penalties into the grade.

Boz: So you were ending with those last comments. I wanted to ask, cause I’ve asked a few people this now, what needs to happen, what needs to come next for some of these bigger changes to happen? Is it doing more education about the history of assessments and grading at the college prep level? Is it at the district level and going top down? What needs to happen to really get this ball rolling? Because there’s a lot of, we had Dr. Thomas Guskey on a while back, and he was talking about just the explosion of number of books and research and everything else in the last 10 years around specially grading and assessment. So, a lot of people are looking at it. What needs to happen next to really start seeing changes?

Jack Schneider: Yeah. I think the first thing that needs to happen is that people need to become aware of the fact that every time they are encountering assessment in their schooling careers, they’re encountering things that can be changed. That they need to become aware of the fact that none of this is inevitable, none of this is unchangeable. And once you can begin to see the matrix there, that’s when we can begin to have conversations about how we want to change it. But until people recognize that this is not the only way, this is not a fundamental part of the definition of school. If they don’t realize that, then you’re actually going to get resistance from the folks who you need to be the biggest champions of this. So parents and caregivers, for instance, will at first often be very resistant to any change in grading. And for good reason, because they live in a system where they believe that the only way to help their kids get ahead is to help them accumulate the most tokens and the most valuable badges.

And if we can then help them see, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, sure, there are tokens and badges along the way, and absolutely there are systems that young people are going to need to collect credentials in order to navigate, but learning is going to be lost along the way. Learning is going to be damaged. Learning is going to be moved away from the center of the enterprise to the margins, if this is only about credentials. Then, then families. Start to say. Oh, wait a minute. I don’t like that. I’m not on board with that.

I’ve seen families in districts where they tried to move to standards based grading resist it fiercely because they worried that it would make their kids less appealing to colleges and universities. And they resisted it because it actually made it possible for everybody to do well rather than to have a kind of elite who would go on to collect more rewards than everybody else. People are deeply caring and loving when it comes to their own kids and often when it comes to other people’s kids. And if we can raise awareness about what the consequences for learning are, then I think people become much more receptive to it. And so I think it’s a combination of those two things, right? It’s being aware of the water in which you swim. Like this is not, unchangeable. This is not the best way. This is just the way we’ve been doing it.

Decisions made long ago got locked into place. And then we just keep repeating it because, you know, it’s like my parents went to school. So what did they expect my school to look like? They expected it to look like their school. Schools are conservative institutions because of that, because through exposure, we become acclimated to what we think "normal" is. So denormalizing. assessment for people, and then reminding them about what is being lost here. And that is the centrality of learning in the process of education. That’s what prepares the ground for all of the kinds of smart tweaks and adaptations. And new policies and hacks and everything that educators and scholars and researchers are doing and studying and proposing. There are great ideas out there. They’re not going to go any place until that ground is ready. Until people are receptive to those ideas. Otherwise, you’re going to get a lot of resistance to those ideas. At least that’s been my experience.

Boz: So I have probably asked close to two dozen people that question at this point. And the first part of that answer of just making people aware that this isn’t something that is a must, that this isn’t the way it’s always been and always has been and always must be is a pretty common answer. Your point about the family and the parents, I have not heard, I don’t think anyone else bring that up. And as I listened to you, I’m like, Oh my God, absolutely. Like, I keep going back to, do we need to start getting real education about grading? We joke about grading is such a big part of an educator’s life, whether they like it or not. But how many of us ever took a grading one on one course in our college, in our teacher prep programs. Your point about the parents and the families is absolutely brilliant. And I’ve never really thought of it that way. And like I said, I’ve asked probably close to two dozen people on this podcast, and I don’t think anyone else has ever said that either.

Sharona: Well, and what I’m wondering, Boz, so one other thing to know about, Jack, is that Los Angeles Unified just did their first update to their grading policies in 20 years, and they did about as good as you could do it for the current state that we’re in, would you say that, Boz? Given where we are, where we want to go, they moved to a, "we encourage, but don’t mandate changes to these equity grading policies". So in your situation, Boz, I’m like, okay, they they’ve made the policy change, but we know the devil’s in the details. So is there still room? Is that the next big step, even though the policy has changed to do these things that you just said, did I stump both of you? That was like, it was a question. Well,

Jack Schneider: I just didn’t know if, if. If

Sharona: you want to go Boz, well,

Boz: you know, I think it could be, I think that, and again, because unfortunately I’m in an area that the parent involvement isn’t as much as it is in other places, but I can so see how that can be such a big barrier if you’re fighting parents on making this kind of changes. So I definitely think it is. Actually, I don’t think there is a next step. I think there’s like several different pieces that need to be placed on the board at once. And that’s probably one of the ones that’s getting overlooked.

Jack Schneider: I know that folks in my research team have been talking with people in LAUSD about using performance assessments of what students know and can do in place of standardized tests. And why am I bringing that up? Because I think that, in some sense, the next step is to begin building out an entire ecosystem of assessment that has learning at the center of it. Because one change on its own is actually going to fit badly with every other element of the existing assessment process. architecture, right? You change one little piece and people are going to see this doesn’t really work. It doesn’t fit. We’re trying to do the right thing by our students and it isn’t a coherent system.

And so in some sense, If you’re talking about policy action that has already been taken in the right direction, in some sense, I would say the next step is to use that opening to begin populating the ecosystem with other kinds of humane assessment technologies that will complement each other, and that will really emphasize the importance of learning in education, such that people begin to get acclimated to a new kind of world in which they aren’t being punished. They aren’t being manipulated. They aren’t being given inadequate information.

They are suddenly a part of a process that feels Humane and that feels educational and that feels more, more designed right? One of the things that’s important to remember here is that our assessment system as it mostly exists in this country, right? With tests and grades and transcripts, it wasn’t designed. It just emerged and it evolved, but not in a manner that made it, actually conducive to the fundamental aim of supporting student learning.

The edges got sanded off over time. We ended up with an A through F system rather than 15 different systems. That’s one of the ways in which it evolved. It evolved actually to provide less information. Once upon a time, report cards had far more letters and numbers on them. So it evolved and changed. It didn’t necessarily improve and so again, one of the things that we should think about in moments where there are windows of opportunity is how can we design something coherent that will advance the aims that we have.

And again, let’s not lose sight. We do want to continue to motivate students. We do want to continue to communicate both with students and with their families as well as with more distant audiences like colleges and universities or future employers. And we do want to continue to synchronize the system. Different institutions need to be able to talk to each other about what students know and can do. But we can continue to meet those aims without relying on grades as we presently do. So maybe the answer, in this case, is the door opens, push as much humane assessment infrastructure through that door as you can before it slams shut.

Sharona: Well, and I just want to point out to everyone listening, you are not paid by us. You do not know what we do outside of this because one of the things we’ve been talking about is we do professional development on authentic assessment for alternative grading. So, I just want to point out, you didn’t know that when you gave that answer.

Jack Schneider: No, but now that I know that I’ve accidentally endorsed, I’m going to, I’m going to charge you my my endorsement fee.

Sharona: Oh darn, shucks.

Boz: Well, it has been an absolute pleasure. We are kind of coming close to time. I did want to make an observation and then if either you Jack or you Sharona want to comment on it or have your own ending thoughts, something that I’ve been realizing and talking to you is just kind of confirming this, I don’t know anyone that’s done any kind of grading reform that didn’t get into assessment reform. And I don’t know anyone that got into assessment that didn’t end up doing grading reform as well. Some of us, like Sharona and I came at it from the grading side first and instantly also had to change some of our assessments, other people like Dr. Sean Nank, like it sounded like you did, came from the assessment. And then pretty quickly realized that grading had to be, so are these two things so inseparable? It’s almost like you can’t personally change one without changing the other as well.

Jack Schneider: It’s all connected. And curriculum is a part of that as well. And your relationship with your students is a part. All of these things are connected because as you begin to change this infrastructure, you realize, oops, I removed a support beam there, I’m going to have to replace it with something else. Or, wow, I cleared out this whole room that used to be full of garbage, but now I’ve got to fill it. What am I going to do in this space? So every change that you make to any part of your practice requires change in other parts of the practice. Otherwise things start to feel weird.

I’ll just give you a quick example and maybe this will be my parting thought that is, I teach, as I mentioned, a large undergraduate class. And one of the things that I have tried to do this semester is have lower stakes assessments for them so that they weren’t freaked out about what their grades would be. And so they had some measure of control over that. At the same time, I did not change any of my traditional practices around, I don’t take attendance, you’re grownups, be here, don’t be here. I haven’t changed my practices around, the ways that I encourage students to do readings. Again, I took a pretty laissez faire attitude, do the readings or don’t do the readings.

And I realized I actually had put my students in a bad situation. Because what I had done was I had removed all of the threats that previously existed. Not in my course. Well, although, I guess, they had existed in some way, shape, or form. And then I expected them to totally change their behavior and to suddenly be intrinsically motivated to do all the work and to be in class. And I realized, like, oh, I actually need to change my practice here. I need to do things to help students see, no, no, no, no, just because it’s not graded doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. So I need to change some of my lesson design. I need to change the way I build relationships with my students. I need to change the way I earn their trust. I need to begin building up their tolerance for doing particular kinds of assignments rather than just throwing them into the deep end.

And so I think this is a journey for all of us, but what a way more exciting journey to be on, right? When you’re like, okay, I’ve got to figure out this challenge of making sure that my classroom is a joyous place where people really want to be there and they feel like they’re really growing and they’re getting something out of this. And where they’re gonna talk about this class. Maybe it’s only for the next week, but maybe a year from now they’ll say, oh I took this great class where I learned a lot. I was really inspired to go to this class.

That’s such a better project. A never ending project? Fine, I’ll take that. But a better project than, yeah, you know, they show up, they take their tests, I log it in a grade book. If they don’t come, they get a penalty. But how, how uninspiring. So I’m happy to be on this journey. Even as somebody who wrote a whole book about this, I’m on the journey too. And every day, we get a little better.

Sharona: Well, and just to piggyback on that, I too have said that the change to migrating is what opened the space for all the other things I had heard about. Whether it’s better assessment, whether it’s better relationships with my students.

So what I would encourage and what I like about what you just said, it is a journey, and I would invite everyone listening to go ahead and get on that journey because it’s truly extraordinary.

Boz: As, as we start to wrap up if there’s anyone that wants to learn more about you, Jack or check, check more of your stuff out, do you have any websites or? Anything like that, that you want to plug before you go, so people can look up more of your, your books and more of your writings?

Jack Schneider: I’m pretty easily Googled. So if you Google Jack Schneider, you’ll probably get me. There is a website for the book. If people want to go to that off the mark. com. And if you don’t want to fish around trying to figure out how to buy it from an independent bookstore. It’s on Amazon. It’s on Barnes. Does Barnes and Noble even still exist?

Sharona: They’ve taken over the entire college bookstore market.

Jack Schneider: Maybe on your local college bookstore campus. Yeah. The book is available wherever books are sold.

Sharona: And we will link it in the show notes as well.

Jack Schneider: Cool. Yeah if people get really excited and interested about this, shoot me an email. Also we have been on a number of podcasts, Ethan and I. So if people want to hear more of me blathering about this and Ethan Off the mark book. com has links to a bunch of those podcasts that we’ve appeared on.

Boz: Great. Thank you. I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to come and join us. This has been a lot of fun. I will admit I am not through reading this, but I am, I’m about up to chapter seven. So I look forward to the last few chapters. But thanks again for coming on Sharona. want to take us out?

Sharona: Absolutely. We’d love to hear your reactions. If anyone has read the book, write in, we’d love to read your comment on a future episode. And we’re always looking for guests. So if you’d like to come on and have a conversation, just reach out to us through the contact us form on our website.

Boz: And until next time, we’ll see you later.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episodes page on our website. http://www.TheGradingPod.com, or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show, or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the contact us form on our website. The Grading Podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State system or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.