The Grading Podcast

107 – Set up to fail article

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Boz: See, and I think that that long-term success is one of those metrics that are completely overlooked. Whether we’re talking about K 12, whether we’re talking about the transition from high school to college, whether we’re talking about, like you said, freshman or early career college to completion. This is a metrics that I think should be one of the more important ones and is one of the ones in our system that is almost completely ignored.

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 Grading podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co-host, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How you doing today? Sharona?

Sharona: I am good, but really tired because my theater camp is in full swing, so I’m working every day there. My son’s show opened, so I was seeing a lot of shows this weekend and several of our colleagues are in town, so I’m going out for like drinks or dinner, so I’m having these really long days and yesterday I actually didn’t eat between seven in the morning and 8:30 at night, which is very unusual for me. So i’m a little tired. It’s good tired, but tired. How are you?

Boz: And last night you had a, a little bit of a late night too, from what I hear.

Sharona: Yes. I mean, late night for me means I didn’t finish what I was doing till 10 30, so not exactly like 2:00 AM but yeah, I had a chance. Several of our colleagues, Drew Lewis and Steven Clontz and Dave Kung are in town. There’s probably other people we know at the AIM Conference, which is focused, it’s hosted out of Caltech and it’s focused this year on open educational resources and open standards. And so they were in and I’m like, Hey. So we went out with Drew on Sunday, you and I, and we’re like two thirds of the way through the conversation and I was like, oh, hey, something, something about Steven. And he’s like oh yeah, he’s here. And I’m looking at him. I’m like, and you didn’t invite him? So I ended up going back to Pasadena last night to hang out with them. And it was definitely like conference drinks. Meaning you hang out, you’re having a drink, you’re having a little bit of food and you’re talking to work networking and work and stuff like that.

Boz: Yeah. But that was fun Sunday. ’cause yeah, you, I and Drew got together and i’ve worked with Drew for years now. And I’ve never met him in person. Like, so yeah, that’s this kind of weird hybrid world that we live in now that you literally can work with someone for years and never have actually met them in person. So, I really enjoyed the fact that I got to meet and just sit down and Sunday night was a little bit less of that conference drink. Like drew and I were talking about, you know, driving at young ages. ’cause I’m from Oklahoma and he’s from Alabama. And you know, we started driving at like 12.

Sharona: You have Southern connections, you have similar age children.

Boz: Yeah. Yeah. So, it was a little bit more personal, but it, yeah, it, it was fun. I would’ve loved to have met Steven. But. Well, it was, it was fun. Not, not being hyper work focused.

Sharona: Yeah, we did have this one funny moment at the beginning. It was Steven’s birthday yesterday, so happy birthday, Steven.

Boz: Happy birthday, Steven.

Sharona: And we were talking about ages, and I know that I’m older than a lot of the people that we work with, even though I don’t feel late career because I took a large chunk of time away from academia, but we were joking around and then we were saying, oh, hey, well when Dave gets there. You know, he’ll probably be older than you. And I’m like, oh no, I’m probably older than Dave. So when Dave got there, we asked him his age and he’s younger than me, and my answer was, you know, f he’s still, I’m still the oldest. Like it was, it was a really funny moment. But enough about us. What are we talking about today? We’re on the podcast. So.

Boz: So, you know, a couple episodes ago, back on episode 105, we had talked about, or you specifically had talked about the fact you had gone through several articles, kinda looking for the topic of that episode 105, which ended up being about this concept of a tipping point. But in that, you talked about it, article that you had seen about the San Francisco School District scrapping this pilot project that they had been planning to allow some teachers, and again, allow those that wanted to, to pilot alternative grading. And that kind of stuck with me.

So I was doing a little bit of research and looking at some articles, so I came across this article by Matthew Ebert. Called “Our Grading System was Setting Our Students Up to Fail Until this Change”. And I, as I read it, A), it really hit at a personal level because there were so many similarities to not only my own story, but so many other stories I’ve heard. You know, and I, I just kind of wanted to look at this article and kind of get back to the why we are doing this. Again, we’ve talked a lot about people getting so caught up in the how and that the making the change in the grading without making the change in the pedagogy just doesn’t work. So I wanted to kinda look at this article and talk a little bit about our own experiences and just really get back to why we do this.

Sharona: Okay. So do you wanna kick us off with talking about this article then? What is it that hooked you in, that drew you in, to this particular one?

Boz: Well, it really starts with you know, giving a little bit of background about the, the person that wrote it and a little bit about the setting, but they talk about why they changed, why this is a middle school setting. And they talk about a, a student, they didn’t name the student but a student that had come to them from a lower performing elementary school. And this student was, you know, one of those dedicated, hardworking students that dotted all the i’s and crossed all the T’s of participating in class, doing their homework, doing all those expected expected things from traditional grading, but still had some deficiencies academically. The student because they were doing all the things, they were checking all the boxes, they were doing, all the things that were expected, was getting A’s and B’s in this middle school and was doing what they thought was well. So well that when they left middle school, they were accepted into a high performing high school and immediately dropped out within the first year of that. This is what prompted this principal, I believe they were a principal at the time, and the school to really look at things and make some changes.

Now, I know personally, and I haven’t told this story in a while, but in one of our early episodes I talked about one of my students, , a gentleman by the name of Danny Flores. Yes. I have his permission to say his name, even though he hates what I tell the story because when he said what he said, he’s like, I did not mean your class, Mr. Bosley. Which it’s funny, he’s graduated like almost 15 years ago and he still calls me Mr. Bosley. But he’s like, I was not talking about your class, but it still stuck. He graduated from Santee, did really well, went to a UC and flunked out within the first, I think three semesters or maybe two years, but ended up flunking out.

I forgot where it was. I think it was on Facebook. But he went on and said how Santee prepared students for junior college, not for four year universities. And the funny thing is, his wife, who was also a student of mine, they weren’t married at the time, of course they are now, was in the same situation. She was one of my better math students that I’d had in my 20 year career, also went to the same uc that Danny did and also flunked out.

Now they have both since gone back and actually gotten degrees, but it was not an easy path. So that really kind of hit home ’cause that’s a large reason of why I really started looking at transformation and looking at trying to do things differently. So that really hit home to me.

Sharona: That part of the article hit home to me as well, for many of the reasons that you’re saying. And it’s interesting to me because you and I work largely in both the higher ed, but also the high school world. You have some work with middle school. But then we’ve done pro professional development with middle school, and I think this article really awakened me to how early these challenges start and how important, maybe, the middle school piece of this grading puzzle is because middle school transcripts are still not permanent, right? They don’t go into your college admissions. So maybe there’s a little bit more room to make some of these changes than there might be at the high schools, and it would be interesting as we think about that tipping point thing. Really targeting middle school changes because that’s who we worked with this year extensively as one of, as one of the middle schools that has changed. So I’m kind of curious to think through whether part of that tipping point conversation is a focus a little bit on the middle schools.

Boz: That’s an interesting point I hadn’t thought about, but you’re right.

Sharona: It reminds me a little bit of a parallel situation that I’m grappling with is it’s this idea of preparation. So I coordinate this pre-calculus. If you talk to most math professors, they’re gonna tell you pre-calculus is supposed to prepare your for calculus and it doesn’t usually. So I wonder if the same thing is true, That we can really start to address with some of our grading reforms, moving to an environment where the actual preparation for what comes next is better, is more aligned. So I’m just kind of curious what you think about that.

Boz: Well, yeah, and that was one of the big goals of common core. California, we are a common core state. Most, not all, but a good chunk of states are a common core. But for math, that was one of the big goals and the big shifts was supposed to be vertical alignment. Getting to where topics are more aligned, they feed more into each other. And one class, the prior class, really was preparation for the next class. So a pre-algebra class really supported algebra, a pre-calc, really supported calc. Have we met that goal? I think things have gotten better, at least in the K 12 world. Have we met that goal? No. Are we still approaching it and working towards it? I think so, but it’s interesting that you see that same vertical misalignment beyond the K 12 world.

Sharona: And there’s a whole direction we can go down that I don’t wanna go down, but even if we do get vertically aligned, are we aligned on the right things? But we’re gonna set that aside because that’s a whole different, so we gotta be vertically aligned and we have to be vertically aligned on the things that we actually wanna be teaching. So. Oof. That’s a whole conversation.

Boz: But this highlighted, and they actually say this in the article. In fact, I want to read this part. ” With support from her teachers, she was earning a’s and B’s on a report card. However, these grades were not accurate reflections of her independent mastery of standards, our A’s and B’s represented that she completed classwork, turned in homework on time, and participating in class. None of this meant that she grasped the content and skills.”

This is a large part of our arguments for moving away from traditional grading, that that behavioral component of traditional grading that is usually such a big part of traditional grading, is one of the three big points that we point out in our math is the misuse of grading PDs that we’ve done quite often now.

Sharona: And here’s the thing that is really striking me right now, what you said. We’re trying to say that the shift to alternative grading gives us a better opportunity to have grades reflect actual learning, and that’s one of the things I struggle with, with some of the other names and purposes and things that we talk about. So if you talk about grading for equity or grading for growth, not the details, but those names, it’s this idea that we’re suddenly gonna be more equitable. You could be more equitable in that everybody fails. That’s one way to be equitable.

Or grading for growth. You could have people growing, but not really getting to the things that you want to get to. So I’ve struggled with some of these things, and this is reminding me of that conversation we had with a teacher a few weeks ago where we were, first of all, we were trying to show that the math of traditional grading does none of these things. It doesn’t measure learning. It’s not equitable. It doesn’t measure growth. It doesn’t promote growth, and it doesn’t actually mean anything. And we had a teacher push back and say, well, if you’re gonna let us do all these different styles of alternative grading, ’cause we were exploring standards versus specifications and things like that, and they were saying if there’s no consistency from instructor to instructor within the school, students are still confused. Grades still don’t mean anything. And there’s a degree to which that teacher was right in that it’s going to be hard to translate potentially from an A in one class to what it means to have an A in a totally different class. But if we can agree that it is measuring learning and there’s some place or repository where what they’re supposed to have learned is recorded. Then maybe that kind of gets to the heart of if you’re going to use grading at all, the meaning has to be defined somewhere.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And we’d really want them to be having skills and knowledge.

Boz: Yeah. And that’s actually one of the things that has changed over the years for us and some of our PDs is we start now with a grading purpose statement. When we’re working with an institution, whether it’s a middle school, a high school, a FLC, or a department in a college, that’s one of the things that we now start with is that purpose statement, because that does ground that work and that concept that you were just talking about. And that’s not something we always did. That’s something that we started doing as we got involved in this and grew in this. Right.

Sharona: So along those lines, I wanted to bring up sort of the next thing that really hit home for me in this article, if that’s okay. Okay. Which is quite a bit further down. This particular school, they worked at this a while. They looked at things, they stripped things away, and they eventually shifted to standards based grading. And they did all the things. They had honest debates, observed classrooms. They argued, they took their time and they sat down with families and got feedback. So it sounds like they did a pretty good transition. And once they finally made the change, students’ grades dropped precipitously. That was their word. “When we stripped away the other pieces of traditional grading and solely focused on standard mastery students’ grades dropped precipitously”. So did they screw it up or was, was that a feature or a bug of this transition?

Boz: No, I don’t think this was a screw up at all. And I love the way that they responded to this. And they’re very honest in this article. In fact, right after the paragraph that you just quoted from it states, “I would love to say that we met this challenge head on. That we took it as an opportunity to be great but that’s not true. Not immediately. For many of us, our initial response was despair. What are we doing here? What had we been doing?”

And I think this is, especially in K 12, and again, I might be biased because I am much more into the K 12 world than the higher ed, but I don’t think this is unusual. That when you make this change, you’re going to have some growing pains because your students are going to have some growing pains. If you’re doing this, even at the middle school, many of your students have had several years of training in traditional grading systems. You do this at the high school level. They’ve had almost a decade of training. If you’re starting this at the college, they have had more than a decade, almost a decade and a half of training of traditional grading. The expectations, how to succeed, and this is not the student’s fault. This is how to succeed. So that’s what they’ve been taught to do. So when you change that, you change those expectations, you change those kinda rules of engagement for grading, the students are gonna struggle at first. The students are going to need some time to adjust. And yes, that likely means overall you are going to see some decline in grade and overall grades. I don’t think that’s unusual. I think that’s actually.

Sharona: I think the confusion is part of it. I agree with everything you said, but I think there’s another layer.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: Which is your previous grades, because they didn’t measure learning, everything about your course was set up to support those grades. So it’s not just student understanding of how the system works, but your entire pedagogy and the things you teach and how you teach them was based on this false idea that you were being successful. So I think that even if students understood everything, they still might struggle because your class was not actually preparing your students before. So you’re gonna have to make a lot of changes beyond just the grading system.

Boz: And that’s another separate point that is extremely important is that, and I think this is probably one of the biggest issues I see doing this at the K 12 world. First, and I’ve talked about this several times, doing these kind of reforms in the K 12 world. All, at least every experience I’ve had, it’s like, okay, we’re doing the training on Wednesday. We’re gonna have a follow up next Wednesday and the Monday after that we expect to see it in the classroom. Everything in the K 12 world is like, okay, here’s your pd. Now do it.

It is expected to be be done instantly, which is not a fair or reasonable expectation because this is not a changing in just your grading to do this properly. This is a fundamental change in your pedagogy and in your philosophies. This is not just changing how I set up my grade book, which is the amount of times I’ve done PDs, with K 12 people, and I get those, okay. Okay. Yeah. We get it, we get it. We need to change. Just tell me how to do this in my LMS. And I’m like, no, I’m not gonna skip to that part, because that is setting you up to fail.

But yeah, because this is not just a change in your grading, but a change in your classroom. It’s gonna take time. And you’re gonna mess up. And we have talked about that extensively. How many times we’ve messed up, how many times other people have messed up. One of our favorite guests that we just had on last week, Dr. Robert Talbert, that’s one of his big things is talking about how many times he’s changed. He was on last week putting kind of a cap on a multi episode series where he was talking about these changes that he’s made because of ai, because of trying to teach a class that he’s very used to teaching in a format that he’s not used to teaching in it. So yeah, it’s gonna cause changes, and those changes aren’t always gonna be perfect the first time.

Sharona: Well, this is one of the reasons that I think that maybe in some ways middle school is a safer place to do this because they said, “I don’t want people to feel like they have to wait to like design their system and change all their pedagogy and assessments. It’s okay to just get started.” I agree. I don’t think you should put it in next week, but you don’t need to wait three years either. Like there’s, there’s yeah, a medium. But that being said, maybe it’s okay if students’ grades drop while you’re doing this. As long as students are still progressing. I mean, we don’t want them to drop to failing, but if they drop to C’s, when the student’s used to getting A’s and B’s, there’s time to recover in ways where the high schools, at least a lot of the high schools who don’t have that sort of competitive top choice situation or top school situation that this article talks about, you can transfer to high school and your record essentially gets reset and it’s not gonna matter that you got a C in eighth grade math or a C in pre-algebra versus an A in pre-algebra. So, I don’t know, it feels like there’s a chance you can make at lower stakes, but there’s also a chance that it’s not, because that’s where tracking starts and all kinds of other things. So I don’t know.

Boz: If you’re gonna look at it that way though I do think middle school. You do have a, a little bit more of a safety net. ‘Cause you’re right, no one looks at your middle school transcript when you’re trying to get into college.

Sharona: Right.

Boz: No one looks at your high school transcript when you’re trying to get into a grad program. Once you get into the next level, basically no one cares what that transcript was two levels down.

Sharona: Right. And that’s why maybe there’s a little bit more. So if you’re a principal or an administrator listening to this or a school district official, maybe starting with your middle school might be an interesting place to start.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: I do wanna go to one other thing though, in this article, if we’re done with this or not yet.

Boz: No, I don’t think we are done with this.

Sharona: Okay.

Boz: I do wanna beat that dead horse a little bit more. ’cause I do think it’s so important. In the article it actually talks about that at first their students were confused. They turned in homework at lower rates. They demonstrated a reluctant to reassess on materials that they hadn’t mastered. Instead of taking advantages of the chances to raise their scores, they appeared content to accept the initial grade. How many times have we seen this? How many times have we seen that at first students do turn in homework less. Or the really surprising one, they don’t take advantage of the reassessments.

Sharona: So I’m wondering about that second one. Why don’t students retake when they don’t get the grade that they might have hoped for? And I’m wondering if a lot of these situations where I’ve seen it, there still is a contribution to the grade. The issue is we know that grades are not motivational. I mean, we’ve seen that a million times. Right? And.

Boz: Well, they’re not motivational to everybody.

Sharona: To everybody. I mean, they are motivational to some people, but there’s a lot of issues with grades as motivation. And in our situation, we kind of have a little bit of a binary. Either this assessment that we did counts towards your grade, or it doesn’t count like it. Either you got across the bar or you didn’t get across the bar. So it’s not like they’re raising their grade right now. They don’t really have anything contribute. It’s like a zero, essentially. So they kind of have to retake in the stats class. If they want to get anything to count towards their grade, whereas like in the pre-calculus class, they got a 50 or a 60% on an assessment and they can retake it and make it an 80. But we know that the math isn’t working and it’s not working for them, and they don’t understand the math, so maybe they just don’t think they can get it any better, and at least it’s counting something. Is that part of the problem?

Boz: I think that’s part of it, but I think the problem is much larger and more complex. I think that’s one piece, but there are several different pieces. And which one is affecting student A versus student B? It would be almost impossible to tell, but I think that’s part of it. I think another part of it is again, the students have been trained for so long on traditional grading that it’s almost like they don’t believe that the reassessment is going to count the way it is.

I taught longer using traditional grading than I have teaching alternative grading. I’m almost to that split point where it’s, I’m 50 50, but not quite yet. I know when I was doing traditional, I told my students all the time that, okay, you did bad on this first assessment , you can come to tutoring. I can help you. We can, and it’ll get better. But mathematically, it really didn’t, you know, even if they did kill it on their final, yes, that would improve their grade but, the grade did not reflect the improvement in the actual learning of the student because they were still getting penalized for those early mistakes. So I think, that’s part of it, that that trust, that faith, and here’s another big part. I don’t think math, like we’ve talked about the mathematical reasons. I don’t know if this is something we’ve talked about enough when it comes to student motivation. And that is the student really understanding and knowing how to use those feedback loops We’ve talked about, when we talk about feedback, how important it is to basically train your students on how to use your feedback and how to really explain the why that you’re doing it, so they understand that. But I think that’s part of this too. If you haven’t done that, if you haven’t really trained your students on the why we reassess and the how to really use your feedback loops, they’re not going to,

Sharona: I agree. And tied into that, or maybe motivating that is the self-efficacy issue, right? If a student is not convinced that they know how to improve, that they have the skills and abilities they need themselves to get better, then why would they retake something when they figure that they’re just gonna get the same thing? It’s a waste of their time and energy. To retake it if they’re just gonna get the same or even a worse score.

Boz: Yeah. And understanding what happens if you did get a worse score and understanding that, okay, I got a low C. That’s good enough, right? Not again, with that focus being on the grade and the focus not being on the learning. Which they, in the article, they didn’t quite say that, but they did say something I think that’s related to it, a couple paragraphs down from where we were just reading. It talks about “after coping with our grief, my staff and I talked about what we could do. Teachers made adjustments, we increased formative assessments, we added reassessment windows.” So we’re given that kind of timeframe, “we distinguished between assignments that could be retaken in ones that couldn’t. Slowly things began to change. We heard students using the language we were using, the students were starting to understand the why the students were that focus of the grade was starting to shift from just the end grade to the actual learning. Families were reaching out with questions about reassessments. Teachers began to settle in a rhythm.” I think that’s part of it too. If you get the students to understand the why and they start focusing not on the end grade, but on the learning. Which again, that is something I’ve talked about several times of what sold me the first year you and I did this, and it was a huge failure, right? I still had students coming up to me in the conversation at the end of the semester that every high school and middle school teacher, and I imagine most college teachers have had as well. You come up to the end of the term, Mr., how can I get more points, Mr., how can I raise my grade up? That conversation changed for me. That conversation shifted from that too. Mr what do I need to do to show you I understand inferential statistics.

Sharona: That’s what I was gonna say is that, that I was thinking of that story that you tell while we were reading that about the students using the language, and it’s not just the language of the grading system, but they start to use the language of our disciplines. They start to use the language of scholars, where they’re asking each other more meaningful questions. They’re asking themselves more meaningful questions about their learning. And they’re beginning that learning to learn, that learning to learn from feedback that shows up in their language. But you’re right, it does take time. I think it may in some ways take even more time for younger students. Like middle school students as opposed to say college age students.

Boz: Yeah. Just ’cause there’s a cognitive maturity and development that is obviously different from a, a middle schooler to a college student. So yeah, I would agree.

Sharona: So the other thing that’s sort of coming to me as we’re sort of looking at this article and thinking about this initial precipitous drop in grades is, what I like about the response that this particular school had is it kind of felt like they were in it a little bit for the long haul. They didn’t just dump the whole work they had done in a split semester and maybe, well, that was a failure, but instead they took the time. They had a little bit of a longer focus, and I think they were able to do that because they had this example, or probably many examples, like the student that we mentioned at the beginning that they didn’t feel like they could afford to continue with what they were doing because they had proof that it was harming their students, that they’re sending their students off unprepared. And this ties in, for me, for some of the fights I’m having right now about short-term measures of success versus long-term measures of success.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Because I’m in this constant fight about fail rates but I’m also asking the questions about. Well, if these courses are supposed to prepare for a later course, are they doing it? Obviously the students who fail, they’re not prepared for the next course. We said that during the course, but what about the ones who succeed? Are they prepared?

Boz: I would even push back on that. On the students that that failed. Because, I’m sorry, some of the brightest students I’ve had were students who also failed when I was doing traditional grading because they weren’t playing that game. We’ve talked a lot about how I was not a good student in high school, especially in my math classes. I didn’t do the things that usually meant success, and even though I got away with that in high school, I also had an experience in college that I had to go to the dean and fight for my grade. Because I, well, do we have time for me to tell this story? So my.

Sharona: Yes. Yes, we do.

Bosley: One of my, one of my classes my freshman year came in the first day and the instructor did not wanna be there, and in fact, flat out said that. This class was beneath him. This was an entry level freshman class. It was beneath him. He was not happy about being there. It was a early class. He didn’t like early classes, and he gave us a syllabus and said, these are my three test dates. These are the things that are gonna be on it. If you can do those tests without being here, ’cause you don’t wanna be here, fine. Don’t be here. It makes it easier on me. Well, of course I took that as a challenge. I went to about half the classes up until the first test. I killed the first test. I did not show back up to that class until the second test. At all. Didn’t do any of the homework, didn’t do anything.

Sharona: How’d you do on the second test?

Boz: Killed it.

Sharona: Okay.

Boz: Absolutely killed it because again, this was material that, to be honest, I probably shouldn’t have been in that class. Okay. Went to the final, or actually I went to one of the final classes ’cause they were doing a review. So I went there just to. It was a new teacher, someone else was there. The professor that had started it had been removed from the class the week after that second midterm test. And had completely come in with a new syllabus, new policies. And when I took the final, I didn’t kill it, I got a high C on it. Because there had been some material that I wasn’t expecting because she had changed the syllabus. She initially failed me. Because I hadn’t shown up to class. So I, yeah, I had to go and fight with the dean and say, hey. So I did end up getting, you know, a higher grade in that class, not what I thought I deserved mathematically because of those test scores. But all those other behaviors, the not doing the homework, the not showing up to class, that all caused me to fail. Or would’ve if I had not fought. So no. Even our students, I would argue even the students that sometimes got failing grades did not mean that they necessarily would have. And in fact, it even talks about some of those students in this article that, because of the environment that this school was set in, which sounds like an environment very similar to ours, they didn’t have some of the advantages that more affluent families had. And even though they were in middle schools, some of their students were adulting more than they were childing. Having to take care of and didn’t have the time or the ability to do some of those things that are a big part of traditional grading, like homework. So, no, I would say even the failing students didn’t always mean that they weren’t ready.

Sharona: Okay. And to be fair, that’s a true statement. However, most of our students who are failing are not content-wise prepared. Let’s be fair. Because most of the students, they’ve stopped coming to class and when they do come to class, they take the exams, they don’t do well on them.

Boz: Okay. You’re talking about, you’re talking about our class. And you’re talking about after we had already transitioned.

Sharona: No, I’m talking about pre-calculus.

Boz: Okay. Actually, okay. In pre-calculus.

Sharona: I was going somewhere.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: So I’m gonna go where I was gonna go. Okay. You had your say. Now here’s where I’m gonna go. I did an analysis and I can’t do an analysis on students who fail because they’re not allowed to take the next class. Mm-hmm. So whether we think they should have been allowed to take the next class or not, they were not allowed to. So I cannot make a statement. I’m gonna go with most of them were probably not prepared. But, supposedly, the ones who passed are supposed to be prepared, especially students who got an A, right? So if our grading system is working, you can certainly argue students who got a C may or may not be prepared. But those A students, in theory, they’re supposed to be prepared. Well, when we do this analysis and we see how many students succeed in the next class, there’s a huge variation from A all the way through F of students who got an A in the previous class. So they get an A and then they go on. These are students who know how to play the game, but they get A through F in the next one.

Boz: So. So you’re saying there’s no real correlation between the success in pre-calculus and their future success in the calculus class?

Sharona: Well, I haven’t run the actual statistical model, but the fact that there was such a high number of fails from students who got a’s, students who got b’s, students who got c’s, and there were A’s from students who got A’s and students who got B’S and students who got c’s, that it’s a little bit chaotic. The initial patterns are chaotic. And this speaks to this idea that if we have this short term success, like we can bump up students to get them through an individual class, but what are they gonna do in the next one?

So it’s this delicate balancing factor that on the one hand, they want to lower those DFW rates. Great. I wanna lower the DFW rates too. But in traditional grading, some of the mechanisms and the machinations we go through to lower the DFW rates show up in very unfortunate ways, but even when we don’t go through those machinations and we have high DFW rates, even the students who pass still are all over the board. So it’s kind of a hot mess doing this short term DFW focus versus a longer term focus where the goal for us is retention in STEM and ultimately graduation.

Boz: See, and I think that long-term success is one of those metrics that are completely overlooked. Whether we’re talking about K 12, whether we’re talking about the transition from high school to college, whether we’re talking about, like you said, freshman or early career, college to completion. This is a metrics that I think should be one of the more important ones and is one of the ones in our system that is almost completely ignored. It talks about this in the early part of this article that the student had gotten A’s and B’s, they went to high school and they dropped out. My story about Danny and Dulce both doing well in high school, dropping out in college.

One of the big metrics that is graded and reported on, in California high schools. We have a thing called the California dashboard that gives a report card to high schools. One of the things that it measures is college acceptance rates. Well, you can’t have high college acceptance rates if you don’t have high GPAs. What it doesn’t measure is college completion rates.

One of the things that I’ve, and it actually came up a lot when I was in the instructional leadership team at Santee for so many years. We had a huge college focus. We wanted our students to have the opportunity, the choice when they left high school to, if they wanted to, to be able to go to college. We made a really big deal about college acceptance. We had this decision day thing that we did for years where we celebrated the students and what colleges they were going to. We even one of my old principals is part of the like marketing for our school. He had these beautiful signs put up and put on the street light poles, showing our students and where they were going. It was a big deal, and it should be. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be. But how many of those students ended up dropping out? What was the success rate of, and honestly, I can’t say. I know from personal experience how many of my personal students ended up dropping out or changing universities.

That’s not something we track in the system. In fact, when I worked with College Bridge and the Slam Program, that was one of the big things that they did. They wanted to show that success. It was so hard for them to track that. There’s no mechanism to try to track that other than really student self-reporting. So we are not even set up to try to track that. And then you talked about the DFW rates, the arguments, and we’ve talked about this a lot that you are going through as the first year math coordinator with both the pre-calc, but also even more so, we’ve talked a lot about it in our stats class. Looking at success beyond that class is not something that other than like, you and I talk about it, some of the other people in your department would are definitely appreciative and in concern with that. But that is not something that is really looked at beyond the DFW rate of that immediate class. That’s all that matters. And that short term goal is one of the things that I think is a huge roadblock for making this kind of change. Just like it said in this school, they initially did not succeed and they panicked at first.

They used the word, what did they use? Despair.

Sharona: Despair. Yeah. Despair.

Boz: But they didn’t let that deter them. And I think that’s the problem, especially in the K 12 world. You get that initial decline and the first initial thought is, oh God, this doesn’t work. We need to go back to where we were before.

Sharona: Yeah. Because now you’re failing on your short-term metrics, which is what everyone is looking at.

Boz: Yeah. Where the long-term one is the more important one. And in fact in this article it even says that. Let me find where.

Sharona: Well, I think while you’re looking for that, I think one of the opportunities that you have in K 12 that’s harder in higher ed is you do have administrators willing to look at this, and they have the ability, potentially, to take a slightly longer term look. Like a principal of a middle school. Is potentially gonna pay attention to how his students do or her students do in high school? No. If they get reports back, no they can’t. Well, they might, they can, like, this might be ad hoc, but they can hear, oh, hey, my student went to these great schools and they’re transferring out immediately. Like that reflects on the entire middle because it’s at least, at least it’s potentially in the district. Right.

Boz: But again, that metrics is not reported anywhere. What is reported on state websites that everyone can access, that people will look at and judge you by? Are the immediate rates. Are the, your immediate you know, whether it’s A through G graduation, fulfillments in high school, you know, whether it’s GPAs. The immediate is what’s reported is reported on state ran websites. It’s what, when principals have to do data discussions with their coordinators and people above that, that’s what’s being that long term is not being looked at. And like I said, is that the transition? The transition from high school to higher ed, we can’t look like there’s nothing in place Right. To really look at it.

Sharona: Which is why I’m wondering, I mean, it’d be great if some school districts, and maybe some smaller ones do, maybe, if you know of one right into us, but you know, at least a middle school to a high school is in the same district. So legally they might be able to, there might be a better ability to at least try. I think it would be almost impossible to do it from, from. High school to college because they scatter everywhere. Right.

Boz: But, but so

Sharona: infrastructure wise.

Boz: You said that the same district? Not always.

Sharona: No. But for those that do,

Boz: yeah.

Sharona: You know, at least there’s, maybe there’s some mechanism. Because aren’t your reporting systems tied in? Like, is the student’s record in the, does the student keep like a record or does it change everything from middle school to high school within LA Unified, I mean, student ID number or whatever.

Boz: Yeah, no, no, it that does that, that does stay consistent and, you know, going into our management systems, I can look at middle school records, but those like big tracking patterns, those, if they exist, I understand they’re not reported.

Sharona: Right. I understand that they don’t, but at least it’s a lower level of lift to try to get them if you wanted to. Potentially. But it’s, it’s a hard

Boz: Well, for a big district like L-A-U-S-D. Yes. You look at the district that my two girls are in, it’s two different districts. Like, the district that my youngest daughter is currently in is an elementary school district only. Right. And then the middle school and high school is a different district.

Sharona: Right. But those districts that are not separated, it’s an opportunity. So if you’re in a district where your middle school and your high schools are on the same platforms, on the same system, maybe there’s an opportunity there. That’s all I’m saying.

Boz: Yeah. But I did wanna read this, one of these last lines, mm-hmm. In this article. ’cause I think it kind of highlights the whole thing and a big part of why we do what we do. Authentic learning happens over time and looks different for each of us. We master skills at our own pace. We comprehend when we are ready, not because of an imaginary endpoint in time. This is what’s at the heart of alternative grading, in my opinion, this is at least one of the things. And this is why we should be looking at long-term successes instead of these immediate ones, even though the immediate is what everyone focuses on. ‘Cause again, yeah, as a high school teacher, I don’t want to see my students going to college. I wanna see my students succeeding in college. And those are two very big, very different things.

Sharona: And even for me, I don’t want my students to just succeed in my class. I want them to have learned something because I do realize that regardless of their path after my class, they’re gonna have a whole life where I want the time that they spent in my class to have had some value for them, whether it’s directly in mathematics or just because I taught them to think.

Boz: Or if we’re looking specifically at the stats class, that’s one of the goals of the class is being a critical consumer of statistics. Statistics are everywhere. Like yeah, you can’t turn on a news program and not see a statistic. We’re coming up to a political season with the, the midterm elections. Just being able to understand and, and being able to consume, you know social media and all the stuff that’s on social media and being able to detect what’s BS and what’s what might not be. Being able to critically, you know, looking at this research that was done that says this outcome, being able to look at it and go, okay, but wait a second. They didn’t do this. They did this and they did this. So are those results really worth looking at.

Sharona: Exactly. So we’re just trying to change the world one student at a time, make them more critical thinkers and all that stuff. So I think we’re coming up on time. Are there any last thoughts you have for someone who managed to make it this far?

Boz: I would love to be able to talk with Matthew that wrote this article that did this. So if there is some weird chance that he actually hears this or anyone that knows him, I would love to get you on and talk a little bit about this article and your guys’ journey. But especially I would love to talk to you about that transition that first year you did it and like so many of us had a lot of indicators of not success. How you guys stayed motivated and kept with it till you actually saw the results that you were wanting to see. I would love to hear more about that. ’cause I think that’s where we’re seeing so many school districts and other things. They do it a year or two and then they drop it . that’s just, especially if you’re only talking about the how and not the why and the grade book is the only thing you’re changing is never gonna work. So if you’re out there or if anyone knows Matthew out there, I would love to talk to ’em. What about you? Any last thoughts?

Sharona: Nope. Just pretty much ditto. I agree. I think it’d be great to talk to Matthew or anyone else who has done this transition and it was rocky and it’s better now. I’d love to hear from you. Love to have you on the pod.

Boz: All right, well, this has been The Grading Podcast with Sharona and Boz. Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode’s 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 featured 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.