School administrators in Denver, Broomfield and Maryland, among other places, say it’s time to talk about what an “A” is.
Denver Public Schools administrators and teachers have begun to craft new grading policies that will ask teachers to give grades based on what the state requires students to know. Like their counterparts in a few other districts nationwide, they’re aiming to to bring academic rigor and consistency to all classrooms.
“I think our students and our families deserve the truth,” said DPS chief academic officer Jaime Aquino.
The effort to bring some consistency to grades is relatively new in suburban and urban school districts across the country. Administrators are trying to make a grade mean something – or, rather, the same thing – in all schools.
For years, grading was private – something teachers did without consultation and guidance, said Betsy Brown, director of curriculum and instruction for Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. Her 140,000-student district is also trying to reform grading, starting with a 17-school pilot project.
“It’s pulled grading out to a public place,” Brown said. “Teachers … like what they’re getting because it sharpens their planning and focuses their instruction. … Teachers can be comfortable talking about it.”
An eye toward college
Grading consistency is important, experts and some teachers say, because it helps students understand what they need to work on and how to prepare for college.
“I think the racheting down of expectations happens over time,” said Mariah Dickson, a consultant who was a school-reform coach at Denver’s Manual Educational Complex. “The real travesty I see is when the kids who get an A-plus paper then graduate and they are not at all ready for college. … It’s extremely unfair.”
If students go to college and can’t handle the work because their A’s or B’s were inflated, they have trouble later on, said Alice Weeda, a 25-year veteran Denver teacher.
Some remediation needed
“It’s a bad thing for them,” said Weeda, who teaches English at Thomas Jefferson High School.
About 30 percent of all Colorado high school graduates need some kind of remediation in the basics when they get to college, according to the Colorado Commission on Higher Education.
The “standards-based report cards” monitor whether students meet very specific goals in writing, reading and math.
In addition to using assessment tests, schools would require teachers to collect “evidence of learning” in a classroom, Brown said.
The overall goal is to determine whether students are performing at grade level.
Joe Sandoval, a DPS area superintendent who heads the high school grading-policy work group, said he wants teachers to keep the state standards in their heads when they grade.
“A lot of people, even today, don’t address the standards,” he said. “You give kids extra credit and they get a higher grade, but that may have nothing to do with the standards. People need to understand what the intended learning is.”
At Legacy High School in Broomfield, teachers have been working in small groups for more than a year to bring consistency to grading, said principal Cathy Nolan.
Teachers work together to develop a common test – written to reflect state standards – for all students in a course, even though the students have different teachers.
“Each teacher may still have their own quizzes, different types of papers,” but the test is the same, said Nolan.
Grading what they know
Mark Sass, a history teacher at Legacy, said individual grading relies on the idea that teachers work alone in their classroom, rather than collaboratively.
“If I see that my kids are lacking in some area, I have to have a conversation,” he said. “Your grade really should be based on what you know, not on effort, not how much homework you did.”
Indeed, the movement to create grade consistency based on student knowledge has sparked debates among teaching circles about how to weigh participation, attendance and effort.
This fall, elementary school kids in Denver will bring home report cards that rate “effort” as well as academic knowledge. Because the grading topic has been so controversial, Sandoval’s high school work group has another year of work.
What is expected
In Montgomery County, elementary and middle school report cards reflect measures for behavior, effort, participation and assignment completion. This information, though, is solely for parents and students and doesn’t factor into the grade point average, Brown said.
Eileen Adair, a first-year creative writing teacher at Denver’s Thomas Jefferson High School, said that talking to her students about what is expected – even writing it down for them – keeps grading “in check.”
“If you can say X points get taken off for grammar or story development,” Adair said, “it works itself out.”
Staff writer Allison Sherry can be reached at 303-820-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com.
