By Thomas Ultican 4/2/2024
With the new century, public education encountered virulent standards, standards-based testing and a call for standards-based grading (SBG). While schools were inundated with standards and testing, SBG was not such a success. Since the pandemic, a renewed push for SBG rose. On March 16 2024, corporate education mouthpiece, The 74, published “Why is a Grading System Touted as More Accurate, Equitable So Hard to Implement?”
Answer: Maybe it is bad education policy?
Charter schools and vouchers claimed to save poor minority children from “failed” public schools. They wanted to bring fairness but instead brought segregation, no-excuses schools and discrimination. Similarly, SBG is neither about accuracy nor equity; it is about teaching to the test and implementing thoroughly debunked mastery learning.
What is SBG?
Common Goals Systems Inc. is typical of companies in the education business making it a good source to explain SBG and they share the following math report card example:
Their SBG definition states:
“In SBG, grading is based on demonstration of mastery. Students attempt standards-aligned activities (projects, worksheets, quizzes, essays, presentations, etc.). Teachers assess the student output and choose the appropriate mastery level that was demonstrated. In standards-based education, teaching is responsive to learning.” (Emphasis added.)
I never met a teacher who was not responsive to learning, no matter the grading system.
Power School sells school management programs that include grading tools. They state, “Since standards-based reporting is designed to only reflect true evidence of learning, parents get a clear picture of what the student has or hasn’t mastered without the influence of other factors, such as effort and attitude.”
Teachers and most parents believe effort and attitude have a lot to do with developing “true evidence of learning.”
Valerie L. Marsh, PhD from the University of Rochester, wrote a research brief about SBG:
“The emphasis in SBG is to promote teaching and learning that meet learning goals based on standards. Moreover, students are assessed on their level of mastery of specified standards rather than points accrued for individual assignments (Iamarino, 2014). Teachers then base course grades on students’ progress in meeting the standards (Lewis, 2022).” (Page 3)
When a group of Bay Area upper middle-class parents successfully reversed their districts move to SBG, EdSurge reported, “‘Standards-based grading’ treats homework as unscored practice, eliminates extra credit and focuses on proving mastery of material.” Dublin Unified School District’s parents were displeased with the new SBG pilot effort.
In July 2023, the school board voted 3-2 to end the experiment.
In the same article, Cody Whitehouse, a social studies teacher at Wilson College Prep high school in Phoenix, shared his experience with the district’s roll-out of SBG. At first, he was enthusiastic about allowing multiple opportunities to demonstrate learning but soon soured on it. Students quickly learned that homework was not being graded and stopped doing it!
Whitehouse said, “It’s teaching to the test — the assessment is all that matters.”
Grading Scale Comparison
Problem with Standards Based Education
In 2015, I wrote:
“The learning standards upon which high stakes testing is based come from a mistaken philosophy of pedagogy that posits: a standardized learning rate, standardized interests, linear learning progression, developmental alignment, etc. Humans are not standard. Some learn to speak at 16 months and some don’t acquire that skill until 72 months. Some are short, others are tall. Some are fast, other are not. A child from urban Chicago has different perceptions and interests than a child from Winnemucca, Nevada. A global curriculum will not meet the needs of an endlessly diverse population. One size truly does not fit all. Even if it did, it would still be a bad idea to have political entities in centers of power deciding what that curriculum should be.”
Reinforcing education standards by tying grades to them is a colossal error.
Arnold Toynbee (1889 – 1975) was perhaps the world’s most read, translated and discussed living scholar. His 10-volume masterpiece, “A Study of History”, was an enormous success and a 1-volume abridged version of the first 6 volumes by David Somervell sold more than 300,000 copies in 1947. Like most people, that was the version I read and found this quote:
“We must ask whether, as we look back over the ground we have traversed, we can discern any master tendency at work, and we do in fact unmistakably decry a tendency towards standardization and uniformity: a tendency which is correlative and opposite of the tendency towards differentiation and diversity which we have found to be the mark of the growth stage of civilizations.” (Page 555)
For politicians, oligarchs and many scholars, there is a powerful desire to control public education. They see teachers as inept and needing to be managed from Albany or Sacramento or Washington DC. Standards were seen as the path forward. They became more and more prescriptive with test and punish methods to enforce adherence. SBG is one more tool for developing faithfulness to standards.
Good schools in poor zip codes have been shuttered because they were not making adequate yearly progress based on testing results. There was no recognition that standardized testing results almost completely aligned with community wealth.
Since the pandemic, a new billionaire-financed movement has arisen to end the public education we know and replace it with a digital badging scheme. For this to work, mastery learning must be adopted and is likely the biggest reason SBG is being promoted.
In his 1916 book, Democracy and Education (page 122), John Dewey stated,
“An aim must, then, be flexible; it must be capable of alteration to meet circumstances. An end established externally to the process of action is always rigid.”
Mastery Learning violates Dewey’s warning.
In 1968, Benjamin Bloom published a small paper titled “Learning for Mastery”. This publication, Bloom’s Taxonomy and John Carroll’s work were combined to create “Mastery Learning”.
Competency-based education (CBE) is the digital screen approach that replaced the failed 1990’s Outcome-based education. Outcome-based education is a renamed attempt to promote the 1970’s “mastery learning” theory. Mastery education’s failure was so complete that it had to be renamed. It was quickly derided by educators as “seats and sheets.” These schemes all posit that drilling small skills and mastering them is the best way to teach. It has not worked yet.
Summing it Up
Thomas R. Guskey, PhD University of Kentucky, is considered a world authority on grading practices and supports SBG. In 2001, he wrote the peer-reviewed article “Helping Standards Make the Grade”, responding to a widely held criticism of grades in K-12 schools. The curriculum expert, Robert Marzano, stated grades “are so imprecise that they are almost meaningless.”
I have a lot of respect for these scholars but it seems they were wrong.
Multiple studies have demonstrated that high school grades are more predictive of college success than standardized tests from ACT or SAT. The head of a 2020 University of Chicago study, Elaine M. Allensworth, reported “The bottom line is that high school grades are powerful tools for gauging students’ readiness for college, regardless of which high school a student attends, while ACT scores are not.”
I do not believe there is anything nefarious about either Marzano or Guskey. Their opposition to traditional grading is not well-supported and a grading scheme tied to standards promotes bad drill and skill education. Yet, their efforts were sincere.
There is something nefarious about Michael Moe and his company GSV Ventures. Several organizations fall under the main GSV group, including GSV Labs, GSV Asset Management and GSV Tomorrow, a commentary arm where investing trends and stories are disseminated. They link readers to the GSV landing page for the annual ASU+GSV Summit, claimed to be the “most impactful convening of leaders in education and talent tech” with over 5,000 attendees and 1,000 speakers from 45 different participating countries.
GSV appears to have convinced Tim Knowles and Carnegie Foundation to abandon the Carnegie Unit for CBE based badges.
Edtech leaders are creating a dystopian system of education and career tracking, making Orwell look optimistic. With this, every American’s history will be held in an unalterable blockchain which needs CBE as the education method to function.
It will be a goldmine for tech companies…
the big reason tech billionaires push Standards-Based Grading…
tultican 