There is a new educational fad in our country's schools. It's called "Grading for Equity." You'll hear the phrase being bandied about in teacher training, school board meetings, and educational conferences. Here is a brief description of acceptable equitable grading practices from the book GRADING FOR EQUITY by Joe Feldman:
...use a 4-point grading scale, weight more recent performances, promote productive group work and high-quality work without a group grade, exclude behaviours from the grade (e.g., lateness, effort, participation), provide non-grade consequences for cheating, use alternatives for late work, reframe homework, allow retakes and opportunities to improve grades, use rubrics to calibrate learning intentions, promote students’ self-regulation and agency through student trackers and goal setting, and more.
Zero-grades, averaging, and extra credit, by contrast, are practices Feldman argues should be dropped.
While some of these processes such as weighting more recent "performances" on classwork, the exclusion of group grades (something I never agreed with), or allowing re-tests, most of what follows is removing any accountability of students for meeting deadlines. Not demanding that students complete work accurately, removing averaging of many grades and eliminating zero-grades when work is not done, are effectively killing the resiliency of our children.
Before we examine resiliency, let's acknowledge that some of the practices listed above have been incorrectly or overused by some teachers merely to punish some students and favor others. Teachers, like any other profession, are good and bad, excellent and poor, etc.
Even if some teachers use these methods to manipulate students, others motivate and actually educate our young people by employing the practices listed as bad in Feldman's book. There are some students who need high standards, strict expectations, deadlines and the application of appropriate consequences to help them learn. Human beings are all different, and it is up to the expert teacher to employ methods that bring out the best in their students.
Resiliency is something that may or may not be present in the nature of human beings. From
In very simple terms, resilience refers to the ability to cope when things don’t go as planned. Being able to deal with the ups and downs that come with life and being able to accept and deal with disappointments, hurts and surprises requires a good sense of resilience.
If you look at the success of this or any other society, it is built on the many positive character traits of the citizens, one of which is "resiliency" regardless of one's circumstances. How many truly successful people in this country have overcome failure after failure? Watch interviews with any champion athlete, successful businessperson, etc. and you will often hear a tale of overcoming obstacles and picking oneself up and moving forward. Many achieved despite poverty, poor family situations, etc.
They also talk about that parent, coach, or teacher who held them to high and strict standards that were not determined by their ethnicity, economic status, or home life, but by what they needed to learn to become a successful individual.
Parents might be grateful for equity grading because it will excuse their child who doesn't meet deadlines, who doesn't finish work, or who doesn't work hard. It will reward this child with grades they don't deserve, and which don't show the child's actual learning. The parents might like equity grading because they will not have to keep hounding their child over doing schoolwork and handing assignments in on time. Regardless, the child will get a good enough grade to get by.
Many parents in previous generations wouldn't see that as a plus, but modern parents might. What they don't see is that they are dooming the children they are raising to be adults to a lifetime of weakness and mediocrity.
We are not talking about providing help for hearing impaired, sight impaired, and other students with other learning differences. We are talking about using arbitrary, surface, differences to excuse students from achieving standards and success.
However, equity grading is built around the idea that students come from different backgrounds and therefore we should grade them differently based on their social, ethnic and economic status. Here's our article regarding equity grading:
In the article above, you'll read that equity grading actually hurts student learning and accomplishment by giving out inflated grades that do not reflect student proficiency and competency. Imagine thinking that you can fly an airplane because you got an "A" in flight training while, actually, you completed your flight lessons at a "D" or lower level. Disastrous.
Or, imagine an doctor who can't make it to surgery on time or finish operations within time allotted because he/she has been coddled his/her whole life. Equity grading is a huge part of why we see so many high school graduates having to take remedial math, English, and reading classes during their first year of college. Perhaps "Grading for Equity" should be renamed "Grade Inflation."
Another problem with equity grading is that it teaches students that they don't have the resiliency to overcome personal circumstances to achieve their goals. Therefore, these kids accept mediocrity and the idea that someone else will save them from their poor work habits. For the students who have come through this system, every disappointment, every problem, everything that doesn't go their way, is a disaster that causes them to meltdown, threaten violent and crazy actions and seek out "safe spaces" instead of picking themselves up and overcoming obstacles.
This can be even more pronounced with students with special needs. While it's true that special needs must be accommodated in schools, one deficit in the education system is that instead of teaching students how to overcome potentially limiting characteristics, the schools deliver the message that these students are "victims" who must rely on others for success.
Accommodations themselves are not the problem, it's that we don't teach student to understand, manage and adapt to their own learning styles and abilities.
What is the result of this philosophy? Where do we see its effects?
Look at the reaction by students from different colleges and universities to the recent Presidential election results. Go on Libs of Tik Tok and you will see example after example of people who can't handle anything that doesn't go their way. Here are how some of these schools, where parents send their hard-earned dollars for their child's education, are handling even the possibility of their students being upset over the election of Trump:
We are talking about Georgetown University, a school that is supposed to produce our best and brightest leaders. It's not just college students, however.
We have women stating that they will shave their heads and not have sex with men as long as Trump is President. Others are threatening to "burn everything down" or kill Trump supporters. One FEMA employee was fired for telling relief workers not to provide hurricane relief services for people who had Trump signs in their yards:
Thankfully she was fired. (This incident occurred before Trump's election)
Where does this vitriol originate? There is one strong possibility. It originates in the classrooms that have teachers like the one featured in this article:
There are some bonus "X" posts in the above to show more examples of adults showing how to throw temper tantrums when they don't win. But the California teacher has to take the prize.
With examples like those above coupled with "equity" grading that doesn't teach students resiliency, we develop mentally fragile adults.
Most teachers are not like the teacher in the article. Most teachers want to inspire their students to overcome obstacles, to exceed expectations, to bounce back from disappointment. They also have no desire to indoctrinate their students with political ideas.
Perhaps the problem is that the description of the practice is "grading for equity." Equity is not equality. Equity is making up deficits FOR people who we classify as "victims" of economics, ethnicity, and nature. Equality is allowing people to find ways to make up any deficits by their own hard work, determination and ingenuity. We can teach our children "equality" and perhaps some actual academic skills along the way.
Jan Greenhawk, Author
Nov 11, 2024
Jan Greenhawk is a former teacher and school administrator for over thirty years. She has two grown children and lives with her husband in Maryland. She also spent over twenty-five years coaching/judging gymnastics and coaching women’s softball.
This article was originally featured on the Easton Gazette.
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