The school year has started at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, D.C. Students are giving presentations on their work to their classmates.
A teacher tells her students, “We’re looking for an audience that is paying close attention and forming high-level questions.”
The presenter, first-year Genesis Benavides, asks her fellow students: “How do social and cultural expectations affect our personality? Personal identity?”
Peer feedback is part of how students’ work is evaluated.
A student raises his hand to ask Genesis about his work. “When you were writing your poems, did you feel like you were connected to it?” he asks. “Yes, I am related to the main character,” she replies.
Students take tests and write papers in Bell, which is part of Columbia Heights Educational Campus, But presentations are another way Bell students show what they’ve learned.
“If a kid comes up and says something out loud, that’s value. If one student talks to another student about the purpose of the day, that’s value,” says Robert Athmer, Bell’s special education instructor. “
The conversation is part of a new wave of assessment and grading policies that many American schools are adopting.
Recently, the Los Angeles and San Diego school districts, which have about 700,000 students each, removed behavior from the factors teachers use to calculate grades.
and the Philadelphia and Fairfax County, Virginia, school districts are among several schools that have adopted near-zero policies, setting 50% as the minimum score a student must achieve, even a Also for missed assignments.
Kevin Hickerson, president-elect of the Fairfax Education Association, said in 2016, “It doesn’t matter when students turn in the assignments. If they’ve got the knowledge, they’ve got the knowledge.”
Hundreds of high schools have adopted an approach called Mastery. The idea is that students are given repeated opportunities to learn the information until they show that they have learned it.
“We put kids in classrooms, and we all teach them math. And after a week or two, we move on to the next unit, and we move on, even though every student in the class has mastered the material. Have done it,” says. Mike Flanagan, CEO of Mastery Transcript Consortium. He says the purpose of mastery learning is for students to “really master the material before moving on.”
Traditionally, the time between tests in school, known as seat time, is fixed, and then the class learns new material. That’s why some students learn more than others.
The mastery approach aims for all students to learn the same amount, with the amount of time required varying between students.
“The swim test is not a swimming race,” says Flanagan. “We’re not going to have all the kids jump into the lake and see who gets across the pond first. We want to empower all the kids by teaching them how to swim.”
“Whether it’s literacy, whether it’s math, whether it’s fundamentals of science, if you only have a C-minus or 70% understanding of the material, you should not be allowed to graduate,” says Flanagan. “If they need something specific before moving on to the next step, we stay at that step until they get it, until they’ve mastered all the standards. They can’t move on to the next step if they don’t know 100% [of] Every step.”
Deviating from traditional assessments is what attracted Genesis Benavides to Bell. “I really like the way they handle grades in school because it’s not just about completing assessments or taking tests.”
Bell’s report card includes numerical and letter grades.
But dozens of high schools across the U.S. have adopted a new kind of transcript that describes students’ work, skills and accomplishments without numerical or letter-based grades.
Harvard, MIT, and Cal Tech are among the three hundred and seventeen universities that accept these transcripts for college applications.
Whereas each school has its own policy. The Mastery Transcript Consortium is piloting what they call a record of learning, a document that does not list courses and credits but shows progress toward mastering a skill.
All fifty states now allow schools in some way use skill Instead of grades to graduate.
But alternative grading policies have created controversy across the country, including in St. Lucie County, Florida in 2018, when the district changed the grading policy to the lowest possible grade, 50%.
In 2017, Dianne Tirado was fired during her probationary period. The district said this was due to poor performance.
Instead Tirado says it was the refusal to give a fifty instead of a zero for work that was not assigned. Well, what if they don’t give anything? We give them fifty. I go; No, we don’t do that,” she said. “We have a nation of kids who are just expecting to get paid to show up and live their lives, and that’s not real.”
Some parents agree with this sentiment. A father from St. Lucie said, “You don’t know what’s going on at home, and what you’re seeing is the front, because if my son clearly chooses not to do that, he knows that. He’s got a point.”
It’s a debate that will become even more heated for students, teachers and parents as the new school year begins.