We Need to Talk About Standards-based Grading
“Reformism, in the end, is the therapy for symptoms: erasing the consequences while showing to advantage the system one belongs to, even if it means concealing it.”
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Let me start by saying that I myself was a longtime practitioner of standards-based grading (SBG). Beginning in 2005, I increasingly tried to incorporate its concepts into my assessment, grading, and reporting practices. I was an early participant in the #sblchat Twitter chat and a member of Standards Based Learning and Grading Facebook group. Even as I transitioned to going gradeless, my system was still organized around standards, just without the numbers. So even though I’ve chosen an overly click-baity title, it’s not coming from the usual reactionary stance. I have no desire to return to the toxic practices of the past: late penalties, one-shot assessments with no opportunities to redo or retake, zeroes on the 100-point scale, etc.
As I consider my long tenure within this group, I realize what most resonated with me was the negative: what we needed to remove from grading to improve its accuracy and equity. That said, I agree with John Dewey’s edict that it’s not enough to reject a given method or system; instead, “there is a need to search for a more effective source of authority.” For a time, standards-based learning and grading seemed to offer a sweeping, comprehensive alternative.
Now, after many years, I am no longer sure SBG is the “more effective source of authority” I was seeking.
Unfortunately, as educators have brought up objections and explored alternatives to SBG (e.g. contract grading, labor-based grading, going gradeless) some SBG apologists have responded by gaslighting, even trolling them. This, too, began to taint my opinion of the SBG. If its advocates need to resort to polemics and policing to make their point, SBG must be a brittle system indeed. Add to this that the most vocal antagonists were often far removed from the classroom, mansplaining SBG principles in response to teachers’ lived experiences. I have been frankly appalled by some who hounded participants in our #tg2chat as we explored a non-SBG compliant topic. It’s actually one of the reasons we stopped doing Twitter chats.
But a doctrine can’t be judged solely by the conduct of some of its evangelists. I hope to point out here some of the issues that I and others have encountered with SBG. Whether those issues can be remedied or mitigated lies outside the scope of this piece. Nor do I spend any time comparing SBG to the dumpster fire that was grading previously. Nor do I spend any time exploring alternatives, other than what has already been proposed on this platform.
I admit my current thoughts on assessment, grading, and reporting would not be possible were it not for the foundation of standards-based reform, and I find many of its practitioners to be open minded and accessible, embracing flawed realities in the quest for something better. (My current colleagues Emily Rinkema and Stan Williams, authors of the Standards-based Classroom, epitomize these qualities.) To me, SBG’s greatest contribution is the way it overthrew the regime of broken, inequitable, irrational practices, clearing the ground for something new.
What SBG has erected in its place, however, has at times become a stumbling block, frustrating attempts to foster cooperation, accommodate complexity, and respond to the urgent issues of our day.
SBG pairs comments with scores
Let’s start with a properly gradeless critique. Although in theory SBG makes no such demand, the online standards-based gradebook does. Whether those scores are levels or numbers or marks or labels or scales or progressions or colors, students read them as grades, which have consistently been shown (for instance, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) to have negative effects on achievement, motivation, and the development of a growth mindset. In my own use of SBG, I still saw the telltale complacency and discouragement when students received a score—even a formative one—resulting in diminished motivation for improvement.
Once a standards-based gradebook is chosen, the rest inexorably orients itself toward this end. Rubrics are a logical next step, and they repeat the cardinal sin of pairing comments with scores. What’s more, the traditional rubric spends 3/4 of its real estate describing not yet. This deficit emphasis has an inevitable impact on the mindsets of teachers and students.
While some might argue that innovations such as the one-point rubric and learning progressions have taken some of the focus off of score, the larger architecture of the gradebook and the transcript requires that teachers communicate levels in one way or another—and sooner rather than later. This is less so students know where they stand vis-à-vis the learning objective and more as CYA for when the summative grade is logged. If you are a standards-based grader, you hide the levels and delay the grade at your own peril (and often to students and their parents' frustration). But once you pair a score with comments, fixed mindset kicks in and undermines the benefit students get from feedback. As many of us who worked in standards-based grading have discovered, the conversation veers predictably toward resentment, discouragement, or complacency around the grade.
SBG is exhausting
I don’t hate the time it takes to read and provide feedback on student work. But my enjoyment plummets when I start grading. Not surprisingly, so does my speed. I know what’s happening: I’m subconsciously beginning to build a case for the grade I’m going to assign, especially if I know it’s a lower one (which in the case of my students, was beginning to be anything less than a 4.0). As an English teacher, grading and the logging of grades took an enormous amount of my time, almost pushing me to the breaking point as a teacher. That said, I acknowledged the right of students, parents, interventionists, and other caring adults to have up-to-date information about how a student is doing.
The standards-based approach took a much larger percentage of my time than the more traditional, single-score grading I had done earlier in my career. Under SBG, single assignments could include multiple standards, each needing a score in the gradebook. Redos, retakes, and resubmissions meant that I was constantly changing these scores to reflect updated levels of performance.
And for what? Pairing grades with comments made it less likely my students would read, process, or benefit from the comments I had painstakingly provided. And, at least in my experience, kids frequently hated it as much or more than traditional grading.
SBG isn’t timely or accurate
Now, as an administrator and parent, I often have gone into a student’s standards-based gradebook to find what looks like a decent grade only to find out (through conversation, email, or some other channel) that this grade is actually going to be much worse than it looks right now. And not only that: it may be too late. The reason—in addition to the natural human tendency to procrastinate unpleasant things—is that formative assessments and incomplete assignments don’t register in the cumulative grade. Only summative grades do, which frequently come last.
Now yes, in the case of our current gradebook, I can use expand-collapse arrows to drill down into the formative scores, see some collection of I’s, N’s, U’s, and 1.0’s, and roughly calculate that my child is not on track for the 3.0 currently displayed. But that’s not easy for anyone, and it’s especially difficult for parents without high levels of assessment or digital literacy—not to mention time to spare. Many parents, myself included, have expressed shock when a decent grade suddenly plummets a whole letter grade or more as a summative comprising multiple standards is entered or as time finally runs out on incomplete assignments.
It’s not surprising that students, many of whom have only recently transitioned out of Piaget’s concrete-operational stage, don’t always get the memo about their cumulative grade’s transience. Add to this that many students are disinclined to spend even one second looking at a gradebook, much less explore its byzantine inner workings, and you have a recipe for confusion, anger, and plausible deniability on the part of the student.
SBG perpetuates the idea of a single standard
Well, obviously—it’s in the name itself. And while I think there may be single standards for “pilots, plummers, and podiatrists,” there are problems with inviting (mostly white) teachers to decide what is good, true, and beautiful for everybody. As a teacher of English, I sadly took too long to realize this. Here is NCTE’s Students’ Rights to Their Own Language Position Statement:
Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans.
In recent years, many departments in schools have tried to break up the hegemony of white male authors, artists, characters, history, and personages in the content that they teach. And yet, although our book closets may be less cluttered with these privileged voices, lives, and histories, white supremacy culture remains enshrined in our choice of standards and our descriptions of quality. Ironically, these standards tend to snuff out and stifle the very voices we have begun trying to center in our curricula. In teaching culturally diverse literature in the standards-driven milieu of AP English Literature and Composition, I saw how the course’s standards tended to affirm and value white aesthetics, characters, texts, stories, and language.
Perhaps the solution is to revise the standards, articulating different, more inclusive outcomes we are committed to. But as Asao B. Inoue points out, outcomes themselves are valued for their utility in norming, creating a modicum of reliability across evaluators. Due to the hegemony of white dominant elites in the field of education, this standardization has and will continue to skew white in its values and assumptions. Some of these values involve more obvious surface features about what makes a given instance of language, art, or history valuable, but others are more embedded and insidious, like a tendency to privilege the abstract, the socially and politically neutral, and—perhaps most irredeemable—the measurable.
SBG privileges what can be measured
It’s clear why the standards-based mindset often stands in the way of richer pedagogical experiences. Responsiveness (cultural or otherwise) obligates the teacher to complicate the trajectory and target, with an increasingly unreliable and inaccurate result in determining the grade. Fostering 21st-century skills like collaboration and cooperation is difficult to say the least, requiring high levels of supervision and often resulting in bitterness and frustration among group members.
Since the gradebook needs measurables, the curriculum is inevitably whittled down to learning objectives that can be clearly articulated, demonstrated, and measured. It’s easier for me to measure, say, a student’s avoidance of passive voice (heck, the Hemingway editor has been doing it for years) than it is to measure the development of voice. And, sadly, what we evaluate is what we end up valuing; what we count is what ends up counting.
My ‘Existential Letter to Self’ rubric wasn’t a particularly proud moment.
In most subject areas, measurables represent a slim sliver of the goodness that can be shared, discovered, and demonstrated. “The truth,” Bill Ferriter asserts, “is that the things that are the most meaningful are also the hardest to measure.” But here’s the rub: even if we could measure them, is it worth finding ways to quantify these more meaningful, harder-to-measure qualities, such as creativity, collaboration, risk taking, civility, empathy? As someone who developed dozens of rubrics over his career, I know I’ve tried to shine the bright light of measurement on these more nebulous qualities. But it’s much harder to do, and less defensible. Therefore, these qualities end up getting relegated to some realm that may have numbers but in no way contributes to the grade.
To be clear, I wouldn’t want them to be part of the grade. There is something especially degrading about being observed, surveilled, measured, totaled up, graded while doing something you actually enjoy. Daniel Pink points out how rewards and punishments—which are inextricably baked into grades—actually hinder creativity, higher-order thinking, and intrinsic motivation. And yet grades set up a hierarchy that renders anything that is not measured definitively less than.
One would think that after nearly a century of quantum physics we would understand how observing something fundamentally changes (or, as John Wheeler contended, creates) its reality. Arguably, this accounts for a prudent modesty in approaching more ephemeral realms not yet colonized by measurement. And yet, by privileging what is measurable, we effectively ignore this goodness, ascribing it no real value.
Some final thoughts
Ultimately, these questions may resonate at a deeper, almost spiritual level: To what extent does the dominant culture value only the outer trappings of the false self? To what extent is it blind to that which prefers not to disclose itself in visible, measurable, and thus exploitable ways?
In his writings, Thomas Merton likens the true self to a shy, wild animal (usually a deer) that startles at the slightest movement:
The inner self is precisely that self which cannot be tricked or manipulated by anyone…He is like a very wild animal that never appears at all whenever an alien presence is at hand, and comes out only when all is perfectly peaceful, in silence, when he is untroubled and alone. He cannot be lured by anyone or anything, because he responds to no lure except that of divine freedom.
Is it too much to imagine schools where students’ learning, growth, strengths, and identities can be acknowledged, celebrated, even shared—without the stifling influences of standardization and measurement? Are there other structures, platforms, and tools that allow us both to credential students’ acquisition of important skills and to accord value to what falls outside our preconceived boxes?
If not, we fall prey to a form of observational bias known as the streetlight effect, where a drunk person looks for his keys only in the light of a street lamp because “this is where the light is.” Floyd Cobb and John Krownapple, in their book Belonging Through a Culture of Dignity, use this metaphor to interrogate failed equity initiatives.
Are we looking where it's easiest? Have we been focusing on the wrong things? Are we like the man in the story, deprived of reason from our observational bias (our tendency to see only what we expect or want to see)? Are we unaware that anything exists beyond the light provided by a system designed to maintain itself?…Are we ready to deal with the underlying reasons why we haven't ventured further afield?
These questions have uncanny relevance to standards-based grading. Is consensus always desirable in grading reform? To what extent does it become for the practitioner, to use Dewey’s words, a “rountineer’s road…a ditch out of which he cannot get, whose sides enclose him, directing his course so thoroughly that he no longer thinks of his path or his destination”?
I don’t usually consider reform—grading or otherwise—as allied with narrow orthodoxy or status quo conservatism. And yet, at a time when standards-based grading has achieved its widest acceptance, I often see reactionary responses to new perspectives and practices that feel petty, patronizing, and out of proportion. One well known author has remarked how the new, varied approaches make it “exponentially more difficult,” dismissing these as mere “semantics,” “idiosyncrasies,” and “brand building.”
But if standard-based grading is to progress beyond the real difficulties that beset it, it must espouse curiosity over defensiveness, openness over dogmatism, empathy over insularity. What becomes of SBG—whether it is able to evolve or ossifies into irrelevance—remains to be seen.
Arthur Chiaravalli serves as House Director at Champlain Valley Union High School in Vermont and is founder of Teachers Going Gradeless. Over the course of his career, he has taught high school English, mathematics, technology, and media arts. Follow him on Twitter at @iamchiaravalli.
