Standards Based Grading Quotes

When I look back, my greatest accomplishment in high school has nothing to do with competition and winning. I learned to use my own judgement and not to follow others blindly. I learned to judge myself based on my own standards. I learned to find my own voice. I learned to speak my own truth. I have nothing to show for these achievements, no grades, no medals, trophies, or diploma. Yet these are the achievements that can't be taken away by loss, failure, or misunderstanding.

In our relentless pursuit of the almighty A and the perfect GPA, something got lost—learning. Grades became the be-all and end-all, the goal itself, not an indicator of achieving the goal of learning. Grades have become the commodity, the badge of success and smarts, the ticket to college.

One of Tavistock’s chief wreckers of our way of life was Dr. Alexander King, a founder member of NATO, a favorite of the Committee and a leading member of the Club of Rome (COR). King was assigned by the COR to lower the standard of American education by taking control of the National Teachers Association and working in close conjunction with certain members of the U.S. Congress. By 1993, the National Teachers Association (NTA) had become a formidable Socialist tool in the struggle for possession of the minds of our children. Outcome Based Education (OBE) was the method whereby the wholesale socializing of American school children was being carried out. Another aspect of OBE is its heavy attention to “sex education” and pumping lesbianism and homosexuality into the minds of grade school and secondary school children

He was almost at his door when Vik’s earsplitting shriek resounded down the corridor. Tom was glad for the excuse to sprint back toward him. “Vik?” He reached Vik’s doorway as Vik was backing out of it. “Tom,” he breathed, “it’s an abomination.” Confused, Tom stepped past him into the bunk. Then he gawked, too. Instead of a standard trainee bunk of two small beds with drawers underneath them and totally bare walls, Vik’s bunk was virtually covered with images of their friend Wyatt Enslow. There were posters all over the wall with Wyatt’s solemn, oval face on them. She wore her customary scowl, her dark eyes tracking their every move through the bunk. There was a giant marble statue of a sad-looking Vik with a boot on top of its head. The Vik statue clutched two very, very tiny hands together in a gesture of supplication, its eyes trained upward on the unseen stomper, an inscription at its base, WHY, OH WHY, DID I CROSS WYATT ENSLOW? Tom began to laugh. “She didn’t do it to the bunk,” Vik insisted. “She must’ve done something to our processors.” That much was obvious. If Wyatt was good at anything, it was pulling off tricks with the neural processors, which could pretty much be manipulated to show them anything. This was some sort of illusion she was making them see, and Tom heartily approved. He stepped closer to the walls to admire some of the photos pinned there, freeze-frames of some of Vik’s more embarrassing moments at the Spire: that time Vik got a computer virus that convinced him he was a sheep, and he’d crawled around on his hands and knees chewing on plants in the arboretum. Another was Vik gaping in dismay as Wyatt won the war games. “My hands do not look like that.” Vik jabbed a finger at the statue and its abnormally tiny hands. Wyatt had relentlessly mocked Vik for having small, delicate hands ever since Tom had informed her it was the proper way to counter one of Vik’s nicknames for her, “Man Hands.” Vik had mostly abandoned that nickname for “Evil Wench,” and Tom suspected it was due to the delicate-hands gibe. Just then, Vik’s new roommate bustled into the bunk. He was a tall, slim guy with curly black hair and a pointy look to his face. Tom had seen him around, and he called up his profile from memory: NAME: Giuseppe Nichols RANK: USIF, Grade IV Middle, Alexander Division ORIGIN: New York, NY ACHIEVEMENTS: Runner-up, Van Cliburn International Piano Competition IP: 2053:db7:lj71::291:ll3:6e8 SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-4 Giuseppe must’ve been able to see the bunk template, too, because he stuttered to a stop, staring up at the statue. “Did you really program a giant statue of yourself into your bunk template? That’s so narcissistic.” Tom smothered his laughter. “Wow. He already has your number, man.” Vik shot him a look of death as Tom backed out of the bunk.

Evidence-based learning helped my learners shift the focus from “playing school” to “achieving a standard.” However, when I threw out grades completely and purged classwork of numbers to achieve, my students started to learn for the sake of learning. They began to attempt class work with a new mindset—one of collegiality and growth, not compliance and immobility.

I had a conversation with a legislator that went something like this: “I don’t believe we can make judgments about the effectiveness of a teacher based only on test scores,” he said. “I don’t believe we should, either,” I responded. “We should look at teacher effectiveness through a variety of lenses. However, I think it’s critical that student achievement growth is a significant one of those factors.” He looked at me skeptically. So I continued: “When I came to Washington, D.C., public schools, eight percent of the eighth graders in the city’s schools were on grade level in mathematics. Eight percent! That means ninety-two percent of our kids did not have the skills and knowledge necessary to be productive members of society.” I told him that when I looked at the evaluations of the adults in the system at the same time, it turned out that 98 percent of teachers were being rated as doing a good job. How can you possibly have that kind of a disconnect? And I asked, “How can you have a functional organization in which all of your employees believe they’re doing a great job, but what they’re producing is 8 percent success?” “Well, that’s not the teacher’s fault,” the legislator said. “Exactly,” I said. “The teachers weren’t the ones who created this broken and bureaucratic system. They know the evaluation system isn’t good. They also know it needs to change.” “But I still don’t think we should look at test scores,” the legislator continued. “It just isn’t fair.” “Let me ask you a question,” I said. “Do you have children?” “Yes,” he said. “I have a daughter who is going into the fourth grade.” “Okay,” I said. “Let’s say that there are two fourth-grade teachers in your daughter’s school. You find out that for the last five years, students in one of the classes have consistently scored in the bottom five percent of the state on standardized test score. The other’s students have consistently scored in the top five percent of the state on the same test. What would you do?” “I’d make sure she was in the classroom of the person who had the high test scores,” he answered—without a hint of irony to his response. “What?” I responded. “But how could you do that? You made that decision solely on the basis of test scores! You didn’t even go into their classrooms!” He stared at me for a moment, confused. Then he smiled and said, “Okay, you got me.” “My point is that student academic achievement does matter,” I said. “It shouldn’t be everything. I think it’s important to consider a broad range of factors in a teacher’s evaluation. But how much students learn has to be a major piece of it.

Despite compelling new knowledge about learning, how the brain works, and what constitutes effective classroom groupings, classrooms have changed little over the past 100 years. We still assume that children of a given age are enough like each other that they can and should traverse the same curriculum in the same fashion. Further, schools act as though all children should finish classroom tasks as near to the same moment as possible, and that school year should be the same length for all learners. To this end, teachers generally assess student content mastery via tests based on specific chapters of the adopted textbook and summative tests at the end of designated marking periods. Teachers use the same grading system for all children of a given age and grade, whatever their starting point at the beginning of the year, with grades providing little if any indication of whether individual students have grown since the previous grading period or the degree to which students' attitudes and habits of mind contributed to their success or stagnation. Toward the end of the school year, schools administer standardized tests on the premise that all students of a certain age should have reached an average level of performance on the prescribed content by the testing date. Teachers, students, and schools that achieve the desired level of performance are celebrated; those that do not perform as desired are reprimanded, without any regard to the backgrounds, opportunities, and support systems available to any of the parties. Curriculum often has been based on goals that require students to accumulate and retain a variety of facts or to practice skills that are far removed from any meaningful context. Drill-and-practice worksheets are still a prime educational technology, a legacy of behaviorism rooted firmly in the 1930s. Teachers still largely run "tight ship" classes and are likely to work harder and more actively than their students much of the time.

We reward the modern version of virtue and punish the lack of it. We reward responsibility, effort, hard work, neatness, and homework completion. We penalize tardiness, sloppiness, late work, and cheating. For this noble goal of instilling morality in students, grades have been a most convenient tool.

What if an A student was a compliant one rather than a learned one? What if the premise that high grades were a predictor of success in life was faulty? What if grades, as the marker of success in school, were a flawed, or worse yet, meaningless

Truth be told, we like our norm-based comparisons. As a competitive culture, we like winners and losers and the fact that there is only so much room at the top. It is a way to demonstrate (we believe) that school is a meritocracy—that hard work is rewarded, and that a hierarchy of achievement exists. This system secures the fate of those few at the top, who are then given access to the best high schools and colleges. So the tradition of honor rolls, class rank, and valedictorians lives on.

Standards-based grading is grounded in several key principles: grades must accurately describe a student’s progress and current level of achievement; habits of scholarship should be assessed and reported separately; grades are for communication, not motivation or punishment; grades must be specific enough in what they measure that it is clear what students need to work on to improve; and student engagement is key to the grading process.

At time of writing, the National Education Standards and Improvement Council, set up by the Clinton Administration,61 is due to prescribe what students in grades five through twelve are supposed to know about American history. Not a single one of the thirty-one standards set up mentions the Constitution. Paul Revere is unmentioned; the Gettysburg address is briefly mentioned once. On the other hand, the early feminist Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments receives nine notices. Joseph McCarthy is mentioned nineteen times; there is no mention of the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Robert E. Lee; Harriet Tubman receives six notices. The Ku Klux Klan is mentioned seventeen times; the American Federation of Labor comes up with nine appearances. The role of religion, especially Christianity, in the founding and building of the nation is totally ignored; the grandeur of the court of Mansa Musa (King of Mali in fifteenth-century Africa) is praised, and recommended as a topic for further study.62 Such standards are linked in the minds of many with “outcome-based-education” (OBE). If the “outcomes” were well balanced and not less than thoroughly cognitive (though hopefully more than cognitive), there would be few objections. But OBE has become a lightening-rod issue precisely because in the hands of many it explicitly minimizes cognitive tests and competency skills, while focusing much more attention on attitudes, group conformity, and the like. In other words, granred the postmodernism that grips many educational theorists and the political correctness that shapes their values, this begins to look like one more experiment in social engineering.

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Got you,” he heard someone murmur, looking over to see one of his team members—Nate Carson, a former Air Force pararescue jumper or “PJ”, as they were known—aim his index finger at the frozen image on the laptop screen, pantomiming getting off a shot. And so they had, or at least were as close to it as they had been in months, the big man thought as he laid down the yearbook, pushing his way past Carson as he made his way to the door of the tent. Their best intelligence on Hassan's location since their abortive raid in late March, having come through just the previous day. And now all they awaited was the all-clear from Washington. For the politicians to make up their mind, as ever. The desert heat of the Sinai struck him full in the face as he stepped through the flap. Dry, choking heat—impressive even by the standards of east Texas, where he'd spent the majority of his childhood, before leaving home at the age of 18 to join the Corps. Seemed like he'd been spending his life in the desert ever since, as the Marines—and now the Agency—sent him to one desolate waste after another. North Camp was located some twenty kilometers south of the Mediterranean and not far from the border with Israel—a six hundred plus-acre compound that served as a forward operating base for the Multinational Force & Observers, the international peacekeeping force based in the Sinai ever since the Camp David Accords of '78. And now, for their team—through some special dispensation obtained by the Agency's seventh floor. All of it so far above his pay grade as to be beyond his concern.

Self-Awareness Assessing our feelings, interests, values, and strengths; maintaining self-confidence. Self-Management Regulating emotions to handle stress, control impulses, and persevere in overcoming obstacles Social Awareness Understanding different perspectives and empathizing with others; recognizing and appreciating similarities and differences; using family, school, and community resources effectively Relationship Skills Maintaining healthy relationships based on cooperation; resisting inappropriate social pressure; preventing, managing, and resolving interpersonal conflicts; seeking help when needed Responsible Decision Making Using a variety of considerations, including ethical, academic, and community-related standards to make choices and decisions

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