Better Teaching: Only Stuff That Works

Gene Tavernetti: Welcome to Better Teaching, Only Stuff That Works, a podcast for teachers, instructional coaches, administrators, and anyone else who supports teachers in the classroom.

This show is a proud member of the BE Podcast Network shows that help you go beyond education.

Find all our shows@bepodcastnetwork.com.

I Am Gene Tavernetti the host for this podcast.

And my goal for this episode, like all episodes, is that you laugh at least once and that you leave with an actionable idea for better teaching.

A quick reminder, no cliches, no buzzwords.

Only stuff that works.

Today I had the extreme pleasure to talk to Dr. David Griffith about a topic that we have not discussed before on better teaching only stuff that works and that is grading.

And, uh, had a chance to talk to Dr. David Griffith, who is from the, uh, Fordham Institute and where he's the director of research and he manages or authors reports on various subjects including charter schools, accountability and civic education.

His research has been published or cited in numerous outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the New York Post, USA Today, national Affairs and Education Week, a native of Portland, Oregon.

David holds a bachelor's degree in politics and Philosophy from Pomona College, a master's degree in Public Policy from Georgetown University, and a PhD in public policy from George Washington University.

Prior to joining Fordham, he worked as a staffer for Congressman Earl Blumenau, a research assistant at Data Quality Campaign and Education Sector, and a high school social studies teacher in Washington dc.

In his spare time, David enjoys playing soccer and embarking on literary and culinary adventures with his wife Lindsay and his two children, James and Aurora.

I think you're gonna like this discussion.

Hello, David.

Thank you so much for being on better teaching Only stuff that works

David: Thanks so much for having me Gene.

Gene Tavernetti: well.

It's my pleasure.

I know that, you had posted something that I was, became first aware of it on Twitter or x, whatever we call it.

And it was a, an article about some research that you folks had done about grading equity.

In fact, the title of the article was Equitable Grading Through the Eyes of Teachers.

Could you talk a little bit about that?

And I'm sure I'll be interrupting you with questions as you go.

David: Yeah, sure thing.

So, as I think you mentioned I'm an education researcher and I work for the Thomas p Fordham Institute and we study all things K 12.

And so, you know.

Grades are obviously central to the work of schools.

And so they're one of the things that we study.

And you know, in recent years we have gotten concerned, I would say about what is happening to grades with, you know, just nationally.

Basically in every state, I would say and your listeners are probably familiar with this, but you know, we have seen a lot of grade inflation in recent years.

This is not a new phenomenon.

You know, I think pretty much anybody, if they ask their mom or their dad they'll say, well, it's easier to get an A than it used to be, right?

But in the last, say five or six years it has really taken off.

In part because of the pandemic which just obviously was, you know, a huge curve ball for our education system.

But then I think also for other reasons, which is what we wanted to sort of study in this report there has been a long standing.

Movement to reform grading.

And it has probably a longer history than I can do justice to in this space.

And it has many different players and many different motivations.

But in the last few years there has been sort of a rise of something called grading for equity.

And it's associated with you know, a few notable kind of grading gurus.

The policies that it pushes for anecdotally we knew were adopted by some fairly big districts.

And generated some controversy.

So we wanted to take a closer look at this because as far as we could tell, there was really no systematic data that was telling us how widespread these new grading practices were.

And basically what was happening it was an understudied phenomenon.

So that's what the report is about.

Gene Tavernetti: So when are we talking about equitable grading?

What are we talking, what are we saying?

David: Yeah, so it's obviously it's a term that gets used a lot these days.

And I don't know exactly when we decided that everything.

Had to be equitable.

But it increasingly encompasses things that aren't, or things that not everyone will agree are equitable.

So we chose to focus on five policies that seem to be promoted by e advocates for equitable grading.

There's no official

Gene Tavernetti: David, just to give you a break here, is that the equitable was in quotes

On your report.

David: It was, and we debated that, right?

Because, you know, it makes it, it does when you put it in scare quotes, right?

You are taking a position and you're saying something, right?

And you're saying something about how you feel.

But, you know, I may as well put my cards on the table here.

Right?

We did not really agree with the thrust of these reforms.

Teachers do not really agree with them.

And we didn't really want to give the people who are pushing them the word equitable, because it's something that is often used as a club.

And really we shouldn't do things or not do them because the word equitable is affixed to the policy, right?

We should do it if it makes sense, if it helps kids.

And so.

You know, well, yes.

We put the scare quotes around it anyway to address your questions.

Right.

It, you know, we looked at five policies and we gave them kind of pithy labels to help people wrap their heads around them.

So the first policy is called like No Zeros, and some listeners may have heard of it.

And it is basically this idea that you are not going to give.

Kids Zeros for assignments that they don't turn in.

Because doing so will have such a sort of de deleterious effect on their grades that they may get discouraged.

And then, you know, you'll lose them for the rest of the semester and they won't really try.

The second policy was we called it No Late Penalties.

This is the idea that basically you know, that kids, particularly marginalized kids maybe will struggle with getting things in on time, right?

And they deserve the opportunity to show what they know or you know, get credit for work that they have done.

And so, you know, we should essentially not have late penalties and let them turn the work in in, you know, when, whenever they do it.

The third policy, we called it unlimited retakes.

This one is basically the idea is if a student has bombed a test or a quiz that student should be in a, be allowed to retake the test or the quiz without penalty.

You know, and sort of incentivize you know, give the student a chance to try again and to show what they're capable of doing and to improve their performance.

And then the final two policies we called, one we called no participation, and the other we called no homework.

And the basic idea as those names sound is that suggest is that teachers should not assign any points for homework and they should not assign any points for participation.

In other words, there shouldn't be some element of the grade that is based on participation

Gene Tavernetti: so the proponents of these.

Equitable policies are saying that you should not get a participation grade

and not get credit for homework.

David: yeah, there, there should be no, there should be no participation grade and no points for homework.

Yes.

Gene Tavernetti: Okay.

David: So, no, that's okay.

I mean, I can give a summary of what teachers.

Think of these policies.

I guess I should also say they're, you know, they're both policies and practices, right?

And so we asked you know, a few questions about each of those from each angle.

But I think the main thing to understand is that when we asked teachers if these policies were in effect.

In their schools or districts.

A lot of them said yes.

So overall, more than half of the teachers in our sample, which was a nationally representative sample, said that their school or district had adopted at least one of these policies.

Right.

So not as an option, right, but as something that all teachers in the school or district were supposed to do.

So I'll just, you know, listeners can take a moment to imagine you're a teacher.

You're teaching, I don't know, ninth grade social studies like I did.

And the message that you get from above is all students must get a grade of at least 50% for assignments whether or not they turn them in.

Okay.

This is a thing that's actually happening in American schools.

And it's not just happening in a few of them.

It's happening in a lot of them, and it's disproportionately happening in classrooms and schools and settings where a majority of the students are students of color.

Gene Tavernetti: Okay, so the results that you presented, the results that you presented from the survey was for each of those categories,

David: Yes.

So, so

Gene Tavernetti: you broke it down.

Okay.

David: yeah if you take it, if you take it policy by policy there's sort of three policies that are particularly common.

One is no zeros.

Another is no wait penalties, and another is unlimited retakes.

Each of those is present in somewhere between 25 to 30% of American classrooms.

And then the other two policies, no participation and no homework are in effect in about one in 10 American classrooms.

And so, you know, it's not as though like, none of no single policy has a majority in all classrooms.

But lemme just make a couple points.

First of all, I included K five in those numbers, okay?

So I'm including.

Grades where we wouldn't even normally sort of think of students as having you know, as ha as earning letter grades.

Right?

So the actual adoption rate for the grades that we kind of typically associate with grading is higher.

And then I think the other point that needs to be made is some of these policies are they're not quite redundant.

They serve similar purposes.

So, for example, if your goal and nobody will sort of say this out loud, but if your goal is basically to lower grading standards to make it easier for kids to get an A or a B,
and you adopt a policy of no zeros you, you basically do not need some of these other policies in order to get more kids into the passing range because it's such a powerful policy.

It has such a strong impact on kids' finals grades that, you know, you don't necessarily need to have to also have a no homework policy or a no participation policy.

'cause you've already you've already effectively told students you'll get half credit for assignments that you don't do.

Gene Tavernetti: Okay, so, a few questions because it's, I'm having a hard time.

First of all, I'm gonna go back to your original statement about one of your original statements about that grading.

These conversations have been going on

forever and in my experience, the the, 50% was relatively new.

David: Yeah.

Gene Tavernetti: you know, to me, but the participation, allowing participation points, allowing homework points, was a way to, to try to motivate the students to have, you know, if they
weren't doing that great, then, you know, here's a chance for you to to be active in the class and participate and give me a chance as a teacher to kind of evaluate your work in a different way.

And that was the motivation for that.

Was there any way to, to eek that out?

David: Yeah, I mean, so, so let me address what I think is kind of your question, which is like, what's going on here?

What are the goals?

Right?

What

Gene Tavernetti: you go.

Yeah.

David: right?

I mean.

Here's how I see it.

Right?

So part of the reason that the whole conversation is confusing is that grades actually address multiple challenges, or they serve multiple purposes, right?

So one purpose that they pretty obviously serve is to motivate students.

Right.

You know, we, some students are intrinsically motivated, right?

They'll come to class and they'll just do all this, the work for, 'cause they love learning, right?

And they just love simultaneous equations.

Please, teacher, you know, give me another plate full of simultaneous equations.

I would submit that's actually a small group of students.

I think many kids love learning.

But I think most kids require some form of external motivation at least some of the time.

So that's one purpose.

Another purpose that grades serve.

Is to communicate, right?

It's partly to communicate with students about how they're doing.

It's partly to communicate with parents about how their kids are doing.

It is, you know, ultimately partly, you know, it's about sending signals to colleges and employers and yada, yada, yada.

All this, you know, it is a way of communicating things and.

These two purposes are they're distinct.

They're not one and the same, right?

If you want to get kids to, ah.

Try their hardest in school.

You know, sort of do the, make the most of the time, do the assignments.

It makes a lot to assign points to sort of all these intermediate tasks that we all remember from school.

Right?

Here's a problem set.

Do it tonight.

Right?

It's worth 10 points.

Here's another one.

It's Tuesday.

Do it tonight.

It's worth 10 points.

I, you know, I'm obviously I'm sort of.

Simplifying it, but we all remember, yeah, we all remember having work in school.

That doesn't necessarily tell you whether the kid can do it.

Right.

And you know, you might have kids who do all the assignments and still just don't necessarily have the mastery that we're expecting.

You might also have kids.

Who don't do any of the assignments but actually understand it and can do it on a test, right?

So it, the point being these are different things.

And so I think in practice grades have typically been a mishmash, right?

They have partly reflected how hard students try their ability to complete assignments in a timely manner.

And then they have also partly reflected, how the kids are doing, how what they can do how good they are at math.

And so, and I think this is frustrating to many people because if it's doing both of those things, then it's not really doing either of those things well.

Right?

It doesn't really tell us what the kids can do.

And it doesn't really give us a clean read on their behavior or non-cognitive skills or whatever it is.

And so I think that.

I think for many grading reformers, and I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but I think many of them are frustrated by the sort of fuzzy, murky signal that we get outta grades.

What is a, you know, what is a parent supposed to make of a c plus?

I don't know.

Right.

Does it mean the kid can do the stuff or not?

Right?

Like, you know, it doesn't really tell you what you need.

So I think that has sort of motivated a lot of grading reforms.

But here's the thing.

We also need kids to try, right?

And because they're kids, or maybe just because they're humans.

They don't wake up every morning and say, well, I need to do well on the midterm, so I'm gonna pay attention today and I'm gonna do all my homework, right?

This is just not how, you know, classroom management works.

It's not how people work.

And so it's not particularly helpful to teachers to sever the link between grades and I'll just say effort.

Although I could also be talking about behavior participation, all these things that kind of go into making a classroom unwell, getting kids to actively engage in the mat with the material.

Grades historically have helped with that.

And so, I think I, so, so we have a tension here.

And so kind of, um.

In order in, in order to trying attempts to resolve this tension are running into problems.

I'll leave it at that.

Gene Tavernetti: Okay.

Well, it is well, a couple things come to mind as you're talking and also as I was reading the article, especially the quotes from
the teachers and you alluded to it in your answer right now, the fact that teachers say, you're taking away my way to motivate kids.

I, and I'm just thinking, you know, my experience of the kids that are getting zeros.

Bring it on, teacher, gimme another zero, gimme, you know, I, I don't think the 50% changes their motivation as, and neither does the zero for those kids.

That's just, you know, that's an anecdotal thing and I think teachers might be mistaken sometimes if that's the way that you're going to get to that kid, that is not putting in effort.

Yeah.

David: Yeah.

You know, I don't.

Totally disagree with you.

I, you know, when I think back on my brief teacher teaching experience, and I don't wave the bloody flag very often because there are people who, excuse me, the bloody shirt there are people who have taught much longer than I have.

I just wanna be on that.

But I, you know, I do remember those kids who just didn.

Seemed to be motivated by anything.

Right.

And you know, I even remember a kid who was doing all right in the course and then sort of.

New teacher David, trying to figure things out.

Right?

I showed her grade and it turned out that she was failing because she had a big fat zero, right?

And this ruined what was a, an all an a, a partially functional relationship with the kid because the kid just, you know, reacted negatively.

Oh my gosh, Mr. Griffith, you're so unfair.

You know?

Right.

Like it's, children are childish.

Right.

And so I, I'll just say I, there, I don't wanna take the position right.

That none of this stuff is ever appropriate.

I, because sometimes it is.

Right?

It may be that there is a kid who wasn't doing so well but has started doing his or her work.

And the teacher has this sort of fragile, nascent budding relationship and doesn't want to destroy it by pointing out that technically he or she would be failing if they put in all the zeros in the graded book.

I, I have some sympathy for that 'cause I've been there.

But I think there are at least two points that deserve to be made.

First.

It's one thing to do that.

As a teacher using your professional judgment in a particular situation where it seems like the thing to do, it's another thing to mandate it at the school level or at
the district level, prospectively right before the semester has even started to say essentially, you know, we're gonna be giving fifties even if you don't do the work.

That to me is very different from me discreetly deciding that perhaps I won't count this assignment for this child.

That, you know, because it just seems like the thing to do in this situation.

I, to me there's an enormous chasm between those, between a universal policy like that and you know, the sort of grace that teachers.

Occasionally show to students when they think it makes sense.

So that's the first point I would make.

The second point I would make is, honestly, I'm agree, I'm agreeing with you, right, like that some kids are not motivated by zeros.

Some are, right.

And we, you know, we can't design our policies.

You know, we, the goal cannot be.

To try to say to to sacrifice every child, right?

In an attempt to save, you know, a handful of very tough cases, right?

Many kids are motivated by zeros.

80% of our teachers said that the no zeros policy made, you know, was harmful to academic engagement.

Which tells me that, you know, that they think that assigning points for assignments I is actually motivating the kids.

So, yeah, there are a few kids that it's sort of irrelevant for, but I think for most kids and most teachers it is you know, it is deeply important to the process of learning that you know, that kids be given some incentive to do the work.

And so I think it's really dangerous to sort of take away teachers' leverage on that front.

Gene Tavernetti: Yeah, I mean, I, you get a 50, you still got some leverage.

You still got some leverage if you're not getting any points for participation or anything else.

But having said that, these policies that schools do, you know, you know, just like you said at the beginning, it's not because one day they said, let's do this let's give 50 instead of zero.

There's been a whole bunch of things.

Previous to making that decision, and I'm not supporting the decision, I'm just, you know, I think I'm agreeing with you.

You can't take a blunt instrument when you need to work with individual kids.

David: Yeah, I think.

I mean, let me just pick up on, on that last point first I and build on what I was just saying.

I mean, part of where I'm coming from, I maybe I'm wrong about this, but in my experience, the average teacher is a bleeding heart who will bend over backwards to try to help his or her students.

There's just no other reason to do it.

Right.

I mean, it the job doesn't pay very well.

You know, it's got long hours.

I mean, there's no reason to do it except for the kids.

And so I just don't you know, I, good intentions aren't everything, but I don't buy the notion that teachers are cruel or heartless or racist.

You know, overlords who enjoy giving zeros to kids.

They don't, right?

I think teachers are looking for ways frankly, looking for ways to not fail kids, right?

Because nobody wants to do it, right?

And so they don't need universal policies that essentially make it impossible to fail kids.

If anything, they need to be pushed in the opposite direction.

And given a reason to be a little tougher maybe.

But I, you know, I think, um.

To go back to what you were saying earlier, I mean, I think that kids and teachers, um, are responding to incentives that problematic.

Right.

So you know, you Yeah.

Gene Tavernetti: Yes.

Yeah.

David: You said, you know, you said these policies didn't come out of anywhere come outta nowhere, right?

No, it's true.

They didn't, we put high school graduation rates on school websites, right.

Principals are, they're not evaluated based on them.

Right.

But they're human beings.

They're sensitive to how things look.

They're being judged based on how it goes.

Parents don't like it when you give their kids low grades.

Teach.

Kids don't like it when you give them low grades.

So there, I mean, there is no earthly reason to give a child a low grade except professional integrity, right?

All of the incentives are pushing teachers you know, to pass the kid along.

Sure have a B. Right.

Okay.

You're almost to an A, have an A. Right.

That's every, you know, every actor in the system is pushing them in this direction.

Right.

And so, you know, it's I think part of, you know, I have sort of a cynical perspective on this, but I think that part of the reason that these policies have spread is that they solve a problem.

In fact, they solve several people's problems.

It is so much easier to adopt a policy.

That will push all the kids into passing territory than it is to actually say, you know what, you're not in passing territory and we're gonna work really hard.

So that you can actually earn that c. That's real work.

It's actually very difficult.

And you know, it's very difficult to actually make that kind of progress with kids.

It's easier to paper it over.

Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.

You know, I, you know, I'm asking you these questions, but I. realize that this 50% thing was so pervasive.

It doesn't make, it doesn't make any sense to me.

On the other hand, thinking about another comment that, that teachers made, that we're not preparing kids for the real world,

David: Yeah.

Gene Tavernetti: where you don't get this?

Well, I'm gonna call BS on some of that.

Okay.

You know, for example, if I'm getting zeros, let's say I'm in David's class.

Mr. Griffis cloud, and I'm getting zeros, and you pull me over and you say, Jean, look at this.

You got zeros.

And boy, we're gonna need to do something.

And then I take a look at the mathematics of what I would need to do to get B, C or a B, it becomes nearly impossible.

So now in the real world.

What happens is you get to go bankrupt and start over again.

So if there was a way to go bankrupt in your classroom and say, okay, Mr. Griffith, I'm gonna, I'm changing, I'm a different person now that we've had this talk, you watch and I am a different person now what do we do?

Because we've got this mathematical formula that we've been given.

David: Yeah.

Well, so I am against, I am generally against giving teachers mathematical formulas for precisely,

Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.

David: I don't have a good I don't have a good sense of how.

You know how I'm not even quite sure what we're talking about, but I think, you know, I think it's fair to say that in some places, right, teachers have a lot of discretion over how their grade breaks down.

Right?

And in other places, you know, that is essentially something that is broken down for them.

And in some cases it's even, you know, sort of tightly monitored and they're actually expected to follow the policy.

I know that's not something we can assume in the education world, but, you know, I, I. I have learned that there are actually places where, you know, the policy that the school district puts forward is followed by the classroom teachers at the ground level.

So it's not as crazy as it sounds.

So I, you know, I had teachers when we asked them, said that they wanted some sort of schoolwide policy.

It didn't, we didn't really have the bandwidth to ask them what they meant by that.

So I do think that there is, I think there's some desire for some ground rules about how kids are graded.

But I guess I'll just say my, you know, I'm putting my cards on the table here.

I take the opposite view.

I'm of the view that we should maximize teacher discretion when it comes to grades.

I think grades.

Are primarily actually motivational tools when it push comes right down to it.

I think the notion that a C or a B denotes something objective about a kid's.

You know, level is just absurd,

Gene Tavernetti: right?

Okay.

David: Stuyvesant or, you know, you know, that, that high school on the, you know, across the tracks, it's just absurd to think that there's some objective standard that we can impose on all.

Classrooms on all subjects across the country so that, you know, a C really means a C or an A is really an A. No it's inherently subjective, right?

Grades are not particularly fair.

Even if we could make them fair within a school, it still means something completely different at the school down the road.

Even if we did that at the district level, they'd still mean something completely different at the next district over.

Even if we did it at the state level, they'd still mean something different at the, in the next state over.

And you're all, by the way, you're all trying to get into Brown.

Right?

Like it's not fair.

Right.

They are not gonna be perfectly fair.

And I find the I also find the impulse to standardize them.

Just kind of astonishing.

Because.

One class is about math and another class is about social studies, and another class is about pottery.

And making a plot is not the same thing as writing a five paragraph essay, which is not the same thing as learning about fractions.

So why on earth would we think that tests should count for the same percentage in all these things?

And oh, by the way, there are different grade levels, right?

And oh, by the way, the kids are at different levels, right?

And oh, by the way, every classroom is different.

Every kid is different.

Why is it, why do we have.

You know, I'm a Democrat.

I'll put my cards on the table.

I care a lot about equity, but this obsession with fairness for something that is clearly not going to be entirely fair is a little bit silly, right?

It I'm evaluated in my, you know, in my work as are most of us.

I accept that, that evaluation is a little bit subjective.

And not perfectly fair.

I don't know if I'm getting screwed or you know, or if I'm getting an easy ride, right?

But either way, I, there's no expectation that the thing will be perfectly, absolutely fair because nothing is perfectly, absolutely fair.

And so I, I guess I just think we need to be a little bit more pragmatic about how we approach this.

The grades will not be perfectly fair.

They can be an important.

Way in which we convince students to do the things that we think they need to do, so that they become, you know, fully formed people who know something about the world.

Gene Tavernetti: Well, two, two things.

I wanna share an anecdote with you about the

whole idea of, percentages, and you know how we calculate grades.

I was working at a, I was working at a middle school and it was the end of the day and I was debriefing with the principal and he said, I'm sorry.

I have to go.

I have to go to an expulsion hearing.

And I said, oh my goodness.

What, you know, what happened?

What's up with?

The kid says, well, he's splunking out, and I, he's splunking out.

I said, well, what, what's going on?

He says, well, he doesn't do his homework.

I said, okay.

How's his, how are his tests?

Oh, he does great on tests.

How are his state assessments?

Oh, he is proficient in everything he says, but in this school, the teachers expect me to enforce the fact that homework can be a determinant factor in whether you pass or not.

And the kid just decided not to do homework.

So I'm thinking, wow, really?

You're gonna, you're gonna expel a kid, you're gonna send him to a continuation school or a community school because of that.

Which I think just reinforces your argument about when you have these strict percentages, it makes it pretty difficult to have some discretion.

David: Yeah, that's a pretty interesting anecdote.

I mean, let me take it in a slightly different direction.

I think I think flunking which has unique consequences.

At the high school level is kind of a special case.

I'm actually sort of dovish when it comes to things like holding kids back a grade 'cause they're not on grade level, right?

I tend to think social promotion is inevitable.

Right.

And yeah, when you get to the high school level, the kids, you know, they have to take more responsibility.

Right.

But basically you know, I get it right.

Like we, I don't think we gained very much by flunking kids outta high school and putting 'em on the street.

I would rather have them at least be inside a building where adults are supervising them and trying to work with them.

And I don't, you know, I don't lose too much sleep about, you know, the value of a d not being what it used to be.

Right?

Like, we all know what a d means.

A D means.

I didn't want flunk you.

Right.

I think there's some wisdom in that.

I think what the problem is that what has really happened in the last few years?

Is that the grading scale has gotten so compressed that we're now giving a's to like, you know, we hear stories from teachers, right?

Where it's like half the kids are getting A's and the other half are getting B'S and we're not even making use of the C's and the D's.

Right?

And you know, it's not, again, it's not written in the sky what should be an A or how many kids deserve an A. But parents have some sense.

Of what an A means, or at least they thought they knew.

Right?

And so if kids if kids are getting A's right, parents aren't gonna give 'em a hard time, right?

And if all the kids are getting A's, then, you know, then none of the parents are really gonna be, you know, sort of, on their case.

And if it's too easy to get an A you know, then essentially it, you know, you just, you're not pushing kids anymore.

And so I, I'm not actually taking the view that, you know, kids should be, like, the kids that we've talked about, the kids who just aren't doing the work should necessarily be flunked.

Or I'll even throw one more thing out there.

I'd actually think we should, maybe we should flunk 'em, but we just, you know, shouldn't kick 'em outta school anymore, right?

We should find some way to just give 'em an f and just, I don't know, let him move on or something.

I, either way, I don't think that it's important.

To hold kids back if they're below grade level or you know, to just sort of insist that they repeat a course if there is, if it's obvious that's not in the best interest of a kid.

What I do think is important is that we do what we can to maintain grading standards you know.

Make it possible to get a C.

Right?

And even more than that, even more than being against great inflation.

What I'm really against is this effort to just undercut teachers' leverage at every possible point.

Some teachers use homework, some don't.

Mrs. Johnson might not be able to get Tim to do his homework, but, you know, right down the hall, Mr. Smith might be able to get him to do it.

Right.

I had kids like that.

I had kids that I struggled with and you know, other teachers were like, what do you mean she's great?

Right?

E education's a very personal thing.

Some teachers are very gifted at getting the most out of their kids.

They can get them to do things that other teachers cannot.

And so we shouldn't.

We shouldn't undermine that, right?

We should let teachers craft an approach to grading that suits their personal style, that suits their subject, that suits their their students, right?

And that suits their situation.

And we shouldn't worry too much if it looks exactly the same as the, you know, the approach that a teacher down the hall constructs because there may be very good reasons that the teacher down the hall has designed a different approach.

Gene Tavernetti: I know you're just reporting data, David.

David: Right.

That's right.

You can tell I have no opinions.

I'm one of those boring, neutral researchers that you've heard

Gene Tavernetti: Right.

But I, you know, there are interesting, this whole conversation is so interesting to me and you started with the statement that grading is central to schools.

David: Yes.

Gene Tavernetti: And then, you know, I talked to, uh.

You'll have to go back and listen to all my podcasts, David, but I did talk to a teacher from the UK who came over here and started teaching and one of the biggest culture shocks was, wait a second, I have to give all these grades.

I don't care what they know now.

I, at the end of the semester, they need to know, or the end of the year, that's when everything counts.

David: Yeah.

Gene Tavernetti: and so she was just making upgrades.

I don't want to say that's, that might be a little hyperbolic, but for her, it wasn't meaningful at all.

Sh her job was to get the kids to learn.

And if David wasn't motivated, you know, she was gonna work on it,

you know, or, but so I don't know the fact that we've been talking about this for so many decades and then we go to standards based and, you know.

Well at this classroom and Mr. Griffith's class, I had have got an A, but I'm not in, you know, I'm in Miss Jones class, so I parents don't like that so much.

Is parent driven as well?

So I, I don't know the answer.

As I've gotten older, that's what I know.

I just know that there's so much I don't know.

But this is one that do we spend too much energy on it.

I wanna know, David's not doing well.

I wanna go sit in, I wanna go sit in Mr. Griffith's classroom to see what's happening.

If I'm an administrator, I don't wanna say, Hey, give him a c.

That's, so that's what I get concerned about, is that people worry about the minutia, especially in this time of, you know, school choice and you know, I don't know.

I don't know if that's one of the things they look for is, oh, is everybody getting good grades?

Or what happens to the kids?

Are they learning?

So I just don't know.

David: Yeah, I, you know, I have the dim sense that if, as an education researcher, that we could learn a lot from other countries.

If you would just give me, you know, an infinite budget in a thousand years to travel around and try to understand how things work, because it's fascinating, right?

You go to other places and things that you take for granted.

Are not the case.

So I'll hit you back with an anecdote of my own.

I also, I spent a year in England when I was in fifth grade.

And I attended an English, it, it wasn't a boarding school, although there were children at it who boarded.

So it was partly boarding, partly day day school.

Right.

And it was fifth grade and they had grades, right?

So they did letter grades.

Not only did they have letter grades, this was in the nineties I guess I should say.

Alright, so I don't know that they still do this, but I remember quite distinctly at the end of the semester, they would read the ranks of the children out loud to the class and your class rank to a classroom full of fifth graders, number 32.

Timmy, number 31, Gina.

It, I mean, it's inconceivable by Modern American standards, right?

And I'm not advocating for it, right?

To be clear, but I guess I just do take the view, right?

I mean it, there, there are, there, there are.

When I think about that practice relative to what we're talking about now, where you know, it somehow, it's cruel to give a kid a zero.

When they didn't do the work.

I guess I just, I push back on that, right.

I think at some point you, you have to you know, you have to be real with the kid, right?

And so it's all relative is what I'm trying to say.

I think, you know, we are we're not trying to get kids to to fail, but we are trying to get them to learn something about how the world works.

And it's if we shelter them from it forever, they're not gonna learn.

Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.

And I, like I say, I think we're back and forth some kind of Hegelian dialectic here where, you know, we're not gonna do what you did in England, but we don't need to give 'em 50%.

But I think that's what's happening.

And then they'll figure that's not a good idea.

50% is not a good idea.

I don't, I, again, I don't know the answers.

I I don't know the answers to this, but that's it.

I just don't, I just don't know.

That's why I was looking forward to talking to you.

David: Well, I think my my, just my personal takeaway is that we need to.

Give teachers and educators some professional respect and trust them to, you know, to do the right thing by kids.

And to grade in a way that will promote learning and not try to micromanage them in ways that could be counterproductive.

That's my bottom line.

Gene Tavernetti: You, you have any questions for me, David?

David: Well.

I have one question.

We've been talking, we've been talking so much about you know, grade inflation and all these things that we didn't even really get to how it's
been come out of the pandemic, but, you know, I would ask you, you know, my question is basically how would you solve grade inflation, right?

Because we have talked about these policies that are driving it.

But the truth is that even if we got rid of them.

We would still have a real problem with grading standards.

Right.

And I'll confess, I don't have a great solution to that because there are just so many forces that are working against really holding kids to a high standard.

So I guess that's my question for you.

Right.

How do you think, is it even a solvable problem?

Gene Tavernetti: you know, I do not have any solution.

I think that there are some, there may be some, I don't wanna say instructional strategies, maybe some structures that, that maybe we can follow progress using technology.

I'm kind of stumbling getting going here but using some technology that we, I can track David from the beginning of the year through the end of the year.

You know, to see progress, to see, you know, is there gonna be a grade at the end?

I don't know.

Do we even do the grade level standards, you know, or what we expect proficient at a certain grade level.

Does that even make sense?

I mean, I don't know, my focus for the last 20 years and until I'm done, will, is gonna be on instruction.

I wanna be sure that there's quality instruction going on in a classroom now that takes out that variable so that if I'm, if my kid's
in Ms. Jones class and he's not performing well, I wanna be sure that Ms. Jones is at least as competent as Mr. Griffith next door.

Then I'm gonna be a little bit, I'm gonna feel a little bit better.

So I think that's the baseline of everything is that we have to have a baseline quality of instruction to even talk about what the performance is gonna be of a kid in that classroom.

So paraphrase, I don't know.

I don't know what to do.

David: Yeah.

Well, I think I think it's a tough one.

Gene Tavernetti: You got it.

Hey, David, it has been a pleasure meeting you and hopefully we'll run into each other again.

David: I look forward to that.

Thanks so much for having me, Jean.

Gene Tavernetti: If you're enjoying these podcasts, tell a friend.

Also, please leave a 5 star rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

You can follow me on BlueSky at gTabernetti, on Twitter, x at gTabernetti, and you can learn more about me and the work I do at my website, BlueSky.

Tesscg.

com, that's T E S S C G dot com, where you will also find information about ordering my books, Teach Fast, Focus Adaptable Structure Teaching, and Maximizing the Impact of Coaching Cycles.