The school — which serves mainly low-income Latino and Black students — had piloted a new grading approach in 2019, then embraced it when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted students’ lives and learning. Students could redo assignments repeatedly and turn in work late. Even if they didn’t complete the assignment, the lowest score they could get was 50 rather than zero — a concept known as no-zero grading.
In Chicago and around the country, no-zero grading started to take hold at least a decade before COVID struck — part of a larger push to give students more chances to show what they learned. Its supporters argue that giving students zeros for missed or badly bungled assignments makes it too hard for them to recover, leading some to stop trying — and to stop showing up to class.
But teachers at Richards and at least one other high school in Chicago are pushing back on the controversial approach to grading. They worry it allows some students to eke out passing grades with little effort and undermines the importance of turning in work on time and coming to school regularly.
Some educators and experts think no-zero grading — and a broader push to avoid giving F’s — is one reason why CPS has experienced two seemingly conflicting trends since the pandemic: High absenteeism among high school students and increasing graduation rates.
Last year, a quarter of all high schoolers missed more than a month of school, a Chalkbeat and WBEZ analysis found. But the graduation rate has kept going up.
Principal Kennedy, at Richards, is skeptical that no-zero grading was a key factor in lowering attendance, and remains a firm believer in second and third chances for students. But she could also see where her teachers were coming from last spring.
“When students graduate and are working in jobs, what they experience around grace and flexibility at school is not going to match,” Kennedy said. “This bubble is not going to surround you wherever you go.”...
As part of efforts to help students stay on track at Richards in 2019, Kennedy and a group of her teachers read a 2018 book, “Grading for Equity,” by Joe Feldman, which makes the case for rethinking how schools grade students. Feldman, a Harvard-educated former school district administrator, runs a consultancy that works with districts on implementing equity-based grading. In recent years, Feldman and others had questioned the zero-to-100 grading scale, arguing that it’s slanted toward failure. Feldman’s approach has gained traction — and spurred debate — in recent years.
Feldman argues that traditional grading often does not reflect whether students have learned something or gained skills, and grades based on attendance, along with homework grades, can be unfair to low-income students and students of color, who are more likely to contend with homelessness, responsibilities such as sibling care, and other hurdles....
Student Kayla Saffold loves that Richards has fewer than 400 students and so many teachers like Brahm who work to make the school a welcoming, understanding place. “It is like a family,” she said.
As she wraps up her senior year, she can name a long list of her activities, from basketball to founding the student council.
But Saffold said the no-zero grading system was a disappointment.
“I was a witness to kids just coming in, like, twice a week and doing two assignments and then passing the class,” she said. “It was just crazy to me.”
“It felt like I had to put in the effort to get the A, and someone else ends up barely putting in any effort at all, and ended up passing the class. It felt unfair to me,” she said.
If this was not so transparently racist in intent, it would be laughable. Equity is really "the soft bigotry of low expectations." Assuming that BIPOCs are incapable of performing like white kids is really a leftist admission that they think they are too stupid to compete on an equal basis with whites.
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