Schools are ditching homework, deadlines in favor of ‘equitable grading’

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schools-are-ditching-homework-deadlines-in-favor-of-equitable-grading-dcef7c3e

by caseysoftware • 3 years ago

77 115 3 years ago

wsj.com

caseysoftware• 3 years ago

The full article: https://archive.ph/LqMuk

TheCoelacanth• 3 years ago

They should just do away with grades entirely.

brian_spiering2• 3 years ago

Accreditation (and funding) in the United States often times requires grades.

influx• 3 years ago

Just give everyone A's and then everyone will get scholarships to college with 4.0 GPAs. I've thought a lot about this, and I'm sure there are no flaws in this plan.

mbfg• 3 years ago

I'm not recommending this, but really, what is the downside to this for the non-student? Companies now need to rely on something other than grades to decide who to hire? Wouldn't that be a good thing, really?

For the student, it would significantly reduce stress, and so if a student was so inclined to learn, they would likely learn more/better. For the the non-inclined to learn student, yeah, not good, but then again, the non-inclined-to-learn learner probably is going to do well anyway.

What i do think it would do is cut significantly down on the "i hate school" emotion, and "i hate learning" action. Kids probably would like learning more. And to me, anything you can do to get people to enjoy learning, even just a little bit, is a win.

zo1• 3 years ago

We need to decolonize education, it's not inclusive enough.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14

legitster7• 3 years ago

I have a friend who is an administrator at the Las Vegas School District and he was just telling me about this program.

In his words, it sounds all well and good that students have all the time they want to learn the materials. In practice though, you now have no way of gauging how well students are retaining the lessons until the end of the quarter. There's no way to actually catch them up, so the solution has been to drop testing standards as well.

Teachers themselves aren't complaining so much about it because it's a lot easier for them - less grading, less conflict with students, and they can stick to their planned curriculum without slowing down for students.

The "equity" piece of it is mostly window dressing - outside of some grading chicanery there is no reason to believe that it would do anything other than increase the disparity of outcomes between students later in life.

legitster7• 3 years ago

A lot of the trends we are seeing in education are mostly driven by the economics.

Good teaching is a highly-skilled profession. And it requires a lot of very robust interpersonal skill - (something the new batch of Millennial and Gen Z workers are bad at). This skill is rare, getting rarer, and becoming expensive.

Because these workers are expensive and rare, districts can only respond by making the jobs easier and more attractive. And a lot of the "equity" initiatives are just that - at their heart most of them sell teachers on a justification that methods which require less rigour are better.

And at current trends it is getting really hard to argue that a high school is much more valuable than just a daycare for teenagers (depending on who you ask, this may already be the case). If there is not much rigor or motivation being offered the students, there will be a natural regression towards student success entirely being driven by home life.

VyseofArcadia2• 3 years ago

(something the new batch of Millennial and Gen Z workers are bad at)

Let me remind you that the average Millenial is in their mid-to-late thirties now. Hardly the "new" batch.

For that matter, I see no reason that robust interpersonal skill should be distributed unevenly across generations other than the younger ones haven't had as much practice yet. They'll get there, though.

mym19902• 3 years ago

Can you actually point to the data that says Millennial and Gen Z teachers have worse interpersonal skills than those of previous generations? Let alone point to data that says on aggregate Millennials and Gen Z workers have bad interpersonal skills? From the teachers I have come across within these 2 generations, they seem to be incredibly intelligent and personable.

You saying that good teachers with robust interpersonal skills are expensive and rare just shows that you haven't stepped into a school recently, or haven't conversed with a teacher for more than 20 seconds.

lnxg33k1• 3 years ago

Let's say that I agree with you, teaching is a highly-skilled profession and millennials are bad at interpersonal skills. All millennials? All genZ? I've read a while ago "The shock doctrine" from Naomi Klein, and there was a part where schools exploited natural disasters in order to fire all long term employees and hire new temporary employees with worse pay / benefits and contracts, I was wondering, is this lack of quality related to 2 whole generations of people being bad or is it that the offer doesn't attract people who would increase quality... because millennials are a lot of people, if you count genZ they're even, is it possible that billions of people are just bad point blank? Wtf.. maybe they poisoned the running water with some anti social germs that affected the whole generation... or you just said something extremely stupid classifying under a umbrella personality trait a lot a lot a lot of people

Spooky233• 3 years ago

Any controversial program is wrapped with “equity” to neutralize negative feedback.

The reality is that the kids doing the work are overtasked. Right now, Johnny 8th grader is playing school lacrosse, travel baseball or AAU basketball, etc. He gets home at 9pm. Torturing them with busywork doesn’t help anyone.

The kids who aren’t performing aren’t doing homework either.

If you’re 35-55 years old, you’re a child of the 80s and 90s. You’re the old people now, and our perspectives are as out of touch as our 1950s and 1960s parents were.

slothtrop• 3 years ago

Sounds like the obsession with perpetually-scheduled competitive sports could be just as easily identified as a problem. Intramurals are an option, and immigrant parents who place a larger premium on academic performance like to opt for that instead. That aside, a rec league is, what, 2 nights a week? No reason to believe that paired with homework would lead to burnout.

Math and reading takes practice. That's what homework is. The top performing countries don't do any differently. It's interesting that there are people who worry about the quality of public education being under attack by Republicans, but embrace these non-evidence-based ideas for education reform that ultimately will only benefit the upper class.

zdragnar• 3 years ago

WRT equity in racial outcomes, nothing you mentioned factors in. Sports isn't even close to the problem. Look up the rates of students performing at grade level in reading and math, and also at graduation rates, broken down by race.

These are kids whose parents and community couldn't care less about education, and if they did, they couldn't learn anything because the classroom is filled with the chaos of those who don't.

Of course, race is nothing more than a proxy for poverty here- teachers in very poor rural areas will tell you much the same- but nobody really wants to hear that either.

SoftTalker3• 3 years ago

If Johnny 8th grader is playing school lacrosse, travel baseball or AAU basketball he is from at least a solidly middle class, likely upper middle class family, travel sports requires disposable income. The kid who is involved in extra-curriculars likely has a family who cares and is doing better than average in the classroom because if your grades are too low you get kicked off of the team.

giantg28• 3 years ago

"The "equity" piece of it is mostly window dressing"

"no way of gauging how well students are retaining the lessons until the end of the quarter."

Yeah, if you don't know who is behind or on what area, then how could you possibly help them?

taeric4• 3 years ago

If the concern is "how well students are retaining the lessons," I have bad news for you on the previous/current methods. At best, folks retain things for the given class they are in, but they drop it ridiculously rapidly afterwards.

legitster7• 3 years ago

Okay, sure. But we are talking now about failure to retain within the class.

In the previous methods where kids actually got credit for doing the work every day, you would have some sense that students were learning order of operations before you moved onto linear equations. You can generally build off of the ideas.

tmaly• 3 years ago

why not just group kids together by similar skill level like they do in many Southeast Asian schools?

This way the top of the class can still perform with liked skilled people and no one gets left behind.

sneed_chucker• 3 years ago

If you did this in US, the resultant skill cohorts would end up being largely split along demographic boundaries which is extremely unpalatable to modern American social sensibilities.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_achievement_gap_in_th...

guestbest• 3 years ago

Schools would be more efficient if students didn’t get in the way of new processes.

brian_spiering2• 3 years ago

I taught in a system that tried to implement "equitable grading" with unlimited attempts until the end of the term. In practice, this idea was untenable for instructors.

Many students would turn in low-quality work to get feedback, then make very minor incremental changes. This process would be repeated many times. The result was a higher than typical grading load for the instructor (sometimes it felt like I was spending more time on the assignment than the student).

Students would wait until the end to complete the work. The result was students spread out through the content. As an instructor, you could not expect students to know the fundamentals necessary for more advanced material later in the term. The procrastinating students then would expect a lot of rapid feedback at the end of the term. Again, increasing the grading load.

rngname22• 3 years ago

Honestly sounds like when a junior doesn't make any pull requests until their 3 month project is feature-complete and then expects the seniors to drop everything to code review their 10k line change, rather than doing incremental releases with incremental code review.

AKA one of the biggest adjustments I've had to overcome in working with teams.

lazyasciiart2• 3 years ago

Also like when a freshman doesn't start their project until the night before the deadline, or every other way that people procrastinate that leads to failure. If they start getting some real practice overcoming this in high school that would be an insane benefit.

Wowfunhappy2• 3 years ago

Many students would turn in low-quality work to get feedback, then make very minor incremental changes. This process would be repeated many times. The result was a higher than typical grading load for the instructor (sometimes it felt like I was spending more time on the assignment than the student).

The teachers I know who use this policy also have a sort of "bad faith" exception, where students who are clearly abusing the system and not trying are given an ultimatum. But others are allowed to keep trying.

no_butterscotch• 3 years ago

Are those teachers in middle class well to do schools?

I don't know if inserting teacher discretion is a "good idea" in cases where we're talking about "equity" - it could just as easily result in some students being graded worse/better with no respect to the work done.

morkalork• 3 years ago

My sister-in-law is a teacher dealing with this in a pretty rough school district. The admin does not want to expel or fail students because of very sensitive political reasons and there are many students that just don't give a fuck. In the end, she's marking entire semesters worth of work and assigning extra attempts at the end of every semester. It's insane.

orwin2• 3 years ago

There is one way to "bypass" a bad admin: involve the parents. And do not actually bypass the admin, keep them in the loop, but this allow an educator to mitigate the issues.

You will find mostly three types, with a percentage that change depending on the area: Those who want to get involve but do not know how, those who want to get involved but do not have time (single moms are a part of that, but poor working class nuclear family too), and those who don't care. Luckily the third type is not that common (but it exist).

On way of involving the parent is sending them a mail with what was aborded in class and the two-three main points their children should know about. Cc the child. One hidden benefit is that if you're a new teacher, you will have to do that anyway to understand the notions you're teaching better (at least that's waht my teacher friends do).

The children do not have to know those point perfectly, and it has to be clear for the parent. You don't want to be the cause of home dissension. a rough idea is enough, because the next ideas will refine the first one, that's how learning work.

Then improvise on that. I have a friend who started that this year, it's a method that was tried like 5 years ago and that's slowly gaining ground in my country. My friend added "Email hour" where he garranteed to be on his computer between 18 and 19 four days a week, and try to respond as much as he could. He also changed from putting both notions and explaination in the body to notions in the body and explanations in attachment. There is a lot of details to be ironed out, and he also do not want to take too much time from the parents. He likes his job better since he started doing that, and the parents are grateful.

But now my government want him to participate in clubs and other stuff to have his augmentation, so i guess that method might be in jeopardy.

hirvi742• 3 years ago

Could this not be alleviated with software? Let the student submit how ever many attempts he or she would like and then just have the software do the grading?

I imagine there is less 1-on-1 feedback, but if the student had questions, I imagine most teachers would not mind assisting a student at that point.

My university used software like this over a decade ago. I honestly preferred it for some classes. For example, I had a Calculus II class where we could take every test three times. I would take each test once, see what I did wrong, ask the professor, take it again, then repeat if I was unsatisfied with my grade the second time.

I honestly felt like I learned more via this trial-and-error approach than I ever did studying for one-and-done kind of examination because I was able to actually learn the material vs. trying to memorize as much as I could just to pass the test.

I have pretty severe ADHD (didn't know it at the time), so this methodology was extremely beneficial for my "not built for school" type of brain.

SoftTalker3• 3 years ago

How much Calculus do you remember now?

I didn't have this option but I crammed for tests rather than spend time over a longer period actually learning the material. I passed, often with As, but I don't remember a bit of it today.

drbojingle• 3 years ago

SO MVP approach? Seems fine. Get AI to to the intermediate grading and limit the human level grading to 3 attempts.

theonething• 3 years ago

Many students would turn in low-quality work to get feedback,

Sounds like one of my coworker's PRs

lesuorac• 3 years ago

“If you go to a job in real life, you can’t pick and choose what tasks you want to do and only do the quote big ones,”

Sometimes I think teachers are out of touch with the rest of the world.

You most certainly can pick and choose only to do the big jobs. Companies certainly want you to focus on the big jobs over the smaller ones.

Who hasn't heard of projects being completed past the initial deadline? I think it'd be a bit better to have students root-cause why they couldn't complete the deadline on time but the real world misses deadlines all the time.

emaginniss• 3 years ago

In that case, we should let them slip their deadlines and graduate at 20 or 25

crackercrews2• 3 years ago

This will increase the difference between the haves and the have-nots. Students with parents who care about education will make sure they do good work. These students will be more likely to develop good study habits that they will need later in life. Students whose parents don't care will make use of the lenient system and will not learn good study habits. When they get to a school or university that doesn't do soft grading, they will be in for a rude awakening.

uejfiweun• 3 years ago

The upper middle class is starting to get a bit too powerful with all these fancy tech salaries. Let’s force them all to pay for expensive tutoring or private school, to put that scum back in it’s place.

- The rich media execs that push this idiotic bullshit

lacy_tinpot• 3 years ago

The funny thing the tech industry was at some point at the forefront of educational reform, and now when some kind of reform is taking place the general consensus has reverted to tests are good, SATs good, college good, etc. How creative and forward thinking.

berdon• 3 years ago

While I agree with your sentiments, the rude awakening won't occur in college/university as these institutes are also softening their grading and programs. The rude awakening will occur in life when they realize what they missed.

SoftTalker3• 3 years ago

Yes in fact this soft grading trend started in the universities at least based on what I've observed. The last thing a modern university wants is for students to flunk out and lose that tuition revenue. They bend over backwards to keep them in school.

UberFly3• 3 years ago

I wish there would be a rude awakening, but for so many they will just attribute their failings to everything but themselves and there will be many who enable them.

lenkite2• 3 years ago

The "equitable grading" will eventually propagate to all schools and universities too. It's just a matter of time. Might propagate to jobs as well in the future.

neonate• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/LqMuk

ur-whale• 3 years ago

Math is hard, let's go shopping.

giantg28• 3 years ago

"the systems aim to measure whether a student knows the classroom material by the end of a term without penalties for behavior,"

Ok, let's give students a test at the beginning of the year to see if they test out. Then the same test at the end of the year to see if the people who didn't test out pass. Would work pretty well to see what improvements were made to their knowledge during the course vs what they came in with. As is mentioned in the article, there are other learning related areas this approach misses.

devindotcom• 3 years ago

heh you kind of are treating kids and education like products and KPIs. what you suggest is essentially standardized testing, and the result was artificial curricula targeted at increasing scores on known metrics like the ITBS or whatever was currently being used to determine progress and budget.

Devising a good system for evaluating actual domain knowledge in a diverse and complex cohort like a million 3rd-graders is incredibly difficult! But the more thought put into it the better because it's really important.

prepend6• 3 years ago

I would have loved this method, my kids would not thrive with it.

I loved CLEP exams and stuff where you just study, take the test, and demonstrate mastery. I wish schools did this more, but I think they want to keep you there.

I had a year where I was really independently studying where I would check in each day to show off homework and tests and then just run around outside for the rest of the day. I would have about 15 minutes of “school” each day and then just play. Or I would do the whole month or semester in a day and then run around.

It’s hard to know how effective it is. I had fun. And I still remember fractions and George Washington and stuff covered that year. And I did well in “regular” school after that.

It’s just a big risk to run with kids so I don’t think schools want to do it at scale.

corbulo• 3 years ago

I experienced this method in a public high school I went to. It was actually an awesome model and schooldays were 4 hours. The unfortunate thing about high school is the actual materials are really low quality.

Looking back, only math is a useful class in high school (of which I only liked Geometry at the time). The other classes are too low res to be deeply engaging if you're really curious.

Traditional schooling also has a terrible model of punishing curiosity in that if you demonstrate a passion for the material it likely just ends up with more work/homework (AP classes, special credit) instead of acceleration to the next tier of education on that topic. The grade school education system does nothing to reward academic excellence, literally nothing. If you get an A then thats it. You're still locked in with everyone else, so whats the point?

falcolas• 3 years ago

I'm going to go out on a limb here - when teachers don't get the support they need, and parents are more interested in babysitting (and/or a high GPA) than having their child learn the material...

Isn't this the most reasonable solution schools can implement?

I mean, it's not ideal. Not at all. But the incentives and support to do otherwise are not there.

Oh, and more controversially, we can't lay parents' attitude and child rearing directly at the hands of the baby boomer generation. The parents of current school-aged children were largely born after the 1980's now.

Yes, people born '40 to '80 are shaping school budgets and curriculum. But they are not shaping how children or their parents behave.

purpleblue• 3 years ago

All these "efforts" are simply going to make the gap between rich and poor much wider. The richer kids will go to private school that won't have these backwards policies, and the poor people will go to public school and graduate uneducated. This is the result of dogmatic, racist far-left policies that don't actually care about the children but want to push an agenda with fake accomplishments like "all these kids graduated!" when in fact they graduate uneducated.

UberFly3• 3 years ago

Yes, and most never want to acknowledge the real unintended consequences in things like this. There will just be even more oddball stuff enacted to "fix" the new problems.

moomoo11• 3 years ago

No wonder rich people send their kids to private school.

When I have kids I hope I can do the same. Why would I want them to go through this kind of lunacy lol..

UberFly3• 3 years ago

Was just reading that in Seattle 1/3 go to private schools at this point and many of the parents site this kind of activity as the reason.

TehShrike• 3 years ago

Eric Mazur figured out how to improve on the lecture+test cycle a while ago – explain something to the students, ask them a question, let them talk to each other and try to convince each other what the right answer is, collect the answers, and carry on.

Here he is giving an engrossing explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI&t=92s

A text article: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lect...

renewiltord• 3 years ago

I never did any homework and I topped all my exams. Fine by me. Seems like it would kill the bottom end of schoolkids, though.

Grading based on busywork is for mediocre kids.

DoreenMichele3• 3 years ago

Free school lunch and breakfast were supposed to help compensate for differences in home life so disadvantaged students could perform better. I think that general approach is probably better for helping kids succeed.

Homework wasn't really supposed to teach the subject per se. It was supposed to instill some discipline and personal responsibility.

When I homeschooled, chores replaced homework for purposes of teaching those lessons.

We seem to have forgotten why we did things the way we did things.

brailsafe• 3 years ago

Just because we did them a way though, doesn't mean it accomplished anything. Requiring someone to do something I would think removes their autonomy over it, and if it doesn't have a bearing on their understanding of a subject, is pretty quickly revealed as an arbitrary waste of time that favours people who are already likely to be able to succeed at it.

Homework to me is just reps, which are only useful because of how things are tested, which aren't terribly useful, but at least if that's explained up-front then you learn that reps are sometimes kind of useful.

People who succeed at homework were raised in a way and lucky enough imo (in that specific context) to be imbued with a sense that everything depends on perfection

DoreenMichele3• 3 years ago

I'm a proponent of homeschooling but the pandemic made it clear a lot of people hate it. They want their kids to go to school and have a teacher.

Chores had to be done because chores had to be done, not "because mom said so." If the trash didn't go out, it piled up and became a problem.

At first, I would get "Can it wait until the next commercial? I'm watching TV." I would say "Yes."

The result: I nagged for hours without results.

Then I started saying "No. You can never remember to do it on the next commercial. It's taking too much of my time and energy to keep asking you to do it. Do it now."

The result: After a few days of having his fun interrupted, he proactively took trash out before his TV shows started and then asked if there was anything else he needed to do because he didn't want his shows interrupted.

But the folks who hate homeschooling and decry it as the work of the devil don't want to hear that chores are a good substitute for assigned homework.

However we do it, taking ownership of a task is something we need to instill in kids.

steveBK123• 3 years ago

Sometimes I think that at the end of the day a lot of the goals in terms of helping the most disadvantaged kids are capacity constrained simply by % of hours in school out of the year. I mean you're already covering 2 out of 3 meals per day, and in places like NYC the free meals continue through summer when school is out of session.

Kids spend ~7hrs/day, ~180 days/year in school. Deducting 8hrs/day sleep, kids spend 22% of their awake time in school. Aggressive 3hrs/day before&after school programs gets that up to.. 30%. Add a 30hr/week x 10week summer program and we are at.. 35%. Add a half day weekend program while school is in session and you barely hit 37%.

For a middle/upper middle class kid, they go home to a structured enough environment, get food, shelter, attention and discipline. So the other 70-89% of the time is neutral to beneficial.

For disadvantaged kids, their home life may be mayhem and actively detrimental to their development. I'm not sure what you can do with 20-30% of their hours to counteract the other 70-80%.

I'd wager most of the marginal improvement you can get is less about making the in-classroom hours X% better, but, sadly, minimizing the % of hours spent in troubled households. So focussing more on redirection of after hours & weekends to Boys&Girls Club, academic clubs, in-school after school programs, mentorship, etc.

This is of course much more expensive, and morally, potentially brings in problematic conflict between the state & parents, etc... in terms of who is ultimately responsible for raising a child. The number of dollars & hours to substitute a stable household is staggering, and the parents may not ultimately want it.

slowmovintarget• 3 years ago

That's not... no..

Math requires practice. Math homework gave you the repeated practice necessary to encompass the subject. History homework was often a reading assignment, so the classroom time could be spent on discussion instead of variable reading speeds. The same for sciences, where instead of reading, the classroom time could be spent on discussion and experiments.

Even grammar homework had its point in the learning process. So no, it wasn't just about learning discipline, it was often about the practice.

We homeschool. Finding suitable practice books was a large part of the job.

DoreenMichele3• 3 years ago

I did not need math practice. I was just good at it.

My oldest son brought his classroom math work home for a year, lied to me and told me it was homework because he wanted to understand and the teacher couldn't explain it in a way he found helpful. Then he would fight with me for an hour until he was in tears.

Different kids have different strengths and weaknesses.

secondcoming• 3 years ago

Homework also has the role of letting parents see how you're doing, at least for those whose parents took an interest in checking homework.

red-iron-pine3• 3 years ago

Homework wasn't really supposed to teach the subject per se. It was supposed to instill some discipline and personal responsibility.

Wut. Not at all. Studies have shown you need to touch / interact with / refresh something at least 3 times for it to stick. The point is that you do the lesson at school, touch it again, later, at home, and then ideally once or twice more before a test. Maybe many more times, like running through problem sets or flash cards.

It also serves as a way to see how well lessons are sinking in. If Lil Timmy ain't scoring well on math homework but does okay on English then maybe he needs someone to explain it differently, push him a little, try different approaches, etc.

Chores are a fine way to teach responsibility, but that ain't why 8th graders get math homework or college students write term papers.

fredgrott• 3 years ago

honest question...

What is the difference between multiple choice tests

and

Thinking process testing?

What is thinking process testing?

Some essay tests indirectly measure it...

Knowledge skills comes not from multiple tests but from seeing specific groups of things as meta mind-building blocks that we assemble as humans in our brains.

HEmanZ• 3 years ago

It's interesting, the actual implementation sounds like what I had a couple decades ago in middle and high school. And it sounds exactly like what I had in college. The only thing new is the word "equitable".

e.g straight from the article: "Homework, in-class discussions and other practice work, called formative assessments, are weighted at between 10% and 30%. The bulk of a grade is earned through what are known as summative assessments, such as tests or essays.... extra credit is banned..."

This just sounds like what college-prep schools have been doing for a long time, rebranded. I don't think it puts any students at more of a disadvantage than they already were.

Schools are ditching homework, deadlines in favor of ‘equitable grading’

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