{"id":62389,"date":"2018-01-24T15:20:33","date_gmt":"2018-01-24T20:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/?p=62389"},"modified":"2018-01-24T15:22:34","modified_gmt":"2018-01-24T20:22:34","slug":"will-letter-grades-survive-mckenna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/2018\/01\/24\/will-letter-grades-survive-mckenna\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Letter Grades Survive? [McKenna]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will Letter Grades Survive?<\/strong><\/a> — from edutopia.org by Laura McKenna
\nA century-old pillar of the school system is under fire as schools look to modernize student assessment.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpt:<\/em><\/p>\n

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Under pressure from an unprecedented constellation of forces\u2014from state lawmakers to prestigious private schools and college admissions offices\u2014the ubiquitous one-page high school transcript lined with A\u2013F letter grades may soon be a relic of the past.<\/p>\n

In the last decade, at least 15 state legislatures and boards of education<\/a> have adopted policies incentivizing their public schools to prioritize measures other than grades when assessing students\u2019 skills and competencies. And more recently, over 150 of the top private high schools in the U.S., including Phillips Exeter\u00a0and Dalton\u2014storied institutions which have long relied on the status conveyed by student ranking\u2014have pledged to shift to new transcripts that provide more comprehensive, qualitative feedback on students while ruling out any mention of credit hours, GPAs, or A\u2013F grades.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe grading system right now is demoralizing and is designed to produce winners and losers,\u201d said Looney. \u201cThe purpose of education is not to sort kids\u2014it\u2019s to grow kids. Teachers need to coach and mentor, but with grades, teachers turn into judges. I think we can show the unique abilities of kids without stratifying them.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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…
\nThere are other unanswered questions and challenges to be worked out, too. Will college admissions counselors have enough time, especially at large public colleges, to look meaningfully at dense digital portfolios of student work? Will the new transcripts create too much work and new training for K-12 teachers, as they struggle to measure hard-to-define categories of learning? Perhaps most importantly, will parents buy in?<\/p>\n

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Also relevant\/see:<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

What Failing Students Want Us to Remember<\/strong> <\/a>— from edutopia.org by Rebecca Alber
\nBy seeing students as more than their grades, we can enable them to reach their potential.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpt:<\/em><\/p>\n

1. I am not my grade.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/b>I don\u2019t get good grades or earn a lot of points on assignments even though I know some stuff. I often won\u2019t even try because I know I\u2019m going to get a bad grade. I wish there were other ways besides grades or points to show who I really am.<\/p>\n

2. I can still contribute meaningfully.<\/b>\u00a0I like to help, but I pretend sometimes like I don\u2019t and that I don\u2019t care about being part of the school or my class. I protect myself because in school, the kids with good grades get picked to help more often.<\/p>\n

3. I am not a disappointment.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/b>School is hard, and I know I let my teachers down, and when working in a group, I let down my classmates too. Because of this, I struggle to feel good about myself every day. What am I doing right? I wish in school that we could look at all the stuff we do right and not just mostly the things we do wrong.<\/p>\n

4. Meet me where I am.\u00a0<\/b>There\u2019s stuff I can do\u2014just not this, right now, like this. I wish I had more time. I wish the directions and assignments made more sense to me. So much of school is so rushed and confusing.<\/p>\n

5. Don\u2019t give up. Find a way for me.<\/b> I\u2019m not sure why I don\u2019t get it. I want someone to keep trying to find out. It\u2019s not that I don\u2019t want to do it, even though it sometimes looks like that. It helps when adults ask me questions. I can\u2019t do it right now, but maybe someday I\u2019ll be able to.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Will Letter Grades Survive? — from edutopia.org by Laura McKenna A century-old pillar of the school system is under fire as schools look to modernize student assessment. Excerpt: Under pressure from an unprecedented constellation of forces\u2014from state lawmakers to prestigious private schools and college admissions offices\u2014the ubiquitous one-page high school transcript lined with A\u2013F letter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,115,302,343,347,3,46,74,285,66,89,214],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-assessment","category-colleges","category-community-colleges","category-education","category-education-reform","category-higher-education","category-k-12-related","category-leadership","category-legislation-legislatures","category-student-related","category-teachers","category-universities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62389"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62394,"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62389\/revisions\/62394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}