|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
In a befuddling discussion over multicolored bar graphs at a Sequoia Union High School District board meeting Aug. 5, board members debated the success — or failure — of the pass/fail grading system implemented last spring.
The pass/fail system, which drew a heated community debate before being approved on April 5 last school year, resulted in an increased percentage of students passing classes, said district staff who presented grading data.
The school district’s presentation on the so-called pass rate, led by research and evaluation directors Brandon Lee and Diana Wilmot, compared two things: The rate of district students who earned a C- or above in the spring semesters of 2016 through 2019, to the rate of students who earned a “pass” during the pass/fail grading period in the spring semester of 2020, a result of schools being closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. The rate of students who earned a pass in spring 2020 was significantly greater, staff said, with mathematics showing the largest difference ranging from 11% to 16% higher than recent past years.
But in their discussion, board members largely disagreed over how to interpret the data — or if it was even worth pursuing.
Board member Carrie Du Bois, who was a “no” vote on the question of whether to implement pass/fail grading back in the spring, began the discussion saying, “I’m not loving this agenda item. Are we trying to say that we should be pass/no pass forever because kids do better?”
“It’s an incomplete data set, we have to have smart data,” she said.
Du Bois blasted the pass/fail system itself. “I hated that policy, I thought it was terrible,” she said. “Because many kids suffered from that policy decision. Kids, including low-income kids, who were getting their first B, their first A … It was a terrible policy decision. So what is the point of this agenda item?”
Meanwhile, board member Chris Thomsen, who voted in favor of the pass/fail policy, was more sanguine about the nature of the data. “Data sets are frequently incomplete, and educational data sets are almost always incomplete,” he said. “I am grateful for the report. It’s provided one simple set of facts for me: The numbers that were most important was the drop in the number of kids we failed was substantial in every category. Which to me means for the spring quarter we didn’t penalize students who were most at risk.”
But Thomsen said he didn’t think further research into last spring’s unusual semester, with the sudden shift to distance learning, would be useful. “I don’t think we know whether a ‘pass’ meant the same thing for spring quarter as it did in the past. And without that measurement I’m not sure we’re going to learn much from it. Plus, I’d also like to hope that the spring experience was a total one-off.”
School board president Allen Weiner agreed. “Whatever happened in spring of 2020 — it’s like Vegas — stays in spring of 2020. I don’t think there are deep lessons to be learned about education.”
Weiner suggested that the district’s analysis, which compared C- and above grades from spring semesters of 2016-19 to pass/fail grades in the spring semester, is like comparing apples to oranges.
But he said that the data did answer a narrow question about whether more students failed as a result of the pass/fail policy. “We answered the question that was asked: By going to a pass/fail system did we increase the number of kids who failed? Answer — no. That is a smart question, it’s a narrow question and your data answers it.”
Student board member Sathvik Nori expressed concerns about how effectively students learned during the spring semester.
“I have mixed feelings over whether pass/fail was good or not,” he said. “But, especially for freshmen and sophomores, what might be more important is how prepared they’re going to be for a class they’re going to take, especially in something like math … Are they prepared to do well, or did we just kick the bucket down the line, so that more of them are going to fail in the future? What I’m concerned about is not how many people passed or what grade they got, but did they actually learn the material?”
Wilmot said that she plans to do further analysis on the effect of the pass/fail grading system. Among her considerations will be focus group studies with teachers and students on the impact of the pass/fail system, determining if graduation rates and completion of college-required classes were impacted, and studying pass rates in the coming 2020-2021 school year.
This fall, the district will return to letter grades, Superintendent Mary Streshly announced on July 21.
The district promised a large set of changes this coming semester, after many parents and students complained of a rocky experience with distance learning in the spring. In the fall, the district has promised challenging class assignments that are “equivalent to in-person instruction.” It also promised daily live instruction from teachers, a consistent bell schedule, and taking attendance — all of which the district stopped requiring after COVID-19 health orders suddenly forced campuses to close in mid-March.
When the district board first considered moving to a pass/fail system in the spring, it drew criticism from many parents and students, including 1,000 people who signed a petition against mandatory pass/fail grading.
If the priority is grades, this will be fine. Kids will do the minimum, possibly getting outside help and will learn little. If the priority is to turn out educated adults, grades are a great motivator. My experience as a math tutor was I lost almost all my tutees the minute it was announced the current grade would be the semester grade. My student were doing well, but how well will they be prepared for the next class. And when the students turn out not to know very much, the same folks who advocate for pass/fail will blame the teachers. If the foundations of every school would fund-raise to provide internet access and hardware for students who don’t have that, they could pretty much close that gap, particularly if they can get tech companies to join in.