When the school year starts parents and student anxiously anticipate what new changes will this school year bring.  So what was it this year, a new grading standard for the freshmen only at Central High School.  This new standand has brought on much confusion when it comes to a child's grades and how it will affect them on the road to college.  There was so much angst over this the staff at Central held a special forum to answer all the questions parents may have had.  I was at this forum and there were quite a few families but it no way represented everyone that would be affected by this, and of the families that did show there were still many questions left unanswered.  So this month I asked Principal Joe Williams to give a few words on how this new system works so more people can have a better understanding of the policy.  Keep in mind that this is only a pilot and the board still has to decided if this is something that will continue or even expand in the future.  For us to make the best possible desicion on this we need feedback, so if you have not done so already, go to your child's teacher and a thorough understanding of how this works and monitor the grades to see it helped or hurt your student and then bring that feedback to the board.  If you have already done that and have some feed back feel free to leave it here in the comment section.  So without further delay Principal Williams.


This school year, Champaign Central High School chose to pilot a new grading system – Standards Based Grading (SBG) – in hopes to better align with our emerging thoughts about education, learning, and student support.  In the last three years, extensive professional development has been provided for all teachers in the latest research-based practices.  None of the practices are new, but they are proven across many schools across the nation.  The professional development, which has taken place in the summertime and during the school year, is job-embedded.  That is, it isn’t a “sit and get” with little support for expectation of enacting the information.  Two large groups of faculty members attended, over two summers, the Professional Learning Communities Institute in northern Illinois at Adlai Stevenson High School.  At the end of each conference, the group was asked to narrow down, with the new information gained, what they most felt we needed to put our energy and focus on.  Both years, the same two items rose to the top:  1) providing support for struggling students during the school day, rather than “requiring” them to come in after school for assistance, and 2) reflect upon our current methods of grading to determine accuracy, fairness, specificity, and timeliness.

 During the school year last year, a focus group of teachers with representatives from all the core areas (English, math, science, and social studies), world language, career/technical education, and our instructional coaches studied SBG.  The primary resource used last year was the book, How to Grade for Learning, by Ken O’Connor.  Since then, many resources in book and article format have been purchased and used for the development of our understanding of how grading and learning should interact with each other.  We also sought assistance from a school district in Pennsylvania that implemented SBG a couple of years ago after following a similar path of digging into research-based practices that we did.  In fact, later on this October, representatives from teaching and administration will be visiting that district to gain even further insight.  As an aside, our discussions over the phone with them last year indicated a higher level of learning and success for top ranked students, middle-level students, and students that, in the past, struggle mightily with school.  The growth of those three groups of students was because SBG, if implemented properly, could be attributed to different reasons – but, in the end, the actual growth in learning was achieved for all.

Standards Based Grading helps educators and students answer questions about learning that weren’t easily answered, or, frankly, did not provide enough information to give an answer at all, in the traditional high school grading system of the past several decades.  For instance, if you look at a grade on a quiz, test, progress report, report card, etc. under the traditional system, what does the grade mean?   What does an “A” mean?  A “B”?  A “C”?  If you asked this same question of several different people, what kind of answers do you think you would get?  The fact is, in our school and district, that question has been asked around six times per year for the last ten years or so as we’ve studied grade rate distribution from reports showing how many and what students are getting certain grades in courses.  The answers varied tremendously and never reached the specificity of determining what content students were learning and to what level.  Answers frequently included factors that were more about how a student “does” school; the answers were from a culture of “doing” rather than a culture of “learning.”

 In SBG, grades mean much more about certain standards that are agreed upon between teachers of like courses using information from national organizations, federal and state curriculum guidelines, and teacher expertise.  Progress for each student and their level of meeting learning targets for each of the standards is measured throughout the period of the course and it is expected as students gain experience with the knowledge and skills that they will become more proficient at employing them to future problems in the course.  It sets up a system that measure learning over the “long haul,” which is how true learning occurs naturally.  Built into SBG are systems to help students develop skills to monitor their learning right along with the teachers.  No longer do we want students to get a graded piece of their work back, look at the score, and think that score is the end and won’t change.  We also are much, much more in tune to providing deeper and more meaningful feedback to students on their work as it relates to their learning – many assessments given don’t have a score at all, but will have a lot of feedback that students can learn from.

 In just the first quarter of school, as teachers and students are all beginning to speak the same language about progress of learning toward specific targets, the conversations have deepened and have much more meaning.  Students aren’t asking nearly as often, “What do I need to do to get a [certain grade]?”  Instead, they are asking specific questions about what the teacher means when she says, for instance, “You need to show me more about how you are able to apply your abilities to understand scientific inquiry and experimental design.”  All of this is accomplished because the information students receive is based on their progress toward the learning targets.  A student who isn’t proficient at one point has plenty of opportunities to show proficiency as the course moves on – in other words, if they didn’t understand it in  one context, but have the “aha” moment later on in another context, we are saying they have learned it.  Who cares that they didn’t learn it the first time?  They learned it within the same course and semester and that is what we want.  Just this week, I was with a group of biology teachers and we were discussing the “reteach and retake” part of SBG where students are able to receive additional instruction and retake quizzes and tests when they feel they understand the content more completely.  Sometimes, the teachers were saying, the actual discussion they were having with the student showed much more knowledge at a deeper level than the original assessment and the teacher can use that information alone to “re-score” where that student is in their learning. 

 Ultimately, we want to make sure our students are more aware of their learning, are not just memorizing material for the immediate assessment and then forgetting it, and are able to, from year to year and course to course, continue to deepen their understanding of content rather than spend such a significant amount of time in review prior to learning new material.  Ultimately, when students are taking the big summative tests (final exams, SAT, ACT, etc.), we want students to have learned so much more at a deeper application level.  Ultimately, we want all of our students to graduate and move on to whatever they’ve chosen to do including employment, military, community college, and university level work without remediation.