Equity-grading/ SBG - all FCPS high schools? (or only some)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The Madison PTSA board has someone on it that likes to help the principal out with SBG.

Ah HA!! Point your finger and name names! Now were getting somewhere in solving this mystery! A PTA person likes to help the principal...the plot thickens...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous[b wrote:]If they were looking for an “equity” school to try this with wouldn’t they have gone to an economically diverse school with some wealthy pockets and some high FARMS areas? [/b]Not that I want to give them any ideas but a school like South Lakes, Westfield, or South County instead of pretty well off and well performing schools like Madison HS and Irving Middle? It really seems ill-advised overall and like the teachers aren’t even buying into it.

Stop being logical.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous[b wrote:]If they were looking for an “equity” school to try this with wouldn’t they have gone to an economically diverse school with some wealthy pockets and some high FARMS areas? [/b]Not that I want to give them any ideas but a school like South Lakes, Westfield, or South County instead of pretty well off and well performing schools like Madison HS and Irving Middle? It really seems ill-advised overall and like the teachers aren’t even buying into it.

Stop being logical.

Madison is actually a great school for this type of equity program. It has both high and low income students and in particular a growing ESOL population. This kind of divide isn’t happening at schools like Langley, McLean, oakton and is a big reason why the great schools rating for equity is so low at Madison. So a program designed to raise the grades at the bottom while making the top grades more rare will help a school exactly like Madison close this gap. It is less useful at Title I schools because there is not such a wide gulf in performance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is the policy now county-wide in FFX?

Or, are only certain high schools doing this? Is there a list??

(anyone know specifically if McLean HS is implementing equity/SBG trading?

This is my fondest hope. That this madness will extend to the schools with powerful PTAs who will lobby against it for the rest of us.

i'm confused why you think a public PTA is "powerful" or will have the money to take this on????

I have faith in the Langley parents.

You're mistaken. At Madison, it was presented to the parents after the school hired outside people to explore how to implement it. I believe they even have information they presented to the admin that was released explaining how to respond when parents push back. Parents were only told about it after it was going to happen. Last year's seniors spoke at a PTA meeting and explained it is horrible. Parents complain. Teachers complain. The admin is in la la land and thinks it is great because the bottom is brought up. PERIOD. There was never a period where they solicited input from parents or students and then considered what to do. Instead, it was 100% a done deal and presented only after it was being implemented. There is no push back. There is no powerful PTA who can override this.

So weird how they made a decision based on educational research and child psychology instead of parents and kids' opinions.

Also weird: implementing the alleged "equity" grading system in a school that doesn't have a large group of lower performing students.

Maybe this policy (ill-advised or not) is intended to help all students learn more, not equalize them. And really...think about this argument that SBG is just a veiled attempt to create "equity"...that doesn't even make sense at the HS level: the kids who need a GPA boost aren't in the same classes as the kids who are supposedly being down-graded by SBG. How would the admin be engineering "equity" when students are pre-sorting themselves by the classes they take. Colleges look at the difficulty of classes you take, not just your gpa.

All of this was just demonstrated by Rick Wormelis talk today. He didn't mention equity once so it doesn't seem like that was a major goal of his. He didnt seem to know anything about FCPSs implementation. He talked about how colleges look at the courses taught and not the GPA. He taught about the importance of high level classes for college which with AP and IB already have their pre-programmed learning material and end of year tests and are already graded strictly.
He based his entire claim on needing standards based grading on needing to measure students evidence of learning because teachers didnt get enough training on grading and were too subjective in the past. Wait. Where did I hear that before? Oh yeah SOLs which testing was removed for over the past 10 years. So instead of taking SOLs which many were against being reported to the state, there are now SOLs turned into grades rather than tests so that kids can learn all the basics of the SOLs before taking their end of year tests and before completing the grade.

This all makes some basic sense if you don't have SOL tests to measure standards and are worried about kids meeting some basic achievement level by the state, but gives less flexibility to the teacher and student and once the child achieves the basic mastery. I thought we wanted the child to have more ways not less to explore learning. It seems to be a program geared more to making sure all the basic standards are taught and achieved and have no real benefit for anything else. The previous tools FCPS was using were superior to this grading system.

Since RIck didn't know anything about the way FCPS is implementing it he didn't endorse the program and in fact spoke out often against the way it was being implemented even if he didn't know he was doing so.

It all just seems like an effort to do something new to show the school system is progressive. SBG does not match up with other recent initiatives. I think it was just started to make people feel like they were trying something new rather than something needed.

[Anonymous]

He even had this one slide that showed how five different kids showed different strengths and were not all equal and all I could think about was how great it was that they all learned some basics and also got to demonstrate their strengths. It had the opposite effect on me. After achieving the basics, thats exactly how authentic learning looks like. Everyone achieves some basic level of mastery and then excels in fewer areas.

[Anonymous]

On a positive note, he's a good speaker and I'm sure was a great teacher. I just don't understand the over concern that teachers aren't teaching and grading to standards already and therefore need a complete grading overhaul that takes more time taking up precious teacher resources and gives students less understanding of their grade and their work and fewer times to improve their grade and demonstrate the skill.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous[b wrote:]If they were looking for an “equity” school to try this with wouldn’t they have gone to an economically diverse school with some wealthy pockets and some high FARMS areas? [/b]Not that I want to give them any ideas but a school like South Lakes, Westfield, or South County instead of pretty well off and well performing schools like Madison HS and Irving Middle? It really seems ill-advised overall and like the teachers aren’t even buying into it.

Stop being logical.

Madison is actually a great school for this type of equity program. It has both high and low income students and in particular a growing ESOL population. This kind of divide isn’t happening at schools like Langley, McLean, oakton and is a big reason why the great schools rating for equity is so low at Madison. So a program designed to raise the grades at the bottom while making the top grades more rare will help a school exactly like Madison close this gap. It is less useful at Title I schools because there is not such a wide gulf in performance.

The demographics at Oakton and McLean are similar to Madison, and all three schools are more similar to each other than to Langley. I’m not sure why the GS ratings for Madison were lower.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is the policy now county-wide in FFX?

Or, are only certain high schools doing this? Is there a list??

(anyone know specifically if McLean HS is implementing equity/SBG trading?

This is my fondest hope. That this madness will extend to the schools with powerful PTAs who will lobby against it for the rest of us.

i'm confused why you think a public PTA is "powerful" or will have the money to take this on????

I have faith in the Langley parents.

You're mistaken. At Madison, it was presented to the parents after the school hired outside people to explore how to implement it. I believe they even have information they presented to the admin that was released explaining how to respond when parents push back. Parents were only told about it after it was going to happen. Last year's seniors spoke at a PTA meeting and explained it is horrible. Parents complain. Teachers complain. The admin is in la la land and thinks it is great because the bottom is brought up. PERIOD. There was never a period where they solicited input from parents or students and then considered what to do. Instead, it was 100% a done deal and presented only after it was being implemented. There is no push back. There is no powerful PTA who can override this.

So weird how they made a decision based on educational research and child psychology instead of parents and kids' opinions.

Also weird: implementing the alleged "equity" grading system in a school that doesn't have a large group of lower performing students.

Maybe this policy (ill-advised or not) is intended to help all students learn more, not equalize them. And really...think about this argument that SBG is just a veiled attempt to create "equity"...that doesn't even make sense at the HS level: the kids who need a GPA boost aren't in the same classes as the kids who are supposedly being down-graded by SBG. How would the admin be engineering "equity" when students are pre-sorting themselves by the classes they take. Colleges look at the difficulty of classes you take, not just your gpa.

All of this was just demonstrated by Rick Wormelis talk today. He didn't mention equity once so it doesn't seem like that was a major goal of his. He didnt seem to know anything about FCPSs implementation. He talked about how colleges look at the courses taught and not the GPA. He taught about the importance of high level classes for college which with AP and IB already have their pre-programmed learning material and end of year tests and are already graded strictly.
He based his entire claim on needing standards based grading on needing to measure students evidence of learning because teachers didnt get enough training on grading and were too subjective in the past. Wait. Where did I hear that before? Oh yeah SOLs which testing was removed for over the past 10 years. So instead of taking SOLs which many were against being reported to the state, there are now SOLs turned into grades rather than tests so that kids can learn all the basics of the SOLs before taking their end of year tests and before completing the grade.

This all makes some basic sense if you don't have SOL tests to measure standards and are worried about kids meeting some basic achievement level by the state, but gives less flexibility to the teacher and student and once the child achieves the basic mastery. I thought we wanted the child to have more ways not less to explore learning. It seems to be a program geared more to making sure all the basic standards are taught and achieved and have no real benefit for anything else. The previous tools FCPS was using were superior to this grading system.

Since RIck didn't know anything about the way FCPS is implementing it he didn't endorse the program and in fact spoke out often against the way it was being implemented even if he didn't know he was doing so.

It all just seems like an effort to do something new to show the school system is progressive. SBG does not match up with other recent initiatives. I think it was just started to make people feel like they were trying something new rather than something needed.

Which talk? He had an opinion piece in the Post today published under a Valerie Strauss column and the entire thing was nothing but a bunch of sweeping judgement calls bolstered by math that made no sense. Several commenters pointed out gross errors in the way he was "calculating" grades.

[Anonymous]

He didn't even get into talking about removing pluses and minuses from grades. There was some talk about how grades aren't accurate for a variety of reasons if not skills based but no correlation to why each summative taken is better when graded with a larger differential between grades. If we are trying to make grades less subjective it doesn't stand to reason that making the differential greater helps. Maybe he has a point in grading to larger margins for summatives and seemed to be trying to make a case that more generalistic grades give more fluidity to movement but it wasn't well explained and seemed to go against what he said colleges were looking at and how kids learn. The grading by whole letter grades needed it's own separate talk.

[Anonymous]

His Washington post article is wordy but makes sense. 50-100 has 50 points for grading which is similar to the 0 to 4.0 scale using tenths which yields 40 different point scales from high to low. The 50 to 100 uses a 10 number system between grades rather than decimals and uses the favorite 100 percent for getting everything right. I've never understood why people don't like a 50 point system for grades.

The funny thing is FCPS used to have a 50-100 scale at least for individual grades before standards based grading came on board. I guess it's a good thing they are going back to this. It still doesn't answer why each assessment should only be given a 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, or 100 and not use all the integer numbers between 60 and 100 when grading summatives.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is the policy now county-wide in FFX?

Or, are only certain high schools doing this? Is there a list??

(anyone know specifically if McLean HS is implementing equity/SBG trading?

This is my fondest hope. That this madness will extend to the schools with powerful PTAs who will lobby against it for the rest of us.

i'm confused why you think a public PTA is "powerful" or will have the money to take this on????

I have faith in the Langley parents.

You're mistaken. At Madison, it was presented to the parents after the school hired outside people to explore how to implement it. I believe they even have information they presented to the admin that was released explaining how to respond when parents push back. Parents were only told about it after it was going to happen. Last year's seniors spoke at a PTA meeting and explained it is horrible. Parents complain. Teachers complain. The admin is in la la land and thinks it is great because the bottom is brought up. PERIOD. There was never a period where they solicited input from parents or students and then considered what to do. Instead, it was 100% a done deal and presented only after it was being implemented. There is no push back. There is no powerful PTA who can override this.

So weird how they made a decision based on educational research and child psychology instead of parents and kids' opinions.

Also weird: implementing the alleged "equity" grading system in a school that doesn't have a large group of lower performing students.

Maybe this policy (ill-advised or not) is intended to help all students learn more, not equalize them. And really...think about this argument that SBG is just a veiled attempt to create "equity"...that doesn't even make sense at the HS level: the kids who need a GPA boost aren't in the same classes as the kids who are supposedly being down-graded by SBG. How would the admin be engineering "equity" when students are pre-sorting themselves by the classes they take. Colleges look at the difficulty of classes you take, not just your gpa.

All of this was just demonstrated by Rick Wormelis talk today. He didn't mention equity once so it doesn't seem like that was a major goal of his. He didnt seem to know anything about FCPSs implementation. He talked about how colleges look at the courses taught and not the GPA. He taught about the importance of high level classes for college which with AP and IB already have their pre-programmed learning material and end of year tests and are already graded strictly.
He based his entire claim on needing standards based grading on needing to measure students evidence of learning because teachers didnt get enough training on grading and were too subjective in the past. Wait. Where did I hear that before? Oh yeah SOLs which testing was removed for over the past 10 years. So instead of taking SOLs which many were against being reported to the state, there are now SOLs turned into grades rather than tests so that kids can learn all the basics of the SOLs before taking their end of year tests and before completing the grade.

This all makes some basic sense if you don't have SOL tests to measure standards and are worried about kids meeting some basic achievement level by the state, but gives less flexibility to the teacher and student and once the child achieves the basic mastery. I thought we wanted the child to have more ways not less to explore learning. It seems to be a program geared more to making sure all the basic standards are taught and achieved and have no real benefit for anything else. The previous tools FCPS was using were superior to this grading system.

Since RIck didn't know anything about the way FCPS is implementing it he didn't endorse the program and in fact spoke out often against the way it was being implemented even if he didn't know he was doing so.

It all just seems like an effort to do something new to show the school system is progressive. SBG does not match up with other recent initiatives. I think it was just started to make people feel like they were trying something new rather than something needed.

This was not the main basis of SBG. One claim (ONE) is what you said: to just test the knowledge. The problem with this claim is that the knowledge is typically assessed at madison before the skill is completely taught. Most grades are expected to be and are low Cs or Ds in English because the skill isn’t fully taught yet. The teachers tell the parents this and they tell the students this.

The other (non pretextual) claim for SBG is preventing kids who can’t get HW done bc they have to work or take care of siblings are penalized gradewise and that’s not fair. How many kids at Madison do you think this affects? You would need:
- kid needs to work or babysit a sibling (not an option)
- kid can only work or babysit most school days that covers enough hours he can’t get HW done
- but for the working or babysitting, this is the type of student who would always be doing his HW

The percentage of students that falls into this would be very small.

Let’s not forget this is the same school that took away it’s study hall so that kids could get lessons on things like inclusivity…only to realize that wa a mistake after more than a quarter of the year passed.

[Anonymous]

Related to the article, what is the reason that schools and colleges use a 4.0 rather than a 5.0 scale to measure grades they were measuring at 10 point increments? People seem too dumb to understand that a 0 doesn't make sense because we don't have a 10 letter grading scale and one letter shouldnt comprise of 60 points and the rest of the letters 10 (and this is not the first article where people can't understand this basic observation) why not just have a 5.0 grading system? It would still use 10 points between grades and give people their zero they are so adamant to have? Why 4.0 when there are typically five letter grades?

[Anonymous]

Parents need to be in front of the school board every meeting lobbying against SGB. If it takes hold FCPS-wide, good students will suffer.

[Anonymous]

Is there a link that explains this? Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is the policy now county-wide in FFX?

Or, are only certain high schools doing this? Is there a list??

(anyone know specifically if McLean HS is implementing equity/SBG trading?

This is my fondest hope. That this madness will extend to the schools with powerful PTAs who will lobby against it for the rest of us.

i'm confused why you think a public PTA is "powerful" or will have the money to take this on????

I have faith in the Langley parents.

You're mistaken. At Madison, it was presented to the parents after the school hired outside people to explore how to implement it. I believe they even have information they presented to the admin that was released explaining how to respond when parents push back. Parents were only told about it after it was going to happen. Last year's seniors spoke at a PTA meeting and explained it is horrible. Parents complain. Teachers complain. The admin is in la la land and thinks it is great because the bottom is brought up. PERIOD. There was never a period where they solicited input from parents or students and then considered what to do. Instead, it was 100% a done deal and presented only after it was being implemented. There is no push back. There is no powerful PTA who can override this.

So weird how they made a decision based on educational research and child psychology instead of parents and kids' opinions.

Also weird: implementing the alleged "equity" grading system in a school that doesn't have a large group of lower performing students.

Maybe this policy (ill-advised or not) is intended to help all students learn more, not equalize them. And really...think about this argument that SBG is just a veiled attempt to create "equity"...that doesn't even make sense at the HS level: the kids who need a GPA boost aren't in the same classes as the kids who are supposedly being down-graded by SBG. How would the admin be engineering "equity" when students are pre-sorting themselves by the classes they take. Colleges look at the difficulty of classes you take, not just your gpa.

All of this was just demonstrated by Rick Wormelis talk today. He didn't mention equity once so it doesn't seem like that was a major goal of his. He didnt seem to know anything about FCPSs implementation. He talked about how colleges look at the courses taught and not the GPA. He taught about the importance of high level classes for college which with AP and IB already have their pre-programmed learning material and end of year tests and are already graded strictly.
He based his entire claim on needing standards based grading on needing to measure students evidence of learning because teachers didnt get enough training on grading and were too subjective in the past. Wait. Where did I hear that before? Oh yeah SOLs which testing was removed for over the past 10 years. So instead of taking SOLs which many were against being reported to the state, there are now SOLs turned into grades rather than tests so that kids can learn all the basics of the SOLs before taking their end of year tests and before completing the grade.

This all makes some basic sense if you don't have SOL tests to measure standards and are worried about kids meeting some basic achievement level by the state, but gives less flexibility to the teacher and student and once the child achieves the basic mastery. I thought we wanted the child to have more ways not less to explore learning. It seems to be a program geared more to making sure all the basic standards are taught and achieved and have no real benefit for anything else. The previous tools FCPS was using were superior to this grading system.

Since RIck didn't know anything about the way FCPS is implementing it he didn't endorse the program and in fact spoke out often against the way it was being implemented even if he didn't know he was doing so.

It all just seems like an effort to do something new to show the school system is progressive. SBG does not match up with other recent initiatives. I think it was just started to make people feel like they were trying something new rather than something needed.

This was not the main basis of SBG. One claim (ONE) is what you said: to just test the knowledge. The problem with this claim is that the knowledge is typically assessed at madison before the skill is completely taught. Most grades are expected to be and are low Cs or Ds in English because the skill isn’t fully taught yet. The teachers tell the parents this and they tell the students this.

The other (non pretextual) claim for SBG is preventing kids who can’t get HW done bc they have to work or take care of siblings are penalized gradewise and that’s not fair. How many kids at Madison do you think this affects? You would need:
- kid needs to work or babysit a sibling (not an option)
- kid can only work or babysit most school days that covers enough hours he can’t get HW done
- but for the working or babysitting, this is the type of student who would always be doing his HW

The percentage of students that falls into this would be very small.

Let’s not forget this is the same school that took away it’s study hall so that kids could get lessons on things like inclusivity…only to realize that wa a mistake after more than a quarter of the year passed.

I'm against SBG. I don't think high schoolers have too many teachers giving out grades for superfluous skills and think it's more work for the teacher and less understanding for the student. Its based on fixing a problem I have never seen assuming that teachers are giving out fake grades at the high school level based on non standard based assessments. I also think it puts too many constraints on learning and assessing because of the need for everything to be so neatly separated by standards. It's SOLs for grades was my point. Its too rigid
Unfortunately another issue is that the teacher sees all of this differentiation in the actual work but the student doesn't. The feedback to the student is less with fewer comments and rubrics and instead just in these grade breakouts which they may or may not understand how these separations were made related to their work. Rubrics also were given out pre assessment giving a road map to follow to do the work well. Grade breakouts are a post assessment analysis.

Your second point is about homework. He didn't touch on this much and seemed to agree that more data points were better which would imply that formative work should be grades. But then he was also under the allusion that kids would care about data points that eventually would be erased therefore we can grade and then erase them with no consequence and that's a false assumption. I do think County wide there are more kids working after school and living in poverty which could affect daily homework, but still it doesn't do these kids any favors to give them more reasons not to do the work. Create a grading system for this work that allows for ample time to do it and relearn material but don't take away the built in motivation to actually do the work or pretend that kids don't actually need to do the work and get feedback on it. If the kid is so smart they don't need to do any practice work then they are in the wrong class. This kid was given as a reason for not grading formative work but I dont think policy should be made around a kid like this. Everyone should have to do formative work as part of a class and have some built in motivation that it will have an impact on their grade. Quizzes should also have some built in motivation to study for them or at least pay attention in class. These can easily be low stakes grades without being nothing. It's a true outlier to have a student ace a test or project without any practice work and we shouldn't create policy around this type of kid. We should just encourage a kid like this to switch to a higher class and/or do the work like everyone else. If they are that good they enjoy the work anyway. It's a non issue. Whether you work another job afyet school or not, you still need to do practice before taking a final assessment in a class.