Grade equity at MCPS

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You must be white. Biased grading is a real concern in the United States and multiple studies have shown terrible bias by teachers especially in English in their grading. Kids can't really learn properly when the grading does not accurately reflect their achievements.

There is tons of bias in grading but it’s not just a race thing. It can be a handwriting thing, a gender thing, a topic thing, etc. My kids have the perspective that their English teachers have been biased against more highly able students by holding less highly able students to a much lower standard to get the same grades. I agree that when you have human teachers there might be bias, but so many assessments are auto graded. I guess the written assignments could be graded blind. I don’t know that we need some huge study when we already have limited resources and bigger pressing issues like so many students below grade level.

Are you f-king kidding? You somehow know that that bias in grading is only a gender thing and other arbitrary things that you cited? But there's no racial bias in grading and you know that for sure?
Are you out of your mind?

DP here. You really need some better teaching comprehension skills here. Where did you get that from? All PP said was that race isn’t the only bias.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There's a lot of bias at DC's school. Students compare grades.

Is this middle school or high school? What kind of discrepancies are the students seeing?

[Anonymous]

But what happens when the blind submissions reveal poor grades for certain demographics?

Academic performance has more to do with home life and family unit than it has to do with bias in teachers. All this would do is confirm what everyone knows and doesn't want to discuss.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:But what happens when the blind submissions reveal poor grades for certain demographics?

Academic performance has more to do with home life and family unit than it has to do with bias in teachers. All this would do is confirm what everyone knows and doesn't want to discuss.

Yes. We already can’t send kids to the office because too many nonwhite students were being sent. I struggle to imagine a future where our administrators come down on us because more white kids have A’s than black kids. It would lead to getting rid of grades altogether — just like we got rid of the SAT with test optional.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Anonymous grading would be a fair amount of work but running analysis of grades broken down by different categories like gender and race should just be part of a standard process a principal or curriculum head does every quarter. MCPS could easily generate this data for each school and send it to the principal each quarter.

You can't have true equity without understanding what is going on in terms of grading.

They already do this. That is the purpose of the required district assessments (progress checks, common writing tasks, etc.) which are run per the calendars below and stay under the state law requirements on amount of required testing time. The data is in an internal system called Performance matters and it can be dissected every which way demographically. Current teachers can see all past data for their current students to assist with planning. Schools use the data as part of their school improvement plans. This is also the data that is reported at the BOE level and monitored for progress.

https://www2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/siteassets/district/departments/sharedaccountability/testing/es_assessmenttimeline.pdf
https://www2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/siteassets/district/departments/sharedaccountability/testing/ms_assessmenttimeline.pdf
https://www2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/siteassets/district/departments/sharedaccountability/testing/hs_assessmenttimeline.pdf

You don't sound very bright. This does not require a "huge study." This would take a few hours on a spreadsheet.

To this PP - ummm, you are the one who seems dim. You are talking about analyzing the grades that have been reported. In order to see if there is bias in the actual grading of assignments, you need to get the actual written work of students and have an independent process to grade them separately and compare against the teacher's grades.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You must be white. Biased grading is a real concern in the United States and multiple studies have shown terrible bias by teachers especially in English in their grading. Kids can't really learn properly when the grading does not accurately reflect their achievements.

There is tons of bias in grading but it’s not just a race thing. It can be a handwriting thing, a gender thing, a topic thing, etc. My kids have the perspective that their English teachers have been biased against more highly able students by holding less highly able students to a much lower standard to get the same grades. I agree that when you have human teachers there might be bias, but so many assessments are auto graded. I guess the written assignments could be graded blind. I don’t know that we need some huge study when we already have limited resources and bigger pressing issues like so many students below grade level.

Are you f-king kidding? You somehow know that that bias in grading is only a gender thing and other arbitrary things that you cited? But there's no racial bias in grading and you know that for sure?
Are you out of your mind?

"People of color" think that white people spend a lot more time thinking about race than they do. If there is bias in grading based on race, it will be the "bigotry of low expectations" for students of color, rather than harsher grading. But then English teachers probably do like to see standard academic English. If you call that racism, then maybe...

[Anonymous]

MCPS is solving this problem by giving everyone As for handing in any work at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You must be white. Biased grading is a real concern in the United States and multiple studies have shown terrible bias by teachers especially in English in their grading. Kids can't really learn properly when the grading does not accurately reflect their achievements.

There is tons of bias in grading but it’s not just a race thing. It can be a handwriting thing, a gender thing, a topic thing, etc. My kids have the perspective that their English teachers have been biased against more highly able students by holding less highly able students to a much lower standard to get the same grades. I agree that when you have human teachers there might be bias, but so many assessments are auto graded. I guess the written assignments could be graded blind. I don’t know that we need some huge study when we already have limited resources and bigger pressing issues like so many students below grade level.

Are you f-king kidding? You somehow know that that bias in grading is only a gender thing and other arbitrary things that you cited? But there's no racial bias in grading and you know that for sure?
Are you out of your mind?

"People of color" think that white people spend a lot more time thinking about race than they do. If there is bias in grading based on race, it will be the "bigotry of low expectations" for students of color, rather than harsher grading. But then English teachers probably do like to see standard academic English. If you call that racism, then maybe...

You mean they like writing in their own personal dialect, whatever that may be?

"Standard academic English" has not been taught in MCPS in many years. Whatever it is is expected to be picked up from the environment.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:But what happens when the blind submissions reveal poor grades for certain demographics?

Academic performance has more to do with home life and family unit than it has to do with bias in teachers. All this would do is confirm what everyone knows and doesn't want to discuss.

Yes. We already can’t send kids to the office because too many nonwhite students were being sent. I struggle to imagine a future where our administrators come down on us because more white kids have A’s than black kids. It would lead to getting rid of grades altogether — just like we got rid of the SAT with test optional.

Looking forward to it! Grades and GPAs are hogwash already. Grading has no place in learning.

Grading should be performed after the end of learning, by independent authorities not biased teachers and administrators.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just don't see it. Most questions are right or wrong. It's not up for debate. 2+2 = 4 bias won't change that.

OP said "subjects like English and History or anything else that requires writing and where the grading is highly subjective."

That's irrelevant because it runs counter to my preconceived notions

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:But what happens when the blind submissions reveal poor grades for certain demographics?

Academic performance has more to do with home life and family unit than it has to do with bias in teachers. All this would do is confirm what everyone knows and doesn't want to discuss.

Then the tests themselves are racist. We need culturally sensitive test material!!!

Agree with you on the latter point. Just look at disparities in attendance metrics by race.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:MCPS is solving this problem by giving everyone As for handing in any work at all.

+1. As far as I can tell teachers are hardly actually reading and grading anything.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:With a lot of stuff being online now I think MCPS needs to do some studies of bias in grading and report those findings to the public as part of their equity initiatives. They should do things like break the grades down by race and gender for each teacher, section and school to see if there are any outlier grading patterns.

They should also do anonymous grading for some randomly selected teachers in subjects like English and History or anything else that requires writing and where the grading is highly subjective to see whether there are biases by teachers, departments and schools.

Based on what they find they could offer recommendations to help teachers. Just by virtue of having this research or auditing teachers would feel more pressure to be unbiased in their grading.

The Troll is strong in this one!

[Anonymous]

MCPS teacher here. We already know which of our colleagues are biased graders. We just can’t do much about it. Showing them the data in our PLC doesn’t help. They have 10,000 excuses and, as their defense of last resort, tears.

[Anonymous]

I remember even doing this experiment as a kid where I turned in a friend's paper, and they turned in mine. Typically, I got A's on everything, and my friend got B's. This time, my paper got a B with their name, and their paper with mine got an A. It's not like we could do anything about it, but at least we provided this particular teacher was biased.