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

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For a parent with a rising 9th grader, what is SBG? I've read through this thread and there are puzzle pieces missing.

At the most basic level it is grading by core skills to learn throughout the year and not by assignment. Think those skills you see on the elementary report cards that measure your child's skill growth across the year as in "computes numbers fluently and makes accurate assessments" instead of a singular grade for the Unit 5 algebra test. It's a little complex to compare this too because the Unit 5 test before SBG used to also be divided up into several sections if not by skills. A Unit 5 math test both before and after would have been and still is divided up into several grades, just now they are broken up by skill rather than type of problem such as short answer or essay or Unit 5.1 and 5.2 questions.

Because FCPS really made this change not to just better measure skill growth related to SOL passing, but also or instead to bring grades to a middle and reduce the achievement gap, there are a lot of other changes that were implemented and are now part of the SBG change but are peripheral to the main purpose of grading by skills rather than project or test. Homework is no longer assessed, or feedback given. This greatly changes the motivation of students if you have a child who needs regular feedback and who needs more carrots to complete practice work. Now many students come completely unprepared for class because they are only assessed on the summatives. Retakes are now teacher dependent rather than a guideline for the school to follow where any summative grade below an 80 can be retaken to achieve an 80, so if there is a type of problem in Unit 5.2 that your child doesn't understand related to a skill such as "computing numbers fluently" and they get a C on that skill for the Unit 5 summative, rather than retaking the unit 5 test to get an 80 and understand the content better, they will now have to wait until the Unit 6 test and try to compute better on that test and then if they do well on this test and get a B on that skill for unit 6, the old grade for that skill from Unit 5 will be replaced with a B despite never doing another Unit 5 problem. If it's a D on the Unit 6 test, then the C from the last test will just remain. Quizzes are optional grading measurements for teachers depending on the school, class and teacher. Some classes, kids are only assessed on the unit summative tests and no other work for the year. So, in addition to having changing summative grades, they only get graded on one summative test every month or so. Grades come in late for summatives because they are large tests, and you can be finding out that the grade for the summative completely changed your GPA with little time to correct or relearn information you didn't realize you didn't know from the old unit.

All of this helps to provide less work to the teacher. Oh, they say they have to enter more grades for each test and it's true they may now have five "skill" grades rather than 2 or 3 in the previous system, but it's just a larger breakdown of the same test into more sections while grading many fewer assignments. Kids have a hard time relating to the skills because there is nothing specific on their assignments that call out the skills being assessed so the skill breakdown is really for admin to see. They are the only ones that care that all of the SOL skills are being taught. From the student's perspective, they are getting graded on much fewer assignments/work and getting much less homework assigned and feedback on classwork and homework back to them. It may or may not help them to have grades related to skills, but what definitely doesn't help is to give them less feedback on work and less work to do overall.

FCPS also keeps going back and forth on whether zeros are part of this initiative. It's like a bill in congress where you think the change is about one main topic and then FCPS tries to tack on many other initiatives to have them fly under the radar under this umbrella change. So no one really knows all that SBG encompasses because FCPS keeps adding to the initiative.

[Anonymous]

Some of their arguments about only summatives for instance are that summatives grade skills more accurately but I'm sure AI could argue the exact opposite that one day of skill testing just like an SOL does not assess skills any more regularly than skills assessed throughout the year and of course having the same skill assessed all year long and even grades from the past changing relative to the skill rather than the skills changing from unit to unit also speaks to how one specific test doesn't test a skill well. Their logic makes little sense. The old grading system already compensated for lower skill levels with practice work and quizzes by weighing them less. Homework and classwork used to be 10% and quizzes 20% and summatives 70% and so accuracy of skill achievement was relative to the weight of the assessment towards the final grade. Now only summatives count but skills are assessed the same all year. There is no logic in the idea that this is a more accurate system. Kids are deciding not to attend school all over because the only time they are graded is on the summative so why go the other days unless you enjoy your classes? Kids aren't studying for tests because they aren't motivated to do any work before the summatives and then are too far behind to study well for them. Teachers are getting an earful for grading turned in late because now summatives are incredibly important to track towards GPA and they are difficult to track with so many skills and replacement grades. If you don't know a skill now you get a zero even if you attempt it in a summative which brings down your grade tremendously. Before that section would be factored into a grade for the entire test. Now it's a separate skill you could continually do poorly on throughout the year. The zeros may be going away. The rest, I'm fearful is staying.

[Anonymous]

Assuming summative is just a word of art to mean unit test, project or paper?

So grade inflation increases while kids have fewer chances to fix or catch up when they messed up on a test. Sounds like a winning strategy.

[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.

A lot of students don't pre-sort themselves correctly. You'd be surprised at the number of students with a D in a lower-level adjacent class who think that the AP-level follow on is their destiny. Teachers used to be able to at least try to talk them out of an impossible class but this year have been instructed not to tell students during course advising that they think a class may be too difficult.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Assuming summative is just a word of art to mean unit test, project or paper?

So grade inflation increases while kids have fewer chances to fix or catch up when they messed up on a test. Sounds like a winning strategy.

It's the opposite. There are lots of chances to catch up and bring up a bad grade as you move along and show mastery. But it compresses grades and grade inflation and makes it harder to get As. The result (and maybe the goal) is that everyone gets a B.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Assuming summative is just a word of art to mean unit test, project or paper?

So grade inflation increases while kids have fewer chances to fix or catch up when they messed up on a test. Sounds like a winning strategy.

Yes although for problem students there are ways to retake tests till you achieve the desired B or C middle passing grade but none of that shows up in the grading. So a child could retake the test four times and no one would ever know because the retakes no longer show up in SIS.

[Anonymous]

Fcps divides practice work into formative and skills assessed work into summative

[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.

A lot of students don't pre-sort themselves correctly. You'd be surprised at the number of students with a D in a lower-level adjacent class who think that the AP-level follow on is their destiny. Teachers used to be able to at least try to talk them out of an impossible class but this year have been instructed not to tell students during course advising that they think a class may be too difficult.

Totally agree that a lot of low-achieving kids (most likely pressured by their parents) end up taking AP where they do not belong. However, in my experience it's far, far more rare that very low-performing Black/Hispanic kids self-select into AP as opposed to White/Asian kids haphazardly enrolling in AP. So still the equity argument falls flat because the majority of Black/Hispanic kids are in regular classes and have no advantage in college admissions regardless of whatever grading scheme is in place.

[Anonymous]

SBG creates confusion as implemented in FCPS which facilitates raising the grades of poor performing students while lowering the grades of more proficient students. Closes the achievement gap, brings about “equity” and until admissions officers figure it out will hurt those students applying out of state.

Administration wins, good students lose. Same old song.

[Anonymous]

Which FCPS are currently using SBG?

Madison
Herndon
McLean

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Assuming summative is just a word of art to mean unit test, project or paper?

So grade inflation increases while kids have fewer chances to fix or catch up when they messed up on a test. Sounds like a winning strategy.

Yes although for problem students there are ways to retake tests till you achieve the desired B or C middle passing grade but none of that shows up in the grading. So a child could retake the test four times and no one would ever know because the retakes no longer show up in SIS.

Yes this. I'm all for retakes especially for students trying to work out something challenging for them and kids with special needs but if you have to retake the test multiple times over then you are in the wrong class. Not showing retakes in SIS does not give an accurate picture of how the student is doing. Its confusing to me why this is considered more accurate grading and how this is different than just grading quizzes and homework.

What prize does society get for everyone getting a B or C on the tests but one kid took it once and the other five times? What is supposed to happen as a result?

[Anonymous]

To the parent of a rising 9th grader. The removal of older grades in SIS is one of those umbrella additions that really is not at the core of creating grades based on skills. Before parents and kids could see geades for practice quizzes first attempt and second attempt if a retake was taken for summatives and if your school followed FCPS's guidelines you knew a retake would only bring the summative grade up to an 80. You could follow every part of the learning and with retakes only earning a B there was no worry that a child would show up as a straight A student for something they were drugging with.

Now grades get replaced or aren't shown at all except the final best grade and there seems to be no limit to the top grade you can get with a retake. It's one of these umbrella inclusions that they somehow associate with SBG but really doesn't fit the original purpose of SBG which was to have more accurate skills grading.

[Anonymous]

As you can see it's a complete overhaul of grading system, grading outcome, and feedback on practice work that the school board, principals and PTA presidents always stroking the principal's ego and trying not to "make waves" like to brush it off as a nothingburger. It's hard to tackle the changes because so many things have been added under this SBG umbrella that don't really correlate to more accurate grading. Add in that FCPS has not made it system wide and you are arguing then about specific schools and teachers.

[Anonymous]

What a strange post, how does it negatively effect your child in any way?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To the parent of a rising 9th grader. The removal of older grades in SIS is one of those umbrella additions that really is not at the core of creating grades based on skills. Before parents and kids could see geades for practice quizzes first attempt and second attempt if a retake was taken for summatives and if your school followed FCPS's guidelines you knew a retake would only bring the summative grade up to an 80. You could follow every part of the learning and with retakes only earning a B there was no worry that a child would show up as a straight A student for something they were drugging with.

Now grades get replaced or aren't shown at all except the final best grade and there seems to be no limit to the top grade you can get with a retake. It's one of these umbrella inclusions that they somehow associate with SBG but really doesn't fit the original purpose of SBG which was to have more accurate skills grading.

This is a good thing, though. We want our children to master the material. That’s the point of school, not to create some bell curve of achievers and losers.