Reply to Madison H.S. Parents - Principal Survey and Skills-Based Grading

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m mostly concerned it doesn’t encourage learning. [/quote]

Quite the opposite!  It doesn't DIScourage learning.  It encourages kids to keep doing better on the next test b/c if they do, they will get a bump up on the most recent previous test.  [/quote]

Look, we know that you are the poster we suspect of being admin or someone close to admin. Please just start your own pro-SBG at Madison thread and see if you get any posts/views besides your own.
[/quote]

I am just a parent at Madison, and I tend to agree with PP. SBG has been fine. My kid is learning the material, he has to revisit it every unit, and his grades have not changed.

I AM the poster who asked earlier about grade inflation, and in the end, that is all I am seeing here...people mad that homework doesn't prop up a grade on a bad test anymore. The question remains: is your kid learning the material? If so, and most likely, why are you upset?

This nonsense that Madison students will have lower grades is just that-nonsense

I am not really seeing any legit arguments.[/quote]

First this argument is flawed because there wasn't a problem with grading or schoolwork to begin with so the idea that you have to refute something that is new to me is flawed. Why doesn't Madison have to prove that it needs to be changed? What problems are they trying to even solve?

There is no benefit to not grading assignments. It makes it confusing to figure out which assignments will be graded and what ones won't. It leads to less practice and less proficiency. it encourages ignoring schoolwork. It's work for the teacher with no benefit to the student. Who wants to go through the trouble of assigning work that doesn't get done? Does it matter if you don't think it will harm anyone? Do we just experiment with an idea that unless we see harm it's all ok? Do we wait for harm to show up? Even the supposedly benefit of helping kids who have a job or have to watch a sibling is suspect because the better fix for this is to have longer due dates for completion, not elimination of work. Kids need practice and that's why practice is assigned.

As for the grading, at least with a retake or test corrections the child got to demonstrate proficiency in an area of learning. It was also systematic for only certain assessments and most classes the most you could get would be a B. Changing a grade from the past doesn't do anything beneficial. It also encourages cheating I would imagine because kids will get confused why its ok to just change a grade from the past based on a future grade. Where in the world does this actually happen beneficially where we whitewash the past with no added effort?

The grading at just a full letter grade doesn't make sense either. They don't match other schools and the point spread from one grade to the other is too large which is why we have smaller point spreads to begin with. The grading of assessments should follow the same grading as the final grade. Why have two different grading systems?

I think the grading is set up to reduce low grades and high grades and bring more people into the B/C range but without doing any work to really lower their grade or bring it up. It's just arbitrarily tweaking grades in a manufactured way.

The school didn't request this change. It's coming from above. Why be angry at parents who didn't want it to begin with? Not everyone is on board with every change is good change.[/quote]

You obviously didn't watch the video or the background info on why.  The video is about next year's policies, by the way.  Grades aren't being lowered.  Kids are given an opportunity to raise their overall grade by showing an upward trend.  You can disagree with this policy, but not the fact that it tends to RAISE grades, not lower them.

[/quote]

The video is right in that it does raise the grades for the lower performing kids. I don’t dispute that and I personally don’t have a problem with that, though I think the folks worrying about kids not doing homework have a valid point. But the video sidesteps the other real effect that it is much harder to get an A because of the point spread and elimination of -/+ grades.  This is what Madison admin is not being upfront about and what I am worried about. I don’t have genius kids who are aiming for top colleges. Just regular kids who will have a lower gpa because of this which will make it harder to get into the local public schools like JMU or Virginia Tech because the other FCPS schools won’t have this. [/quote]

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