Why I Find Standards-Based Grading Fascinating

People ask me all the time, "Hey Michael, why do you spend so much time harping on Standards-Based Grading?"*

* No one asks me anything of the sort, we are all insignificant specks of sand in this grand sandbox that is the internet and even shouting doesn't make us heard as much as fulfill our need to feel as if we're heard and therefore of some consequence to the universe.

The short explanation for why I find SBG interesting is that I have strange and somewhat confusing interests.

The longer version goes like this: I was trained to teach on blogs. I cobbled together enough experience working with kids in camps and summer programs to convince someone to hire me as a math teacher, but I surely had no clue how to teach so I responded by doing the same thing you do when you can't remember how to get to the airport: I googled it.  Quickly I landed on Dan and Sam and Kate's blogs and I clicked and clicked and read as much as I could.

Standard-Based Grading was abuzz, and I brought it into my classroom from Day One. That means that I have a different relationship to it then a lot of other people who transferred onto the SBG-bandwagon. I tend to associate SBG with some of the decisions that I made in my first few years teaching, and I tend to be very critical of my first few years teaching. ("You're in your 4th year, michael, it's still your first few years teaching." OK.)

So much for psychology. But lately I've been reading a bunch about the history of education reform, and I'm fascinated by SBG as an instance of classroom innovation. Why do teachers like SBG? Why do districts and administrators like it? What problems does SBG solve? We are smarter, but not much smarter than teachers in the past. So why is this innovation emerging now?

I have no firm answers. But things I've learned? I have things that I've learned.

First, I know that teachers justify SBG in a variety of ways, some of which are actually incompatible with each other. I did some research and collected a bunch of justifications that bloggers and tweeters use for SBG, all collected in this doc. Here's an especially interesting contrast that I found:

• SBG Provides Incentives for Students To Learn More, Through Remediation and Reassessment
• SBG Helps Kids Focus On Learning Instead of on Points

If SBG is helping kids to ignore points, then how is it also using points to motivate learning? Either points are being ignored or points are being leaned on heavily.

The answer, of course, is that different teachers have different reasons for using SBG, to the extent that some people have flatly incompatible motivations for SBG. I recognize this pattern from some of my historical reading. It makes sense, right? An innovation needs a broad base of support to be popular, and if it can draw the alliances of educators with widely varying needs and philosophies then it's more likely to stick. (Of course, it also becomes open to the critique that it stands for very little, but it seems to me that these are competing tendencies in many reform movements.)

By the way I'm obviously not a historian, just some fool who's read a few books. I'm sharing what I'm thinking, not what I know.

Here's the other thing about SBG: it seems to be a classroom innovation very much of our times. We live in the age of Standards-Based Reform efforts, a time when high-stakes testing has made a close correlation to standards a vital concern to all teachers of public schools. I wonder: can this partially explain the broad appeal of SBG? Can it really be a coincidence that SBG emerges in the years of No Child Left Behind?

The story, perhaps, goes like this: in a time when standards-based reforms became a living reality for teachers, a grading system that could more closely align classroom assessments to state assessments starts seeming natural. Because there's widespread dissatisfaction about grading, teachers then use this opportunity to graft on their particular concerns to the innovation in grading. Some teachers wish that there was no grading. Others want grades to be more carefully aligned with incentives. Still others just want to be able to ease communication with parents.

SBG then starts defining itself against "traditional" grading, making it hard to criticize SBG (since everyone has some problem with traditional grading). Since SBG is such a disparate camp, it becomes hard to keep track of what SBG stands for and this aids in its rise, but ends up meaning very different things to very different people, following the same path that "projects" and "problems" and "occupations" and so many other instructional innovations have tread.

So much for amateur history. The last reason why I find SBG so interesting is because I find conflicts between what I'm learning about effective assessment and some especially popular interpretations of SBG. Finding the right tone and angle to criticize a popular ideology is an interesting rhetorical exercise, and one that I think is important because, in my (current) opinion, some of our best have gotten this one wrong in an important way.

Dan is our very best.

Take some of the justifications for SBG that I collected in my doc, put them under the microscope and they end up squirming a bit.

• SBG Helps Kids Focus On Learning Instead of on Points: How? By assigning them points for everything that they know? 
• SBG Provides Incentives for Students To Learn More, Through Remediation and Reassessment: One thing that we know is that extrinsic incentives for good behavior often backfire in remarkable ways. (Click that link to read about how financial incentives for parents picking their kids up from day care on time lead to parents showing up later.) Grades should not be used as an incentive. 
• SBG Assesses A Student On What They Currently Know, As Opposed To What They Knew In The Past: This seems flatly impossible. Grades are static, knowledge is dynamic. In any event, are we really claiming to be able to represent what a student knows in a series of skills and numbers? And what do we care about accurately measuring a student's learning, anyway? Will this help the kid's learning? How?
• SBG Provides Superior Feedback to Students: Superior feedback comes without a grade, so Standards-Based Grading would seem to be a poor candidate for providing better feedback. Maybe SBG gives better feedback than "traditional" grading, but since we know that kids ignore all feedback that comes in anything as easily fixated-on as a number I can't see much advantage to providing many numbers instead of one number.
• SBG is an Appropriate Response to Standards-Based Instruction: We also know that a major problem in math instruction is that it comes across as piecemeal and disconnected. Good math instruction is deeply connected, and I can't see how either Standards-Based Instruction or an approach to assessment that atomizes mathematical knowledge can create the deep web of learning whose creation we're trying to foster.

The sheer variety of things that SBG can stand for makes any sort of criticism very very difficult. SBG can become deeply entrenched. But perhaps precisely because it can be safely defended, SBG becomes an excellent forum for hashing out some crucial disagreements concerning assessment, in general. Criticizing any particular plank of SBG is non-threatening, since defenders have many different planks upon which to shift. It's in this context that we can maybe make some progress, getting people with very different uses for SBG to agree that, yes, students learn more from feedback that is completely dissociated from grades. After all, criticism of using SBG for student feedback doesn't mean the end of SBG and another radical change in grading practice. Maybe this is how we make progress through educational reform, even if not through the educational reforms themselves.

It seems to me that SBG is an innovation with a broad base of support, a loose and shifting definition, and a strong connection to tendencies in the wider educational reform movement. There are a network of justifications for it, and this network provides it with a strong defense as well as diffused results when implemented widely. At the same time, I'm betting that the popularity of SBG gives us a safe context in which to debate the essentials of assessment, and perhaps to change a few hearts and minds on some important matters.

Update: Confused by this piece? You weren't the only one. Here's a clearer restatement of the crucial bits.