Nampa school board voted to eliminate standards-based grading. What happens now?
The Nampa school board’s decision last week to eliminate standards-based grading in secondary schools, against the administration’s recommendation, has spurred some confusion as teachers begin to prepare for the start of the school year.
The administration had recommended the school board give the district more time to evaluate standards-based grading and determine ways to improve it before taking action, especially given that much of the transition for secondary schools happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But board members said they heard from families and students that standards-based grading wasn’t working for them. It was confusing, hurt high-achieving students and made it difficult for students and parents to know where they stood and what their grades were in class, trustees and parents said.
Now, weeks before school starts, teachers will have to figure out what it will look like to transition back to a traditional grading model.
Nampa schools transition to standards-based grading
Elementary schools in the Nampa School District have been using standards-based grading for about a decade, said interim deputy superintendent Waylon Yarbrough.
In 2018, the district’s board adopted a policy to implement the practice district-wide. The district launched a pilot program for standards-based grading in some middle and high schools during the 2019-2020 school year. Nearly all remaining teachers transitioned this past year.
Standards-based grading “focuses on measuring students’ progress towards gaining proficiency in the essential learning standards,” according to the district’s 2021 teacher handbook. The district’s goal was to “ensure grades are consistent, accurate, meaningful, and supportive of each student’s learning,” the handbook said.
The transition to standards-based grading was also an effort to make sure grades correlated directly with what students knew and eliminated differences in how grades were decided throughout the district, according to a presentation given to the school board. The process is a shift from “grading student compliance to grading student proficiency,” according to the handbook.
With standards-based grading, teachers provide students with scores between one and four. A one means that a student is beginning to learn the standard, and a four reflects exceeded proficiency. Educators then convert student progress into traditional letter grades at the end of the semesters.
The method gives teachers clear language on communicating feedback to students and provides a shared vocabulary, said Brian Coffey, president of the Nampa Education Association. It also focuses on improvement of skills, he said.
School board discusses standards-based grading
The school board discussed standards-based grading during the June board meeting, and considered holding a work session. Instead, board members took action last week.
District administrators last week said the pandemic made the transition even more difficult, especially at a time when students were learning remotely or doing hybrid learning.
The administration proposed the district form a committee of stakeholders — which would include parents, students and educators — and define parameters and “success criteria” for standards-based grading. The committee, according to the proposal, would then monitor progress and report information to the board by March 2023 to “determine board action (and) next steps.”
The proposal was meant to give the district another year to set specific markers to determine success and improvement, and to be able to present those findings. Yarbrough said the proposal would have also provided more time so that if schools moved away from standards-based grading, the district would have more than just a few weeks to be able to make that shift.
The system wasn’t being implemented perfectly, he said. But he had hoped the district would be given more time to develop a plan and work with the board and community.
“It’s definitely caused some challenges … but we can do that,” he said. “We’re more than capable of dealing with change, and navigating and supporting kids and teachers and parents as we go through that.”
Decision creates confusion
Coffey said he thinks the board made a decision with little feedback that could significantly impact teachers. But he said he is still waiting for more direction, given that the change and information so far communicated to teachers has been vague, he said.
The decision was also made, to his knowledge, without reaching out to educators, he said.
The change could cause a “potentially enormous hassle” for the teachers who have been using standards-based grading for the past few years and have relied on the methodology, Coffey added.
“They didn’t do a teacher survey, they didn’t ask for specific input from teachers through the building manager,” he said. “That they would do this right before school starts, as if it’s not that big a deal, that’s pretty shocking and disheartening.”
Standards-based grading, he said, was more than how teachers recorded results. It was a methodology that helped students move away from the idea of just scoring points, and toward a growth and improvement mindset.
Coffey acknowledged some teachers didn’t like the system. He blamed a lot of the confusion in the community surrounding standards-based grading on the platform the district used to communicate how students were doing, which he said was confusing and not user-friendly.
Yarbrough said teachers should already align their instruction with the state standards, so they won’t need to change the way they instruct their students.
But teachers will need to change the way they report student progress. The biggest change will be moving to a more traditional, points-based system to report grades, instead of the one-to-four scale.
Before the start of the school year, the district’s secondary leaders will work with teachers at the building level to come up with a plan to align with the board action.
“There will definitely be some adjustments and shifts there,” Yarbrough said. “Folks have been working on standards-based grading in the district for the last few years, and so there will be some challenges.”
The district also sent out an email to parents this week about the move to the points-based grading model. The email said the change will include end-of-quarter progress reporting and grades will be reported at “regular intervals” in the learning management system.
Survey results show parents are ‘frustrated’
Before the board meeting last week, the school district sent out a survey to families about standards-based grading, asking their level of understanding with it, their level of frustration and what specifically frustrated them about the system.
More than 900 middle and high school families responded to the survey. More than 60% of the middle and high school parents who responded said they were somewhat or extremely frustrated with the system.
Yarbrough said the district knew and understood the frustrations.
During the meeting, parents spoke out about confusion surrounding standards-based grading. One parent said her high-achieving children weren’t motivated to strive for higher grades with the way the system worked. They also raised concerns that the philosophy doesn’t prepare kids once they graduate.
Trustee Brook Taylor spoke of a student she knew who had a difficult time grasping a specific skill in a class and showing proficiency.
“We’re sending the message that no matter how hard you work, it stays the same,” Taylor said. “That’s just not how life works.”
But those who spoke in favor of standards-based grading said it gave students an idea of how they were doing in specific skills and gave them the chance to improve. It also prioritized student learning and improvement, they said.
Trustee Mandy Simpson said she saw the issue as mainly a communication problem.
“It doesn’t matter what system you’re talking about. To me the issue is communication,” said Simpson, who voted against the move back to traditional grading. “There needs to be a lot of work on communication, on communicating the ‘why’ because it is a best practice. It is research-based and it does truly help students.”
Coffey questioned whether getting rid of standards-based grading would have the result parents hoped for. And he said the way the board made its decision worries him about what could come next.
“If they’re willing to do this now, with this timing, what else?” he said. “What else are they willing to do? What’s next? That makes it pretty scary.”
This story was originally published August 5, 2022 at 4:00 AM.
