The way we grade student work is flawed—in some ways inequitable—and is in need of reform. But like so many things in American education, the push for “equitable grading” has often been implemented piecemeal, bringing along with it all manner of unintended consequences, the most important of which is lowered standards.
This is the seventh in a series on doing educational equity right. See the introductory post, as well as essays on school finance, student discipline, advanced education, school closures, homework, effective teachers, and a concluding post on doing educational equity wrong.
Student grading is one of those issues that has an enormous impact on kids and schools, yet for years it remained almost completely under the radar. Barely discussed in teacher preparation programs, rarely a topic in professional development sessions, there must have been an assumption that there was nothing much to it or that everyone knew how to do it well.
Thanks to a few intrepid advocates, including Joe Feldman and Douglas Reeves, the issue is a sleeper no more. As these and other analysts and commentators correctly observe, how we grade student work is one of the most important ways that we communicate expectations to youngsters, as well as relay critical information to parents, institutions of higher education, and potential employers. Yet as these folks explain, traditional grading practices can be riddled with bias, including racial bias. Hence the drive for “equitable grading,” which seeks to squeeze this bias out of the system.
So far so good. Yet like so many things in today’s K–12 world, “equitable grading” has often been implemented piecemeal, bringing along with it all manner of unintended consequences, the most important of which is lowered standards.
A new white paper by my colleagues Meredith Coffey and Adam Tyner, part of our “Think Again” series, unpacks all this. Here’s a useful table from their paper that illustrates the scope of what we’re talking about:
Table 1: Equity-oriented grading policies
So how can school districts “do educational equity right” when it comes to grading? To address concerns about bias while keeping standards high? Let’s return to this series’ three big rules:
Grading practices that level up instead of leveling down
This is the heart of the matter. As we discussed in our homework post, student effort is key to student learning. Especially as kids get older, they cannot master challenging material by osmosis. They have to put in the work—do the practice math problems, write and re-write and re-write the research paper, study for their history and science tests. And regardless of what you might have read by Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Alfie Kohn, most adolescents are not going to choose to spend extra time and effort on schoolwork because of their intrinsic love of learning.
Tough grading practices, then, are essential to motivating students to work harder. Indeed, several research studies, including a Seth Gershenson paper published by Fordham, demonstrate that teachers who are tougher graders have a clear positive impact on learning, even after their students leave their classrooms. That goes for students from all racial subgroups and those in high-poverty schools. If we’re making it easier for students to get A’s and B’s, that’s a problem.
Yet there’s no doubt that we’re making it easier. The evidence on grade inflation continues to pile up. Like so many negative trends in U.S. schools, this phenomenon started before the pandemic, but the Covid era made it markedly worse. That’s partly because schools understandably relaxed standards while kids were Zoom-schooling, but it’s also the case that the push for “equity” in grading gained steam after the racial reckoning of 2020.
Now we’re in a situation wherein elite colleges can’t rely on student grades to send clear signals because almost everyone applying for admission gets straight A’s. On the other end of the academic spectrum, our high school graduation rate is higher than ever, in part because standards for graduation—which are of course tied to getting passing grades in required courses—are lower than ever (yay?).
What this all means is that we need to take a critical eye to any grading practices that have the effect of lowering standards—even if their advocates didn’t intend them to. In that bucket I’d include the “50 percent rule”—mandating that teachers give no lower than a 50 percent on any test or assignment, even those that kids don’t turn in. For obvious reasons (at least obvious to anyone who has met a teenager or ever been one), some kids will adapt to this system and put in less work. Likewise with bans on grading homework, even for completion. Like many of us, kids need someone to hold them accountable for doing what’s in their own long-term self-interest. And that means hitting the books, doing their homework, and getting feedback on whether they did it well. Same with banning penalties for late work, or even cheating.
That leaves plenty of other grading reforms that are still worth embracing—those that are focused on maintaining high standards while reducing bias—as we’ll discuss below.
Grading reforms and high versus low achievers
One of the major arguments for practices like the 50 percent rule is that giving a kid a zero on a big assignment will tank their grade and encourage them to give up. That’s certainly a possibility. Zero is indeed a long distance from 60 percent, the traditional minimum score for a passing grade, and it very well might be mathematically impossible for a student to make up enough ground to pass a course if they are staring at a goose egg.
But these across-the-board rules don’t just impact the lowest-achieving students—those kids at risk of not passing their courses. They impact everybody—including the strivers and grinders. And those high achievers will adapt their behavior to the new policies, too. If they build up a high-enough A early in the quarter, they know they can bomb some later quizzes or skip some assignments and still get what they need for their transcripts. So they put in less work. That’s not good! (And please keep in mind, plenty of these high achievers are students from disadvantaged backgrounds, so it’s not good for equity either.)
A better approach, then, is to return authority to teachers over their grading practices so they can offer grace to students on a case-by-case basis. If students bomb a big assignment or test early in the quarter, their teachers can make it clear to them that, if they get their act together and do better on future assessments, those zeroes will be adjusted upward. That’s a much better solution than schoolwide or districtwide rules that apply to everyone.
What about bias?
Now for some grading reforms that are well worth supporting: those that indicate higher expectations and work to reduce bias. The bias piece is important; whether it’s because of students’ socioeconomic backgrounds, or race, or the intersection of the two, it’s not hard to see how unintentional bias can creep into the grading process. On the one hand, a teacher might go a little easier on a kid knowing the hardships he or she is facing at home—the soft bigotry of low expectations. Alternatively, a teacher might anticipate lower-quality work from a student given their zip code or appearance—or just their performance on previous assignments.
Thus, various forms of blind grading are to be commended. They could involve electronic grading systems whereby teachers don’t see the students’ name until after they’ve completed their evaluations, or mechanisms whereby teachers grade papers and tests from other teachers’ students. Regardless, those doing the grading benefit from clear rubrics, ideally those that enforce a tough standard for what it takes to be considered A-level work. These sorts of approaches are, of course, at the heart of the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs and how they evaluate student exams.
Let’s be clear though: We shouldn’t expect blind grading or similar techniques to eliminate disparities in student grades by race or ethnicity. As long as we have achievement gaps—and sadly, they remain quite large—we are going to see GPA gaps, as well.
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The “grading reformers” have performed an important service by surfacing this issue as a critical topic. It’s nuts that for decades we largely just expected teachers to figure out grading on their own and put so little effort into making sure that grade expectations were consistent across schools or districts—or even classrooms!
But some grading reforms are better than others. Educational leaders: Be discerning. Empower your teachers. By all means work to eliminate bias. But make sure that, whatever you do, you keep expectations high.
Late last year, researchers Sarah Cohodes and Susha Roy partnered with the MIT Department of Economics to release a paper summarizing the results of lottery-based charter studies. The topline conclusion is straightforward and promising:
Existing evidence shows that charter schools can improve academic achievement and longer-term outcomes like four-year college enrollment, particularly among lower-performing students, non-white students, low-income students, and students with disabilities.
That was the inspiration for an easy column if I’ve ever seen one. Unequivocally, charter schools benefit students, and anyone who disagrees needs to just read the evidence already. Effects vary by school, of course, but overall results are positive. One large coffee with my word processor and we’ll all be on our merry way by close of business.
The reviewed studies paint charter schools in glowing colors. Charters have a “large positive impact on standardized test scores in both math and ELA,” and also non-standardized measures of academic achievement such as end-of-unit exams. Charter school students are less likely to partake in “extremely risky behaviors,” such as sex without contraception, or end up incarcerated. And finally, attendance at such schools boasts enrollment in four-year colleges and civic participation.
What’s not to love? If only social science research were so simple.
Hesitations arise in the nature of the research itself. Selection bias riddles gross comparisons between charter and traditional public schools. Are students who opt to enroll in charter schools—and so complete all necessary paperwork and jump through every loophole—from more stable families? Do charter schools enroll more affluent or poor students? Broad comparisons may only measure baseline differences in students, not effectiveness of the schools.
To account for this causal confusion, one approach—here under review in MIT’s white paper—is to rely on a natural experiment that arises in the system. When oversubscribed, charters are normally required by law to enroll students through a lottery, which makes for a randomized-controlled trial by another name. How do students compare who enrolled but did or did not receive acceptance via lottery? Like medical trials, such built-in control and experimental groups allow researchers to tie outcomes to the treatment itself—in this case, enrollment in a charter school.
However, there’s a bit of a trap hidden in this research: A lottery requires oversubscribed charter schools, those that have more students applying than there’s room for. As a result, lottery studies examine the most in-demand schools, accounting for only 26 percent of charter schools. How much does it really tell us to measure the effectiveness of what may be just the most effective quarter of the charter sector? That the most popular (and, so we would hope, most effective) schools are in fact better at raising student achievement? Such research tells us very little about the performance of the charter sector overall.
When examined alongside other study designs, however, something more like a proper consensus arises. Perhaps the largest, most comprehensive investigations into the charter sector, the CREDO studies from Stanford (the most recent of which released in 2023), compare students at charter and traditional public schools with similar prior achievement—another way to ferret out selection bias or causal effects—and find that charter schools have a positive if modest impact on student achievement.
The topline conclusions of both the CREDO and lottery studies regarding the charter sector as a whole mask a more impressive result: urban charters, in particular, wildly outperform similar traditional public schools. A 2015 study from CREDO found that attendance at an urban charter provides students the equivalent of twenty-eight extra days of learning in English and forty extra days of learning in math.
The most solid conclusion to be drawn from the Cohodes-Roy paper: Good schools really do matter. And I don’t mean to be flippant. There’s an influential strand of educational thought that contends that schools really don’t matter that much. Other factors such as family background or general intelligence are so strong that they overwhelm any impact that a school could have. I’ve been guilty of such fatalism myself.
But these lottery studies—even if they don’t vindicate the charter sector as a whole—do demonstrate that quality schools can alter a child’s trajectory, improving their odds of escaping poverty, staying out of prison, going to college, and leading a successful life. Such institutions are perhaps the single most promising, scalable policy to shrink the achievement gap between low-income and affluent students.
There’s a lot we still don’t know about the charter sector. What’s more, simply placing the label “charter” on a school by no means guarantees success; the sector has many lackluster schools. Even so, as it stands, continued expansion of the sector overall seems to be a largely all-win, no-lose scenario. And Cohodes and Roy have provided an impressive research review in support of that proposition.
Neither of the major parties’ presumptive presidential nominees has anything serious in the offing to help American students get back on track. Both Biden’s unimaginative kowtowing to the teachers unions’ hoary agenda and Trump’s fantastical, funhouse mirror positions leave an awful lot to be desired. The resulting dyspepsia recently got me—along with Pepto Bismol—imagining what the current state of play might be like if the political environment had been suited to elect a President Jeb Bush back in 2016. What could Florida’s former and preeminent education governor have accomplished for our nation’s schools?
It’s a counterfactual worth contemplating because leadership matters even when it comes to the arcana of education policy. As my colleague Mike Petrilli once observed:
If and when we are blessed with a leader—a president probably, or maybe an education secretary—who can find common cause with folks on the left, right, and center and paint a picture of a better education system, and how to build it, I suspect most Americans will be happy to follow.
Bush would have been such a leader: a bridge builder, a policy wonk, and an unapologetic education champion.
On Earth 2, a “Bush 45” would be wrapping up his second and final term, having deftly led the nation through the pandemic by prioritizing school reopenings and holding states and districts accountable for using federal relief dollars in smart ways that target student achievement. It’s a stark contrast to what actually happened, but it’s not the whole story. By my lights, we’d have seen three other notable differences in the policy trajectory.
The first would be Bush’s choice for education secretary. A top contender would have been former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, whom Bush recognized with ExcelinEd’s first “Excellence in Education Award” back in 2012. A prospective presidential candidate in his own right, Daniels would have been exceedingly qualified, having led successful reform efforts in both K–12 and higher ed. Another inspired pick would have been Daniels’s sidekick, former Indiana state superintendent Tony Bennett—whom Bush recruited to Florida to become the state’s top education official. Bennett would have brought ambitious goals to the role, and would not abide the embarrassing drivel being served up by this U.S. Department of Education. (Full disclosure: I worked for Bennett during his tenures in Indiana and Florida.)
Second, Bush would have placed a premium on state, district, and school accountability, an emphasis that’s sorely lacking as achievement gaps continue to grow in all grades and subjects, and as the push for outcomes slackens. In the opening paragraph of an op-ed that Bush authored last December, he wrote:
If you had to pick one issue in K–12 education where Florida policymakers need to maintain their focus in the coming years, the answer is clear: accountability.
As president, Bush would have never condoned the easing off of accountability pressures that policy guru Chad Aldeman says is a primary, if not predominant, factor in the precipitous decline in achievement post-NCLB:
When schools felt pressure from state accountability systems, they increased their academic standards and boosted achievement in ways that had long-term benefits for students... Holding school systems accountable for their lowest-performing students was working—until policymakers decided the pressure wasn’t worth it.
Rest assured that the forces of resistance and repeal are elated that neither Biden nor Trump shows any interest in holding school systems accountable for academic performance.
Finally, unlike the White House’s current occupant, Bush would have brought big ideas to the table—and the temerity to implement them. In fact, he offered a blueprint on the campaign trail that’s as salient now as it was before the pandemic—a plan grounded in four conservative principles:
1) education decisions should be made as close to the student as possible; 2) choice of all kinds should be expanded; 3) transparency is essential to accountability; and 4) innovation requires flexibility.
Yes, this included the expansion of education savings accounts, but it also called for doubling support for charter schools. It contained elements that the left (college affordability), right (school vouchers), and center could have embraced. Most importantly, Bush would have offered an expansive vision for improving schools, and an attention to detail to an issue that is usually relegated to the backseat during presidential elections.
To be sure, among voters, the Commander in Chief’s outlook towards ed policy is the least of their worries. But in an age when all politics is national, it’s deeply unsatisfying to just wait for the pendulum to swing back and, in the interim, hope that governors take up the education baton. Bush’s words from his blueprint are particularly haunting following the erasure of decades of academic progress in that it’s hard to imagine today’s elected leaders being so clear-eyed about what America’s charge must be:
As governor of Florida, I increased student achievement across the board, particularly for those most at risk, and as president, I will do the same.
School choice discussions often overlook intradistrict open enrollment, allowing students to attend any public school within their resident district. It’s less prevalent than, say, charter schools or interdistrict open enrollment (which occurs between districts). But it could be part of a wider effort to stem the tide of disenrollment that many districts are experiencing—especially if students can land in better schools as a result. It could also be part of a strategy to boost learning and reduce gaps. A recent NBER study examines the impact of one such public school choice program known as the Zones of Choice (ZOC) in Los Angeles.
The current version of ZOC began in 2010, when competition from charter schools was impacting enrollment throughout Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The plan was to increase students’ high school options by combining LAUSD school catchment areas into larger choice zones. Without a default feeder system, high schools must attract students from across those zones, which often leads to information sessions on their campuses or at middle schools. It may also lead to lotteries for oversubscribed high schools; otherwise, assignments are determined from parents’ ranked choices using a centralized, one-stop-shop algorithm.
In the case of ZOC, roughly 65–70 percent of applicants listed schools not in their neighborhoods as their first preference. Yet only 30 percent ultimately enrolled in non-neighborhood schools, in part because of capacity restraints (still, that’s a big boost from the 7 percent in the year before the ZOC expansion took place). The ongoing enrollment decline in LAUSD means that more schools can absorb additional students, making lotteries rarer and competition more salient, especially since declines in student enrollment impact staffing levels.
In this analysis, the authors used data for all students enrolled in LAUSD between 2008 and 2019, restricting the sample to student level observations in the eleventh grade. They excluded special education and magnet schools without strict neighborhood assignments and restricted their sample to schools that were open before the ZOC expansion. They employed a difference-in-differences design that compares changes in achievement between ZOC students and non-ZOC students. Specifically, they matched each school to a non-ZOC comparable school within deciles that have the same proportions of Hispanic students and students in poverty. They leveraged student addresses, test score data and demographic data, as well as data on school assignments and preferences—and college outcome data from the National Student Clearinghouse.
The analysis finds large positive effects of ZOC on student achievement and four-year college enrollment. By the sixth year of the program, ZOC students’ English language arts exam performance improved by 0.16 standard deviations (SD) relative to comparable non-ZOC students. ZOC raised four-year college enrollment by roughly 5 percentage points, a 25 percent increase from the baseline ZOC student mean, which was mostly driven by increases in enrollment at California State University campuses. Analysts say that “both of these effects [led] to vast reductions in between-neighborhood inequality in educational outcomes.”
Improvements in school quality mostly explain the effects, which are concentrated among the lowest-performing schools. Indeed, families making choices appeared to place significant weight on schools’ academic quality, giving those institutions competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. Ultimately, the ZOC introduced school choice in roughly 30-40 percent of the district (and has now been expanded to include middle schools).
Last, the analysts probed the structural features of the ZOC that may help explain its positive effects. First, there is a manageable number of choices: ZOC option sets include at most five campuses, far fewer than intradistrict choice programs in, for example, New York City and New Orleans. Second (and related), parents are less likely to suffer from information overload, given the relatively few options to compare. Third, the relative homogeneity of students within each zone largely eliminates the factors of income and race from the equation, leaving school quality as the primary metric upon which options are judged—and upon which schools must compete.
Unfortunately, the LAUSD of late has turned a cold shoulder to charter schools. And without options beyond the traditional district schools, it’s hard to operate “zones of choice.”
That said, the bottom line remains that intradistrict school choice, if designed well, can be beneficial for parents, students, and districts. Providing ranked choices for a handful of options and incenting an emphasis on academic quality are vital facets of a well-designed system.
Which raises the question: Will Los Angeles return to the days of trying to out-compete charters to the continued benefit of kids in the ZOC—or will they choose to suck the life out of an intervention that’s working?
SOURCE: Christopher Campos and Caitlin Kearns, “The impact of public school choice: Evidence from Los Angeles’s Zones of Choice,” National Bureau of Economic Research (August 2023).
Most young people who enroll in college after high school graduation do so in the hope that it will help them secure a good job. Similarly, many employers look to colleges as sources of high-quality candidates to fill job openings. But a new report calls the economic opportunity promise of higher education into question.
Burning Glass Institute teamed up with Strada Education Foundation to examine the employment histories of college graduates. The data come primarily from Lightcast’s Career Histories Database, which includes information on the educational attainment, employment, and career trajectories of more than 60 million workers, along with hundreds of millions of online job postings. Analysts combined these with information from multiple federal education and labor resources to capture extensive information about college-educated workers’ alma maters, degree fields, earnings, and geographic locations. The resulting dataset included about 18.6 million unique degree-earners, 10.8 million of whom earned a “terminal” bachelor’s degree—meaning those who didn’t go on to earn a higher degree, such as a master’s degree or doctorate. (The report does have additional findings related to higher degrees, but those will not be discussed here.)
The aim of the study was to observe and describe the career trajectories of individuals in the years following college degree attainment. To do so, the researchers examined profiles with graduation dates between 2012 and 2021, determined who was employed in 2022, and worked backward to construct their employment histories between graduation and 2022.
The big news: Overall, 52 percent of college graduates were underemployed one year after degree completion. That is, they were working in jobs that don’t typically require a bachelor’s degree to obtain. For those initially-underemployed workers with ten years of data, 45 percent of them were still underemployed after a decade, even given the post-pandemic labor market conditions that favored workers.
However, of the 48 percent of graduates who were working at a college-level job (one that typically requires a bachelor’s degree to obtain) within a year after degree completion, 79 percent remained in a college-level occupation five years after graduation. And the vast majority (86 percent) of these graduates with 10 years of employment data were still in a college-level job a decade out.
Unsurprisingly, these outcomes vary by field of study. The best degrees for attaining college-level employment upon graduation are those involving substantial quantitative reasoning (computer science, engineering, mathematics, etc.), or math-intensive business fields, like finance and accounting. Not all STEM fields are alike, however, as graduates in the life sciences do not fare as well as their engineering and math-focused peers. Also good: education and health-related degrees such as nursing. On the other hand, nearly 60 percent of graduates with degrees in public safety and security, recreation and wellness studies, or general business fields like marketing are likely to end up underemployed.
The analysts found a strong connection between internships and college-level employment after graduation. Controlling for factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, and institutional characteristics, the odds of underemployment for graduates who had at least one internship are 48.5 percent lower than for their peers who had no internships, and the benefits associated with completing an internship are relatively strong across degree fields. Graduates of more selective institutions are less likely to experience underemployment than those who attended more inclusive institutions. Black and Hispanic students are substantially more likely than students of other races and ethnicities to wind up underemployed. And men are more likely to be underemployed than women. None of which is too surprising.
But underemployment also varies by state, with Hawaii and its tourism-driven economy faring worst (57 percent of college graduates were underemployed five years after completing) and D.C.-adjacent Maryland faring best (“only” 40 percent underemployment after five years).
While the college wage premium is real—the Burning Glass report found that recent graduates employed in a college-level job typically earned about 88 percent more than a high school diploma holder—the path to that premium is not as clear cut as high school students and their families might think. Certain additional data not analyzed or discussed here—such as the specific skills listed in job postings—might help clarify those pathway mismatches a little, but the sheer amount of job listings and career trajectories that are included seem pretty clear cut: Underemployment for college grads is pervasive, persistent, and pernicious, as an underemployed college graduate typically earns only about 25 percent more than a high school graduate, and for most young people, everything starts from that very first post-college job.
Recommendations from the report are aimed at policymakers and higher education officials and include eliminating low-return major offerings, providing clearer and more realistic information about the job market for graduates, offering more internships, and establishing stronger coordination between employers and colleges about what skills—and credentials—are truly needed for high-paying jobs.
But the message for families considering postsecondary options should probably be simpler: caveat emptor.
SOURCE: “Talent Disrupted: College Graduates, Underemployment, and the Way Forward,” The Burning Glass Institute and Strada Education Foundation (February 2024).
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