The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: Schools that grade students are failing them

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

It's back to school for millions of students this week after a school year of unprecedented disruption and with the traditional grading systems and report card one of the main casualties. But some educators say this past year's abandonment of letter grades and grade point averages has been a good thing and is key to reforming the education system. They say that for decades research has shown that traditional grading systems decrease student learning by shifting their attention from deep learning to how to play and win at the game of school. Giving out grades reduces student interest in knowledge for its own sake as well as the desire to take on challenges. Rather than providing a fair and helpful snapshot of a student's progress, grades only succeed in capturing the inequity and bias that afflicts our education systems. Supporters of traditional grading approaches respond that grades, especially when paired with individualized comments, provide a valuable feedback tool that is fundamental to a successful education system. Grades that are based on clearly defined learning goals address the problem of teacher bias and provide an honest answer to the key question on every student's mind: how am I doing? Grades also communicate this important information to parents and to higher learning establishments with limited enrolment. Most importantly grades reward effort, a key pillar for a fair and just education system and the broader society it feeds. Arguing for the motion is Alfie Kohn, an education lecturer and author of many books on parenting and education including Punished by Rewards and The Schools Our Children Deserve. Arguing against the motion is Tom Guskey, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Kentucky's College of Education, and an international expert on student assessment. He has also published many books, most recently Get Set, Go! Creating Successful Grading and Reporting Systems and What We Know About Grading: What Works, What Doesn't, and What's Next.  Sources: City News, King 5, First Coast News, ABC 10 News, ASCD, CBC, CESA 2 The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/   Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Christina Campbell Editor: Kieran Lynch Associate Producer: Abhi Raheja Researcher: Eden PollockBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, schools that grade students are failing them. Global pandemic is changing how teachers teach, how students learn, and just recently how they'll be graded. Each district has been given flexibility on how to assign grades, but no one can get a fail. Instead of using an A through F grading scale, students would get grades like exceeding, developing, or emerging. The pandemic is illuminating for us how these traditional practices are so inapplicable and so unhelpful and actually punishing students for things outside their control. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths.

Well, it's back to school for millions of students this week after a school year of unprecedented disruption. with traditional grading systems and report cards being one of the main casualties. Some educators say the past 12 to 18 months of experimentation with downplaying letter grades and grade point averages has been a good thing, and it's key to reforming the educational system. Opponents of traditional grading point to research showing letter grades decrease students' learning by shifting their attention from deep cognition to instead, Instead, trying to play and win at the marks game at school. Giving out grades reduces students' interest in knowledge for knowledge sake.

Rather than providing a fair and helpful snapshot of a student's progress, grading schemes end up extenuating inequality and bias in our education systems, especially towards minority groups. I want to think about adopting a grading system that is human-centered. I've got to understand how racism, classism, sexism, ableism, show up in social systems, specifically the social system of school. Supporters of traditional grading respond that marking, especially when paired with individualized comments by teachers, provides a valuable feedback tool that's fundamental to creating a successful educational environment for students. grades that are based on clearly defined learning goals address the problem, teacher bias, and provide an honest answer to the key question on every learner's mind.

How am I doing? Grades also reward effort, a key pillar of a fair and just educational system. There are ways to grade more equitably, more accurately, resistant to bias and more motivational. On this installment of the monk debates, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved. Schools that grade students are failing them. Arguing for the motion is Alfie Cohn, an educator, lecture, an author of many books on parenting and education, including the renowned international bestseller, punished by rewards and the schools our children deserve. arguing against the motion is Tom Gusky, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky's College of Education and an international expert on student assessment. He's also published many books, most recently, Get Set, Go, creating successful grading and reporting systems, and what we know about grading, what works, what doesn't, and what's next.

Alfi, Tom, welcome to the Monk Debates. Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be with you. Very much looking forward to this conversation today. You know, many of the disruptions of the pandemic, surely one of the places in our society that has really seen incredible transformation over the last 18 months has been our schools and our school systems.

They've grappled with this pandemic for better or worse in creative and less creative ways. But the result of all, this is, I think, a renewed focus on the part of parents, educators, the public in what are we doing in our schools, how are we delivering education to our children, our expectations aligned between those different groups, parents, teachers, students. And we have a great opportunity today, I think, to unpack all of this with you by engaging with an incredibly timely resolution. And it is the following, be it resolved, schools that grade students are failing them. So Alfie, you're arguing

in favor of our motion today. I'm going to put a couple minutes on the clock and turn the program over to you to open up this debate. I don't want to brag, but I think that I have read every study ever done comparing students who get grades to those who don't get grades. It's not much of a boast because there aren't that many such studies. Most of them, unfortunately, just compare one variation of grades to another. But when you look at all of the studies that compare kids who get grades to those who don't, you find three robust differences. First, kids who are graded tend to become less interested in whatever topic they were doing. The specific topic, as well as the whole area, such as math or writing, for example,

compared to students who got the identical assignment but with no grades involved. Second, kids who are graded when they have a chance to pick the easiest possible task. Not because they're lazy or because they lack a growth mindset or something, but because they're rational. I mean, duh, if the point is to get a high grade, of course you're going to pick the shortest book or the easiest assignment. That's simply rational, and it's because grades inherently lead students to avoid intellectual risk-taking. And third, according to the research, kids who are graded are likely to think in a more superficial or shallow fashion, more likely to ask questions like, do we have to know this? As opposed to more thoughtful questions about what evidence leads us to say that and so on.

Now, I want to be clear about this research. It's not a matter of what grade kids get. The problem isn't with giving kids grades that are too low, and it's certainly not with giving kids grades that are too high, which is the whole ridiculous canard of grade inflation. The problem is with grades themselves. Now, we can take a bad thing and make it worse. You could introduce competition in the form of ranking kids against each other

or grading on a curve that adds more point. to the arrangement, it would be even worse to mindlessly average the scores that kids get or give them zeros or believe that failure is going to motivate them. And I think happily Tom Gusky and I agree that all of those things are bad. What I believe separates us is that he thinks getting rid of these super bad variations or doing grades thoughtfully or having other minor repairs like standards-based grading are sufficient. Whereas I'm persuaded by experience and research that the problems with grading are inherent. Research and experience show that you can't address these problems by just doing grades better, only by replacing them with less destructive forms of assessment and also improving education more generally. Thank you, Alfie, for that opening statement.

or debate today, be it resolved, schools that grade students are failing them. Tom, you're speaking against the resolution. Let's have your opening statement, please. I need to begin by saying I'm really honored to join in this discussion debate on grading issues with clearly one of the most articulate spokespersons for education reform, Mr. Yavut Cohen. His perspectives are always thoughtful and always driven by a commitment to do what is best for students at all levels of education. There are many of those perspectives with which I must say I wholeheartedly agree. But as you will soon discover in this podcast, there are some with which I don't.

It is resolved in this podcast that schools that grade students are failing them. Now, it's certainly true that there are a number of really bad grading practices that we need to eliminate it. And I've highlighted these in much of my work. Number one, and Alfie alluded to this, already, we need to stop grading students according to norm-based criteria that is comparing students with their classmates. That tells us nothing about learning. It makes learning very competitive. Students have to compete against each other for the few scarce, high grades will be distributed, destroys any sense of collaboration among students because helping a classmate is actually detrimental to your chances for success. And evidence indicates it actually

destroys the relationship between teachers and students, because as soon as a teacher begins helping one student, you're interfering with the competition and not providing the same assistance to another. We also need to stop grading students according to this bell-shaped curve distribution that arbitrarily limits the number of high grades. Those of you that have studied statistics know that a bell-shaped distribution describes the distribution of randomly occurring events when nothing intervenes. And teaching is an intervention. And I've argued that the degree to which distributions of grades represent the normal curve represents the degree to which teaching has failed. We need to stop calculating class rank based on competitive, weighted GPAs that pit students

against each other is in senseless competition that harms more students than it benefits. We need to stop using factors related to students' behavior in determining grades. In order to control students or ensure their compliance or punish those that don't comply. And of course, we need to stop using percentage grade systems that imply 101 discrete levels of achievement, two thirds of which denote levels of failure. But eliminating bad grades doesn't mean eliminating grades themselves. Just like a dimendating bad testing practices doesn't mean we need to eliminate testing, and nor does eliminating bad drivers mean we need to eliminate driving. We need to recognize that there are some advantages here.

There are good and positive grading practices that many schools use. They start by focusing on the community purposes of grades rather than the judgmental purposes. That the grades do not describe who you are as a learner, but where you are in your learning journey and where is always temporary. We need to ensure that the consequences of grades actually support improvement. We need to use student-involved aspects of grading, especially through conferencing and interactions with students and with their parents.

And we need to provide regular opportunities for students to self-assess and become involved in reflection and goal setting. And knowing where you are is essential to understanding what steps you need to take to improve. Grades can serve that purpose. well, if we do it in a way that actually supports learners and doesn't take on some of these practices we know are actually detrimental to students in any learning context. Tom, thank you for that opening statement. And thank you, Alfie.

You know, a sign of a good debate is when I'm completely confused as the moderator. I don't know whether I'm pro or con. Hopefully the next 30 or so minutes will help me and the listeners figure out. But before we get to the questions that are probably top of mind of people listening to you, I want an opportunity for both of you to react to what you've just heard from the other person. So, Alfie, I'm going to put a couple minutes on the clock for you now, a chance to spark off Tom's opening statement. I think we may have to distinguish, and perhaps I was remiss and not doing that earlier, between assessment in general and grading in particular. Much of Tom's defense is seeming befuddled by the idea that there would be no rules for assessing performance.

we wouldn't be able to evaluate expertise and distinguish it from its lack is not at all what I'm saying. I do think we have to be sparing and careful in the way we assess because some of the issues that I already raised about too much focus on how well kids are doing relative to what they're doing

as well as between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation actually do raise concerns about other ways of assessing. But when we're talking about grades, And presumably this is what's built into the definition of our topic today. I'm talking about attaching letters and numbers to students and to the assignments that they do, the kinds of things that are called marks or reported on report cards and so on. So, yes, of course, it is possible to distinguish between better and less good ways of doing things.

But the research indicates that grades per se are a uniquely bad way of doing this. Now, it's nice to say we're interested in communication. That sounds good. But what are we communicating exactly? And why would we ever need to use grades in order to do it becomes the issue? There are some other things where we would want to call into question the whole practice. Tom gave two examples. I agree with one and not with the other.

He said, are we then going to back away from tests? And I would say to that, yes. As long as we don't back away from authentic ways of assessing mastery and understanding, we could have another debate about why you need tests to do that. But with respect to driving, no, of course not. That's a false analogy. Just because there are many things in life that we need to improve, rather than getting rid of them like driving, doesn't mean that any single example like grades constitutes an example of that.

And I think it's real important to realize that that sort of mealyard approach where we say, don't throw out everything, let's just make it a little better without giving up on the underlying process, doesn't always apply. Some things are bad because of what they are, not just because of what they're doing. I think the research shows that's true of grades. So when Tom closes by saying, grades can do these functions. very well as long as we, et cetera, you know, do it well and avoid the big risks, the burden would be on him to show that that's true. And as of now, I haven't heard a compelling reason why we need grades to assess or why grades are safe from exactly the kinds of inherent destructive features that I believe are there. Thank you, Alfie. Tom, your opportunity now to react to Alfie's opening statement or what you've just heard from him. I do think that there's an important distinction to be made here, but I would actually make the distinction between assessment and evaluation.

I think assessment implies an understanding of where you are and where you are in a continuum of learning, what degree of learning is taking place and what you have done well, what you need to do to improve. Evaluation typically involves some idea of assessing a value, or assigning worth to that. And I think that's a distinction that we need to keep clear

that the assessment and hopefully the grading process does relate directly together where the notion of value or worth in that is something that we need to be able to think about and consider in different ways. Also, I think it would disagree

that we don't assign grades to students. We assign grades to performance. And the idea that that performance is always temporary. That just as a grade should always be temporary. It should never be a student should not see themselves as this grade, but their performance at this level. And knowing where you are is sort of the essential first step

in understanding what you need to do to improve. If I don't know where I am, I'm sort of lost in the wilderness, but if I have a clear understanding of where I am in this sort of progression of learning, and then I have a better idea of what I need to do to get better. and how it can make those improvements. And that's where the value and worth comes in. It's in the improvement and being able to move in a direction that's going to be purposeful and intentional

and be able to be recognized by myself as a learner that things are getting better. And my understanding is deeper. It's going on a different level. Thank you, Tom. Thank you both for engaging with each other with civility and substance. Much appreciated.

Now let me join the conversation try to think through some questions that are top of mind to our listeners tuning into this debate. And Alfie, to come to you first, you know, I think a lot of parents, taxpayers, if I want to use that word loaded as it is, look at grades as an accountability mechanism. This is a way for us to understand outside of the system, outside of the classroom, how maybe not only our particular student is doing, but how the students in our state or province are doing or how our country is doing versus another country and that we need grading as a way of ensuring that our educational systems are delivering on the bigger social priorities that we have mandated them to achieve hopefully success around. And in the absence of grades, there's an absence of an accountability and it becomes a free-for-all.

What is your reply to that argument about the importance of grades in terms of the accountability of our educational systems? You know, I've heard that argument made normally in the context of trying to justify standardized testing. And I have a response to that about why standardized tests are not good indicators and that there's also an important difference between showing that kids are learning well or schools are teaching well as opposed to that comparison that you slipped in there. how are we doing better than or compared to other states, provinces, countries, districts, which is not about quality and learning. It's about winning and victory.

But I have to be honest, I've never heard anybody tried to justify giving grades to individual students in terms of holding accountable teachers for how well they're doing overall, since the grade my kid gets tells you absolutely nothing about the overall quality of the school. So I don't even see how that argument flawed as I believe it is would begin to justify the process of giving grades. In terms of parents who want to know to make sure their kids are doing okay, that learning is taking place, their own kids, that's where it becomes important now to look at alternatives to grades. And I think here's what, and this is not stuff I'm thinking of as a utopian thought experiment, but here's what lots of great schools are doing now

in place of giving any letters or numbers, which turn out to provide a far richer and more informative sense to parents and to the kids themselves than a B-plus or an 87 ever could. The first way they do that is by offering narrative comments where teachers describe in words what they've noticed going on and where the improvement can happen. The second way that's even better,

is conferences or conversations with kids, with parents, with kids and parents, or best of all, with kids and parents where the kid is in charge of the session of revealing that, possibly by showing examples of the assignments in a portfolio to indicate this process. The reason I believe the latter conferences are, is superior to narratives, is because a conference can, in theory, be a dialogue. whereas a narrative is still a monologue, even though it's way better than reducing the kid to a letter or number.

So when those things are done and parents have a chance to experience being walked through exactly what's going on, the parent realizes, now I have more information with fewer disadvantages than when I merely got a report card that had a letter or a number on it.

Thanks, Alfie. So, Tom, what's your view on this? I mean, Alfie, painting a picture here, one that's probably compelling to a lot of frustrated parents who feel that the grading system isn't in any way capturing the nuances, the complexities of their child. It's like drawing a rich milkshake through a really, really thin straw. I mean, to what extent are you comfortable? And if you're not, give us a little more sense of why. it wouldn't be the right thing just to throw it all out and just move to, as Alfie's characterizing here,

kind of conversations, conversations between parents, teachers, students, you know, make this into a Socratic dialogue, not an exercise in quantification and qualification. Well, in this case, I do agree with Alfie that the notion of grades serving as a mechanism for accountability is, I think, a pretty weak argument. I really haven't seen that so much, but I do know it's related to a major concern that parents and students reflect when we do surveys of both about the grading process. And that is they're concerned about the terrible inconsistency there is in grading policies and practices across teachers within the same school. As we've tried to understand why that inconsistency exists, we find that often it comes down to there not being any clear notion of the purpose, of grading, or even what evidence would best reflect that purpose. One of the major steps that we continue to press educators to take on as they look at grading

reform is to be clear about their purpose and make that clear. And then once that is clear, you can go back to your policies and practices and see whether they do actually reflect that purpose. And what you'll discover is that many, many don't. Now, the other thing, I think it's essential for us to keep in mind. is that there's a long history behind this and actually why we came to grades. When we first began looking at the way we reported on student learning progress, it was just as obviously just narrative reports.

In the early colonial days, when there would be a single teacher purchased for, hired for a community, that they wouldn't have a lot of money to pay the teachers. So the community would make arrangements that, one the night during the week, the teacher would visit different family members. And during dinner, then the teacher would talk about the progress the students were making, what successes they had had, where they need to make improvements. It was all done sort of orally through these sort of, you know, conversations that they would have with parents in the home. And that continued for many, many years.

And it wasn't until the sort of middle 1800s where we started passing on our country, the mandatory school attendance policies, that we had more and more students finishing the elementary grades, moving on to high school. High schools increased rapidly during the country at that time. And then the challenges of doing that became real. We started with doing narrative reports, but then that became very difficult for teachers as well. It was the practical constraints that made those things hard.

I mean, I know my very first experience in education was to serve as a middle school teacher. In the middle school where I taught, I had five different classes of different students, each with over 30 students. So that would mean I had basically more than 150 students per day. If I had just a five-minute conversation with each of those students, that would be 12.5 hours of class time. If I reduced that to just two minutes of conversations with maybe a minute of transition, that's seven and a half hours of time. If you divide that across my five classes, that would mean taking an hour and a half per week in order to have those conversations, that doesn't include the time that a teacher I would have to spend reviewing students' work preparing for those conversations and helping students in preparing

for those conversations as well. We came to grades because of the necessity of finding the best of a very difficult situation. How can we communicate effectively and efficiently? How well students are doing in schools and make it a practical experience for the teachers. So granted, grades are not a deal, and grades by themselves are not very helpful. A grade on the top of a paper gives a kid no idea of what they've done well or how they can improve. They always have to be supplemented with other kinds of information to provide their kind of guidance direction to students and then to those that are wanting to help the students. But the grade itself, knowing your position or where your strengths and weaknesses are can really be an advantage in making

those changes and moving in that positive direction. Thank you, Tom. So Alvi, I mean, this is an interesting point. I love it when people bring in a historical perspective because it often gives us some illumination as to why we've reached certain decisions or choices today that may or may not seem logical. So Alfie, can you explain to us a little bit more about how your system of much more kind of contextualized, narrative-based reporting that does away with formal grading works in an era of mass education, why this isn't something that, you know, private kids, private school kids are really wealthy schools with extra small class to teacher ratios. You know, why this isn't something only for them. Well, first, as a matter of fact, many rich private schools,

most of them, in fact, continued to give letter a number grades, despite the fact, that they have the opportunity, which kind of blows out of the water, the idea that this is just a matter of convenience or necessity, given the number of kids each teacher has. Conversely, there are public schools that manage to make this work right now. Now, it may be the case that Tom is right and what originally pushed people away from a more thoughtful, holistic, qualitative approach to providing assessment for students was they have too many damn kids. And of course, let me also be clear that he's only talking about high school now. So that doesn't explain why in the world we would be giving letter or number grades in elementary school, where a typical classroom teacher has more like 25 or 30 kids, and that's it. I suspect that something else is involved here, too, which is an over-reliance on quantification,

a belief that it is more scientific and objective somehow to reduce things to, numbers, even though that's ultimately not true, because I can give a kid an 87.6349% and it's ultimately still based on subjective decisions I've made as a teacher, both about what to teach, how much of it to teach, what to assess on, what counts, what matters, and so on. Ultimately, it's a kind of illusion. You know, there's a professor at Rice University named Linda McNeil who said measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning. But if you're trained in psychometrics, which is all about numbers, you come to think that numbers are going to be the solution,

and you just have to have better or more accurate numbers, whereas in fact the process of reducing things to quantitative terms may always end up distorting what it is you're measuring, at least when you're talking about ideas like understanding and so on. But take a step back and consider, the impact of what Tom is telling us here. Remember, the research finds that giving grades undermines kids' excitement about learning.

Every study I have ever seen with elementary school through university that compares kids who get grades with kids who do the exact same assignment with no grades finds a diminution in excitement, enthusiasm, curiosity about what they're learning. And a reduction in preference for challenging tasks and depth of thinking. So here we have all this powerful research showing the damage that all kinds of grades do.

And the answer to that is, yeah, but we need them because it takes too much time given how many kids a high school teacher has. A, some high school teachers managed to do this. And in an article I wrote called The Case Against Grades a few years ago, in which I interviewed a number of high school teachers. who have completely stopped grading in public schools, I explain what they told me, how they managed to do it. But even if that does provide a problem for them, the answer is to rethink the organization of schools that assigns too many kids to a teacher,

not to shrug our shoulders and say, well, that's the way things are. Let's now destroy their excitement about learning by giving them grades because it's easier. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member. Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits, including a 10-plus-year library of some of our best debates, dialogues, and podcasts. You also get a free monthly newsletter featuring the debates that we're watching around the world.

And you get a specially curated Friday weekly monk members-only podcast that focuses on the big international, events and trends shaping our world. All of that, again, free at www.w.com. I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. Now, back to our program. Tom, one of the factors of bias that we see in grading, unfortunately, has to do with issues of race. And there's a preponderance of evidence that over decades now, children who are visible minorities who come from disadvantaged communities are subjectively graded and ranked in ways that are inferior to their white peers. To what extent are you concerned about racial bias as an ongoing and serious problem that really challenges the equity and fairness of grading as in any form or any fashion

in our educational system. Well, I think that's a very real concern and something for which we really need to be investigating with great depth. I've been particularly impressed by the work of Professor Quinn who has looked into some of these issues, and he has been able to show that racial bias does occur in evaluations of students just by putting different names on papers

and asking teachers to evaluate those papers or assign a grade to them. The results of the experiment, teachers were evaluating a second grade writing sample, were less likely to rate a version of the student writing sample written by a black student on grade level or above compared to an identical writing sample, reportedly written by a white student. And so what David Quinn has been able to show is these things are real and they need to be countered.

But what I find most intriguing and most hopeful about his research, though, is that we're not is that when we took those same teachers and provided them with a very significant and well-organized set of criteria for evaluating those papers, and they used those criteria in order to provide students with feedback and assign a rating of how good the paper was, that all the evidence of racial bias disappeared, that the rubric actually led to more clearly defined evaluation criteria that eliminated those things. So I think that there's hopefulness here that if we can move away from some of these

recognized poor grading practices and the bias and subjectivity can be associated with it by being clearer about the criteria that we're looking for, how we're judging the performance, what we're looking for in terms of determining expertise in these areas can lead us into much more for a promising direction. And I also want to add, though, that this notion that measurement takes away from it,

I think is really wrong that, you know, I always go back to the great quote by Lord Calvin, who said that if you can't measure, you can't improve it. And I think that's really true. In order for us to improve something like creativity, we have to be able to determine what creativity is and how we would recognize it, how we could tell the difference between the student who is and the student who isn't, because we have to help the one who, as we define, isn't, become more like the one who is. And that implies some

identification of criteria upon which then we can give feedback and help those students make that kind of progress. So I don't think the measurements are our enemy here I think is actually our vehicle for making the kind of improvements that are necessary. So Alfie, we would all admit that there are kind of,

there are finite educational resources in our society. And as students progress through their educational careers, the resources that are offered to them are offered on a competitive basis, hopefully a meritocratic basis. In the absence of grades, I mean, what is your solution, your prescription for a university, a community college that is sitting there thinking, I have to figure out what my incoming class looks like.

I want to use the social resources that I have to educate the best and most promising students in my society, in my community. I need some kind of grades. some kind of quantitative measurement of performance to understand how I'm going to allocate that scarce resource for the betterment of all. Well, first, the radical challenge to that would be, why should colleges pick the most gifted and the easiest to educate those who are most, have done the best job in high school? Is that really sure that?

Is that what we want in a society as for colleges to make what they have a, available only to those who outperform in high school, as opposed to those who would most benefit from a college education. That's a radical challenge. It's interesting how we all take that for granted. Second, high schools, both public and private in this country, some high schools have completely gotten rid of all grades. So we don't have to, again, start from scratch here and imagine how this would be done. We merely need to ask them. What they do is they provide a sheaf of narrative reports for their high school students from teachers and other adults who know them well,

as well as a very detailed, annotated account of the courses that they've taken. And that kind of substantive transcript when combined with interviews, essays and so on, actually provide college admissions office with a far richer picture of these applicants than saying, they have a 3.749 grade average. So it isn't necessary to the extent that we are pitting the kids against each other for scarce slots. But again, let me just add, that applies only to high school students. What you've just asked in your question doesn't even begin to apply to elementary and middle schools. Colleges don't care about anything that kids have done before ninth grade.

But if I can just return quickly to the Lord Kelvin quote about if you can't measure it, you can't improve it, I think that represents a really limited view of both improvement and what constitutes quality. The idea of conflating that with quantity is clear that that's happening again now, as I argued at the beginning of our discussion. Tom said we have to be able to recognize quality, know how to improve, identify the criteria. I agree with all that. But he did a little switcheroo there in suggesting that those things require reducing things to numbers. And that's exactly what I want to call into question, as have many other thinkers. It is possible to assess the quality of what students have done and to report out their quality in qualitative terms, without doing what the research shows turns out to be triply detrimental

by offering letters and numbers that are necessarily evaluative in the worst sense of that word. And, you know, one of the reasons I think, I'm not sure about the history here, but I think that another reason that we moved from this very effective narrative reporting some years ago to letter and number, especially numerical grades, is because of the very thing that Tom and I agree is destructive, which is competition, where you create this artificial scarcity of understanding and pit kids against each other.

So even though he doesn't like that and thinks we can somehow re-engineer this to minimize or even eliminate the competition, my hunch is that this nasty competitiveness where kids have to try to make other students fail in order to appear successful, themselves was largely responsible for shifting away from narrative assessment and toward grades in the first place. Thank you, Alfie. Well, let's go to closing statements. This has been a

terrific debate. Our resolution today, be it resolved, schools that grade students are failing them. Tom, you've been arguing against this motion. Let's have a couple minutes on the clock for you to wrap up with the key points that you'd like to leave our listeners with. Thanks so much for inviting me to take part in this discussion. And all always when I have a conversation with Alfie, I learn new things. I would like to close, though, by saying that I do believe that that grades can serve a valuable, meaningful purpose for educators by identifying sort of where they are in terms of their learning journey.

But we need to make sure that the purpose of grades and the way we interpret those is really going to be helpful for students and not detrimental. When Alpha refers to all the research that's compared grades versus comments, His analysis is correct, but if you look at those studies carefully and look at how the grades were determined, even down to the classic study by Ruth Butler from 1988, the grades, as they were given in these studies, were all referenced according to a student's standing among classmates. The Butler study refers them as being ego related or personally related, where the comments were task related. We really don't know if we made grades task related and comments ego or personal related if the results would have been the same. And I'm suggesting that maybe they could be quite different, that actually you can kill

a kid with comments. Even the studies we've done where we've asked students what they remember about their experiences. And often what they say was one of the most detrimental experiences they had, especially in elementary grades, was not what a teacher did to them on a repertion. report card, but what a teacher said to them in class as part of those comments. So we need to make sure we deal with quality issues in both of these areas and then use grades for their purpose. Recognize that they're shortcomings. Recognize that just knowing where you are doesn't give you

any idea how to improve. And that means that grades need to be supplemented with other information to provide students with this kind of direction and guidance on making those improvements and moving in a more positive direction. When I was younger, I worked as a Red Cross water safety instructor. And those of you who have gone through the swimming programs for the Red Cross know that the swimmers are classified according to their skill. In the system that we used, we classified our swimmers from being starfish to whales. Now, each of those levels represented a different level of proficiency with regard to their swimming abilities and what they were able to do in the water. I don't think Being classified in one of those categories was detrimental to any kid's interest in swimming or

their drive to do better. In fact, I think in many cases, it actually prompted them to want to improve, to take on those challenges. And I think the same could be true with grades, but it is necessary that we look at using them in good and positive ways to enhance learning and avoid some of those nasty, horrible grading practices that we know are far too prevalent in schools today and need to be abandoned. Thanks. Thank you. Alfi, we've been arguing debating today, an important motion, an important topic, be it resolved schools that grade students are failing them. You've been arguing in favor

the motion. As per debate convention, we're going to give you the last word. So take us away with your closing statement. I often like to quote the late educator Jerome Bruner, who said something that I immediately committed to memory and have referred to ever since as Bruner's Law, which is, we want students to experience success and failure as information, rather than as reward and punishment. I think that Tom would agree with me that that makes sense. We want kids to experience times when they flub things, when they struggle, and other times when they succeed as feedback in the truest sense of the word, which is not evaluative. Feedback by definition means just information.

And yet, while we can do certain forms of feedback badly, while I agree that some comments that teachers offer can be hurtful or pointless or simply not very informative, that can be improved. grades are inherently about experiencing things as reward and punishment. If you doubt that, then it's been too long since you were a student and you haven't talked to many students lately. When students get what they consider a high numerical grade or an A, that is a reward. It's equivalent to a sticker, a gold star, a pat on the head, a good job, which a huge range of research. indicates undermines kids' interest in whatever they had to do to get that reward. And conversely,

when they get what they considered to be an unacceptably low grade, that is a punishment. So I'm concerned about what the research is telling us. The particular Ruth Butler study that Tom mentions was indeed about grading conceived competitively. But most of the research that I was alluding to does not construe grades that way. So we already know from the data, and I cite the original studies in many of my articles and books if people are interested in reading them, that grades, even without competition involved, have the three effects that I mentioned at the beginning. They make kids less excited about what they're learning. They lead them quite logically to try to avoid unnecessary risks so they'll get a higher grade,

which is the point, unfortunately. And it leads them to a shallower approach to trying to figure out what they need to understand in order to get the grade, not for the purpose of understanding itself. In schools that are still requiring teachers to turn in a grade at the end, which is particularly destructive

and what colleges are looking for at the high school level, individual teachers who would like to create learning-oriented environments, rather than grade-oriented environments, end up doing two things. First, they never put a letter or number on any individual assignment that a student turns in, only a qualitative comment in writing and sometimes in person. And the second thing they do to minimize the inherently destructive effects of the final grade, is to let kids pick their own final grade during a conference, most of which has been devoted to important issues,

like how did the class go and how can I make it better? In the short run, we can minimize the damage of grading for a while, and great teachers are already doing that. They don't stop assessing, they don't stop making distinctions about better and worse ways of solving a math problem or writing an essay. I'm not suggesting a kind of relativism here. That's a straw man argument, but they do manage to minimize the harm that grades do, which is what we're discussing today. And in the long run, those teachers and parents are also working to abolish the grades that are given at the end to join those schools that are already successfully moving past numbers and letters in order to do richer, more authentic assessment and to be mostly about learning.

Thank you, Alfie, and thank you, Tom. This has been a terrific debate, an important one. It's gripped us all over the last 18 months and to have the opportunity to focus on this kind of critical issue of grading, which gets at so many of the issues and sometimes frustrations that parents, children, and educators have with our school systems, but also, I think, opens up our mind to some of the opportunities, the incredible social good that flows from education. This has been just a terrific debate. And thank you for lending your expertise, your knowledge, your considered opinions,

and more importantly, your civility and respect to one another to be part of this important conversation. Thank you. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. While that wraps up today's debate, I want to thank our participants, Alfie Cohn, and Tom Gusky. They certainly gave us a lot to think about. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, please. Send the Monk Debates an email.

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