Your Kids Aren't Learning: Mastery-Based Learning + Equitable Grading = Fraud

What gets measured gets done. What if the person in charge of what is done is also in charge of how it's measured?

This series explores the most compelling reasons you have to declare independence from the peculiar institution of American government schooling and make significant life changes to ensure your kids get a real education, something American public schools no longer provide, if they ever did. These essays are based on my observations and thousands of conversations with students aged 13-18 and their families over the span of my 20-year career teaching in government-run schools in California.

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Three years ago, volunteer teachers at my large, high-performing high school site shadowed a student for a day, following her same schedule, sitting in a student desk, and doing the work she was asked to do. (Hilariously, we were also told by the principal that we shouldn’t feel bad if we couldn’t actually do the work.)

This came under the auspices of Stanford policy group Challenge Success, whose slogan is “Less Pressure; More Balance; Deeper Learning”. That’s right, Stanford is telling your high-achiever to slow down and smell the roses; besides, she probably wouldn’t be accepted there anyway.

So we got subs for our classes and followed kids around the school.

It was taxing running around our large campus, but also oddly boring. Just when I’d start working on something, when the teacher finally had taken attendance, passed out papers, answered questions, gone over the directions for the third time — just when I started to get into a state of flow with the work, the bell would ring.

Then it started all over again in another class.

The math class, pre-calculus, was the most interesting. The work was difficult and the teacher let students dive right in because he’d explained it the day before. Nothing was on the line for me so I enjoyed the challenge, especially when the process started to click. I wanted to ask if my work was right, but the teacher was hustling from desk to desk trying to help students with their hands up. He occasionally admonished kids who were off-task, likely because they too were lost but not interested enough in the work to take a stab at it.

When I left class that day, I had only completed a few of the problems assigned and wasn’t sure I’d done them correctly. If I was a student, I’d’ve had homework and little certainty whether I was doing it correctly. The teacher has a solid reputation as an all-around good guy, a professional, but he doesn’t correct homework, so unless I made a point of asking him to review my work — IF he had time in class — I probably wouldn’t receive any feedback until I took the exam.

This is a good math teacher in a California Distinguished School in a neighborhood where 1500 square foot starter homes sell for well over $1,000,000.

How would your kid fare in that math class?

Good thing there’s PhotoMath. PhotoMath allows a student to take a picture of a math problem then helpfully solves it for her, showing all the steps. Remember einstellung, that reverse-engineering-the-answer problem I told you about here? In math it’s now the norm. Kids ignore instruction, ignore practice, and have an App do their homework. 100 million downloads later, millions of American kids believe that because they can see how PhotoMath solved the problem, they can solve it too. The first time they actually try to do the math often happens on test day, with predictably awful results.

That math class was by far the best one I visited in terms of student engagement, but it was clear to me that only the kids most persistent in asking for teacher support would get it — not for the teacher’s lack of trying, mind you.

In the other classes I visited, I could just nod along and pretend to follow the lecture or, as I saw many kids doing, quietly look at my phone under the desk while the teacher played a video about the content or an audiobook of the text.

Ceramics was fun for me, but I was frankly shocked at the number of kids who sat idly at their work stations looking at their phones or chatting instead of actually working on their project. They just didn’t feel like it.

My site went to all this trouble and expense to remind teachers how stressful the average kid’s day was. How exasperating bells were. How much homework students got. How much information was blasted at them.

Instead it demonstrated that students put no particular importance on learning any material and, more importantly, they knew they could get away with blowing most of it off.

And from what I saw, they could. No teacher remonstrated with the kids who didn’t do the work. They just ignored them.

Which sounds fine, right? Choices have costs. Decisions have consequences.

Enter Equitable Grading Practices summarized beautifully here by fellow dissident teacher, Paul Rossi. In many districts, grading for Equity is now Policy. Equity mandates that learners shouldn’t be penalized for turning in work late or not at all. It demands that teachers give passing grades to students showing any facility with the skills primarily used in the class. It offers students an overall grade based on ONE piece of work in a skills-based classroom. It strongly encourages teachers to allow test retakes until a student shows “mastery”, which is a more ambiguous label than it might at first seem when applied in the typical American classroom.

In fact, it’s just more fraud, fraud dressed up with “good” grades so parents won’t complain and teachers won’t have to tackle the Sisyphean task of remediating what these policy changes [intentionally?] dumbing down K12 education have wrought on millions of American kids.

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The pressure on teachers to pass students showing any level of understanding in the class — even at the eleventh hour — is real, if unofficial. I was senior, tenured, and well-regarded at my school. I regularly infuriated the counseling department with the number of Fs the seniors in my economics course had at progress report time, but most of my students did, in fact, pass — even when I knew they had little understanding of the principles of economics or the literacy to ever understand them.

The counselors would hurl abuse at me if I said this to them, but now that I look back on it, I can see that I was lax, having fallen prey to the noxious idea that it’s unfair to punish a student for learning at the pace appropriate for her, i.e., when she is ready.

That word: ready. I fully agree that we should pace learning for each individual student. I cannot tell you the number of times I had a wonderful, big-hearted student who wrestled with the material honestly but for whom there was never going to be enough time in a 180-hour course to catch up.

But for every kid like that, there were 20 who took loose late work and “learning for mastery” and “skills-based learning” policies and realized, quickly, that policies meant to support students who learn at a slower pace actually give all students license to ignore work until the absolute last possible moment.

I paid for my go-along-to-get-along cowardice with mountains of shoddy work to mark right before grades were due, hours of tutoring sessions with kids who had failed, and the voluminous paperwork required to change grades when they finally proved they had learned what the state standards require, sometimes months after the semester ended.

Students weren’t taking extra time to learn at a slower pace; they were gambling that they could avoid the work and still earn a passing grade by doing the minimum at the last minute. I’m sure you can imagine how this would retard the progress of a good student in a class like math. Your kid, who actually does the homework, meets up with the teacher when she needs additional help and studies diligently for her exams, does well enough, but her classmates are failing tests, spectacularly, because they’re either not doing the homework and counting on that 11th hour save or they’re cheating the practice, turning in perfect work they didn’t really do courtesy of PhotoMath or Chegg. The teacher slows the pace of the class, alarmed by the high failure rates on her exams. As a result of this slowed pace, your kid gets 2/3rds of the instruction she needs to succeed in the next year of math. The compounding effect of this kind of teacher decision-making in response to skills-based/equitable grading is real and widespread, and is one of the reasons states like California want to rejigger the entire 6-12th grade math sequence — districts as large as San Diego unified are removing advanced and Honors math classes — for maximum learning equity.

Of course, that also means no one’s learning math unless parents take it upon themselves to get their child additional math instruction at home. This has also raised a hue and cry because “rich” parents can help their children at home and are more likely to hire tutors: equity be damned. (Khan Academy can provide free support, but if you’ve got a little money budgeted for this, I’ve heard good things about MathAcademy’s adaptive learning.)

Please note that my standards didn’t totally erode; I still held all students accountable for revising essay exams (all my exams were written) until they demonstrated clear, basic understanding of the major principles of economics, but this usually required a number of small-group tutoring sessions at lunch and after school. There were also more than a few kids angry that I actually graded what they turned in. They expected to hand in a fraction of their missing assignments late, get minimum points for doing them (poorly), and raise their grade to a D or C because they’d done that before. Students didn’t expect that I would actually read and grade their late work and require revision until their understanding was clear. This begs the question: were other teachers grading the late work we were all coerced to accept or just handing out points for compliance?

My colleagues didn’t understand why I bothered. More than once I heard, “Why are you putting yourself through this? Just give them a D once they hand in the make-up work. They won’t get into any good colleges with that and you won’t have to see them again or deal with counseling or admin.”

Then there were the kids who were really smooth operators, blowing off all work and tests in my “hard” class because they knew there was a shortcut around harpies like me: internet-based credit recovery through programs like Apex by Edmentum. A student can replace an entire semester grade by clicking past the text and videos meant to teach the material and heading straight for the tests where he can use his phone or another browser window to look up the correct answers. He can use “Homework Help” sites like Chegg and CourseHero that have searchable libraries of exams from Edmentum and other credit recovery contractors; a nominal fee gets you access to all the answers on all the tests in a credit recovery course.

If students are unwilling or unable to pay for answers and don’t know how to compose an effective Boolean search (which almost no students do), they rely on the old-school method of guessing on the test, counting on the fact that they have unlimited attempts at credit recovery tests, so they can just guess until they get enough questions correct to pass.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also let you know about test corrections. In this process, the teacher returns the test to the student and allows her to take it home, go over all of her wrong answers and write a short explanation as to why she missed the question. Besides enabling future cheating unless the teacher is going to revise their tests every year (most teachers don’t), this does little to provide the additional practice with the information a student needs to perform the skill or retain the knowledge. Test corrections turn into another worksheet, graded just as cursorily. It’s rarely a springboard for re-teaching. How could it be when large numbers of students are never properly incentivized to study for exams in the first place?

A parent of a student at my old site recently admitted to me sheepishly that her son had earned Ds in his US History course. He was offered online credit recovery to raise his grade to a University of California A-G compliant A, B, or C.

In three hours on a Saturday he retook the entire year-long course and replaced his Ds with As.

That he was incentivized and enabled to do that by his school is fraud.

Your kids aren’t learning. At all.

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If you’ve made it this far and don’t have the desire to curse me and my posterity, please hit the like button. This makes my posts more visible to other parents who don’t understand how much worse things have become since they were in school. The system is actively robbing American children of their full potential to serve mediocre adults and maintain power in the hands where it currently rests. Only parents can reverse this trend; American authoritarianism is born in its “free” public schools.