Fairfax schools implemented ‘equity grading’ to fight ‘bias,’ by Jeremiah Poff, Washington Examiner, October 3, 2022
Officials with Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools have taken steps to implement so-called “equitable grading” at Langley High School and other schools across the district in a bid to fight “institutional bias,” according to internal FCPS communications.
The district’s emails, obtained by local parents through a Freedom of Information Act request and exclusively shared with the Washington Examiner, detail efforts by high school principals across the district, especially officials at Langley High School in recent months, to adopt “equitable grading” practices, including by using federal coronavirus relief funds to purchase a book for a teacher summer reading club titled Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms. The district and Langley administrators also denied the efforts were ongoing when a parent inquired.
The emails also revealed that efforts to implement “equitable grading” at all high schools under FCPS have been in motion for years, going back to 2015, with a notable acceleration in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic as schools across the district remained closed well into the spring of 2021.
“Equitable grading” practices vary based on how the concept is implemented, but the primary stated goal of proponents is to combat “institutional bias” and eliminate racial disparities in grade outcomes through a variety of tactics. Among the least controversial is the removal of grade penalties for late assignments and the ability to retake or redo assignments, often on an unlimited basis.
But proponents of the novel grading practices also advocate the elimination of “zero grades” by using a 50-100 scale. Under that scale, a student cannot receive a grade lower than 50, even if the assignment was never submitted, thereby creating a much higher grade floor and enabling students to achieve passing grades more easily.
In an interview with Harvard Ed Magazine in 2019, the author of Grading for Equity, Joe Feldman, explained that the initiative had three primary elements it sought to achieve: “accuracy, bias-resistance, and intrinsic motivation.”
Grading, he said, should not consider extraneous factors such as student behavior but only “a student’s academic level of performance.”
“Grading practices must counteract institutional biases that have historically rewarded students with privilege and punished those without, and also must protect student grades from our own implicit biases,” he said. “Our grading must stop using points to reward or punish, but instead should teach students the connection between means of learning and the ends — how doing homework is valuable not because of how many points the teacher doles out, but because those actions improve a student’s learning.”