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When Neither the Ends Nor the Means Justifies the Other and Good Intentions are Simply Not Enough

Quite a dust-up has arisen at school over the past couple of weeks over a change in policy. The change was well-intentioned; its effects, however, are potentially disastrous. Whether the conflict can, or will, be resolved in a fruitful manner remains to be seen. The issue at question is the school-wide grading policy, which has recently been amended an authority of the principal, who takes full responsibility for having made the decision. The policy as it now stands mandates the following (the numbering is merely a convenience here; it is unrelated to the policy itself):

1. Teachers must allow students to redo any work that does not earn at least a C the first time.

2. Work that is formative, that is, it is work students do as a means of mastering some skill or knowledge, may be redone as many times as necessary and may earn any score up to and including 100%, regardless of how many times the student had to try.

3. Summative tests, that is, a test that students undertake as a means of demonstrating that they have, indeed, mastered some skill or knowledge, must be redone once for a chance to earn a score as high as 80.

4. Summative work that takes other forms, such as essays or projects, may be redone more than once. (Note: It is not clear yet whether that "may be" means that teachers are to allow more than one re-do attempt, or whether teachers have the authority to determine whether the student is to have more than one re-do attempt.)

5. For formative work, students have until the summative at the end of the unit to redo the work.

6. For summative work, students have one week from the day that the teacher puts the graded work back in his or her hand to re-do it. (That means a given student is absent, a teacher must keep track of when he or she came back and got the work returned; thus, redo deadlines are individualized for every student, depending on when he or she was present to collect the work.)

7. Work that was not turned in on time must be accepted late with a maximum score of 80.

8. Students must attend SDS ("Self-Directed Study" a daily tutoring period) for re-teaching prior to re-doing any formative or summative assessment.

9. Teachers must require any student earning any grade lower than a C for the term to attend SDS. (Teachers issue passes for every student who needs, or wants, to attend SDS, keep records of which student has which pass, indicate whether the students did or did not show up to SDS as required, file disciplinary paperwork for students who are mandated to come to SDS and refuse to do so, and supply written records of all of the above to department chairs at the end of every month.)

10. Students must have a minimum of 20 grades per nine weeks.

11. Students must have a minimum of 4 summative assessments every nine weeks--at least one every two weeks. (We meet on a rotating block schedule, that is, 90-minute periods that meet every other day, so that means a summative assessment roughly every five class periods.)

12. Teachers must update grades on EdLine (a secure on-line reporting system to which students and parents have access) at least once weekly.

13. If a student fails to turn in a given assignment, he or she is to be awarded an "M" (for "missing").

14. Missing work must be made up within one week (although it is not presently clear whether that one week is a week from the day that the work was originally due, or, as required in number 6, a week from the day that the teacher gives the work back to the rest of the class, assuming that the student who didn't turn it in is in class that day to "get back" his non-existent work.)

15. Once missing work is made up, it is to be notated in EdLine with an "L" (for "late").

16. Work that has not yet been redone to earn a grade as high as a C must be notated in EdLine with an "N" (for "not yet").

17. The teacher must override the term grade in EdLine for any student who has either an "N" or an "M" on his or her record, replacing that grade with an "I" (for "Incomplete").

18. Once the missing work has been turned in, or the "Not Yet" work has been raised to a C, then the teacher must replace the "I" with the correct term grade.

19. Students are to be given a chance to re-do work that was turned in right at the end of any given term, and teachers must file paperwork to have term grades updated for any work that students re-do after the term ends.

And a particularly controversial stipulation:

20. If a student fails the semester, and does so with a score lower than a 54%, the teacher must alter the semester grade to a 54 (in order to ensure that the student has a chance to pass for the year, which he or she could do, mathematically, by earning an 84% the second semester.)

This is not the complete policy; the complete policy is three pages of single-spaced text. I offer only the main points. These rules combine into quite incredibly complicated scenarios. Here's an example:

Say that Johnny fails a reading quiz over Act 1 in my unit on William Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. He may redo that quiz as many times as he likes in order to earn a higher grade, so long as he does so prior to the summative assessment at the end of the unit. Before he can retake, I will give him a pass to come to SDS for tutoring. He will come to SDS at the same time as several other students from his class and other classes, some of whom will be working on the Winter's Tale quiz and some of whom will be working on quite different things. (We have been issued 20 SDS passes, so that we can call up to 20 students at a time. How many we call will depend on how many have D's or F's for the term, how many are working on mandatory re-takes of the last summative assessment, and how many have asked to come for SDS so that they can redo an assignment, even though they are already earning at least a C for the term. During SDS, I will also have to monitor the work of my students from the previous class period who didn't have anywhere to go for SDS that day. Ideally, this will be few students, but it is often most of the class, so I could have 15-20 students left from first period plus up to 20 students from my other classes all in the room at the same time.)

After Johnny does his review session with me, I can send him, on another day, during another SDS period, to a testing center where he may re-take the quiz. I can either give him the same quiz over again, or I can write a second version of the quiz. Since Johnny can retake the quiz several times if necessary, I either have to keep giving him the same version or I have to keep re-writing new versions each time he needs to retake it. If other students in the class are also retaking the quiz, unless I can ensure that they all do so on the same day, I have to make a determination about how many versions of the quiz I need if I don't wish to give them all the same quiz over and over and I don't wish them to be able to share with each other information about the re-take version.

A further complication is that Johnny is taking seven classes. In a given week, there are four available SDS periods (Mondays are used for students to participate in school clubs). In order to mediate conflicts between teachers over which class a student must attend to on a given day, there is a rotating system for the four core subjects. (Elective teachers or World Languages teachers must defer to core subjects because the core subjects are those which have mandatory testing for compliance with No Child Left Behind.) Suppose, then, that, as is often the case, Johnny is behind not only in my class, but in several others. That means that I can only call Johnny in on Wednesday, the English override day for SDS. Since Johnny only has until the summative assessment, and the summative assessment is going to be a maximum of about two weeks after the formative (since I have to have four in the nine-week grading period), then at best Johnny is going to get two SDS days to retake his quiz--the first Wednesday to get tutoring and the second Wednesday to retake the quiz itself. Since I am charged, however, with re-teaching Johnny until he understands the material, I must find some other way to ensure that he gets his unlimited chances to relearn the material before the summative.

If, of course, I call Johnny in for SDS on Wednesday and issue him a pass, and then he fails to report, and I can discover that he was, indeed, at school and simply chose not to attend my SDS, then I must turn him in for skipping. I write up a referral for the administrator responsible for Johnny, and Johnny will be sentenced to some penalty. This is usually in-school detention, which means that he will miss a day of my class, during which I will have to provide him with a written lesson plan so that he can do some work in ISD. If he fails to do THAT work, then I will additionally have to chase him down to re-do that work, starting all over on another round of SDS for that make-up work. I will presumably be off the hook, though, for the original quiz, as Johnny will have sacrificed his limited time for tutoring prior to being able to retake the quiz prior to the summative assessment.

Now suppose that Johnny fails two more quizzes and doesn't turn in three of five formative assessments over the course of our study of the play. We have a significant problem with trying to get him caught up with learning all of the material prior to the summative assessment. I am creative, and so I schedule several meetings with Johnny for before and after school and I communicate with him via e-mail to try to spur him to getting his work caught up. I have, of course, contacted his mother about this problem (documenting my contact with her on the record sheet that will be turned in to administrators with any failure report or disciplinary referral), and she helps to ensure that Johnny gets some of his work in. Eventually, then, Johnny could end up with an average of roughly 90% for all of the formative work for Winter's Tale, despite his initially failing all quizzes and his failure to turn in most, or even all, of the homework on time. (The missing work, remember, would only earn 80% as a maximum upon its completion--but he could have as many tries as we could figure out how to sandwich in between his SDS obligations to his other classes.) Let us suppose, further, that Johnny then doesn't turn in the essay at the end of my unit on Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. He or she gets a chance to turn that work in later; the penalty is that he or she can earn nothing higher than 80 for it. (An 80 is a C+ in our system.) If, however, that piece of work is late and doesn't earn an 80, then, because this is a summative essay, and not a summative test, he may redo that work as many times as he can in the time remaining to him, earning as high a grade as he can. I am obligated to collect his work and give him timely feedback in order to maximize his chances to keep trying again in the allotted time. Suppose that Johnny, in a burst of self-interested, short-term diligence, manages three revisions of his essay in the week allotted to him, and earns a 95. For my class, which is an advanced, college prep class, grades are weighted 80% summative/20% formative. So Johnny's grade for the unit will end up as follows:

Assignment	Original Score	Final Score
Quiz 1	45	100
Quiz 2	62	100
Quiz 3	50	100
Formative 1	65	100
Formative 2	0	80
Formative 3	81	100
Formative 4	0	80
Formative 5	0	80
Summative	0	96
Formative Total:	37.9	92.5
Summative Total:	0	96
(96 x .80) + ( 92.5 x .20) = 95.3 A

Finally, let us assume that the Winter's Tale unit ends the first semester. I had to allow Johnny a week into the second semester to redo the essay, so once he has done that and I have recalculated his scores, I must now file a change-of-grade request with the guidance department to change the semester grade. If a transcript has been issued to a college, it must now be re-issued. Multiply Johnny times twenty or thirty or forty students in any given teacher's 130 student load, and you can imagine the nightmare.

Much of this grading policy has been in place at our school for a year and a half. It was in place in almost this exact form last year, except that last year students earned 50% for every assignment that they didn't turn in, rather than a zero. This extremely unpopular aspect of the program was replaced by the "raise the semester grade to 54%" feature this year. At the beginning of this year, however, a new principal, understanding that the faculty was extremely unhappy with the policy, asked for input and approved a revision of the policy that gave teachers authority to refuse students who simply refused to perform the right to turn work in late. Under that version of the grading system, I could have refused Johnny the right to turn in some of that work late, if he had demonstrated that he was simply refusing to turn work in on time in the absence of any extenuating circumstance. We were told, at the meeting at which the changes were presented, that now, "even if a student tears up a test in front of you and stubbornly refuses even to try to answer any questions," we are obligated to give that student a new test, after re-teaching. Students are, then, allowed to preview tests before taking them, and recalcitrance and even insubordination accompanied by abusive language is rewarded with another opportunity to test. The other major change was to extend the re-do periods into the next grading period, eliminating what used to be at least a few firm deadlines to which students had to adhere.

Perhaps it is needless to say, but most teachers are extremely unhappy with a grading system that allows for any student with such an extensive pattern of non-performance as we imagined in the case of the imaginary student Johnny to end up with a grade that indicates excellence. Few teachers are going to feel that it is reasonable for a student who missed six out of eight deadlines and whose highest grade on any assignment was a C+ should be identified to a college as an excellent student. Of much greater concern is the belief that after such an experience, Johnny will be further encouraged to ignore deadlines and fail to study on his own initiative. Since he has learned that he can earn an A by procrastinating and relying on his teacher and his mother to provide him with the direction and initiative to get the work made up, his reliance on others to ensure his success is likely to become further entrenched. His grade may end up suggesting that Johnny is an excellent student; however, Johnny will not, in fact, be an excellent student. He will be a student wholly dependent on others for any success he might have. We will have created a student who embodies the antithesis of what we want public education to engender.

This is, however, only one of the reasons that the enactment of the policy changes has ramped up the antagonism in our building. The real provocation is the blatant mistrust of teachers conveyed by the restrictive, minutely defined policy. The offense has been present since the initial implementation of the policy last year, but it was somewhat mitigated by the willingness of new administration to listen to teacher's concerns. The recent decision to rescind most of the teacher-initiated changes, as well as adding some additional provisions perceived as lenient, has re-ignited the furor. Teachers feel that their authority has been gutted, that they are being required to participate in a program that engenders misleading information about students' actual abilities, and, that all the good, hard-working, effective teachers are being punished for the non-compliance and non-performance of a few ineffective ones. A number of vocal opponents to the strategy have been trying to convince administration all year that good teaching cannot be legislated. People who don't do what they are supposed to do--either because they don't know how or because they are simply non-compliant--won't be more likely to do what they are supposed to do just because there are more rules to follow than there used to be. Most of all, teachers resent the fact that the full responsibility for a student's success has been assigned to the teachers of that student. This grading policy institutionalizes procedures that exonerate students and their parents from responsibility for the child's education.

That absolution of obligation is not the intent, however; rather, this system of minutely-conceived rules comprises a well-intentioned attempt to respond to a crisis situation. Our school is one of the many in the country at constant risk of losing accreditation under the NCLB law, because the vast majority of our population is at risk, educationally speaking, for a wide array of reasons ranging from poverty and its concomitant problem of a large number of students whose parents, for whatever reason, do not or cannot advocate for their children as we would wish them to do, to a lack of sufficient preparation for the level of expectation in high school courses, to a widespread failure to attend school every day, to widespread transiency (most years we have roughly 60% of our students either enroll at our school after September 1 or depart before June 15--many of them more than once). NCLB, however, is unforgiving. It does not set different standards for schools dealing with students with fewer resources (that is the point, after all, of calling the bill "No Child Left Behind"), nor does it provide funding so that schools working with those populations are able to pay for additional resources to fill in the gaps; thus, schools like mine are left to do the best they can with what they've got, and the more difficult things get, the harder dedicated people are going to try to control the uncontrollable. That means, inevitably, more rules.

Barry Schwartz, a professor of Psychology at Swarthmore college said, in a recent talk for TED, that the "more rules" strategy is a mistake. (TED is Technology, Entertainment, Design, an organization formed in 1984 that holds an annual conference dedicated to bringing together the greatest ideas of the year.) Dr. Schwartz points out that when we get into a crisis, we try two things: more rules and more incentives. "Rules and incentives may make things better in the short run, but they create a downward spiral that make them worse in the long run. Moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules that deprive us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisations." The more rigid the system of rules, in other words, the less room there is for dealing with any individual case as an individual case. The less flexibility, the less ability to adapt to different needs. In education, then, the less ability to adapt to different needs, the less ability to help individual students get to the same place in the end. If we keep trying to treat a wide variety of diseases with the same antibiotic, some patients will get well, and some will die. This is as true when we try to treat all teachers as if they were the same as it is when we try to treat all students as if they were the same. Schwartz explains that this kind of over-regulation (he uses an example of a 75-item script in use by every kindergarten teacher in Chicago to teach a 25-page picture book) gets created and used in a desperate effort to avert disaster--the disaster being, in this era, the failure to achieve AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) under NCLB--but he points out that they do, indeed, tend to prevent disaster, "...but what they assure in its place is mediocrity." No one would argue, I think, that our hypothetical student Johnny is headed for mediocrity at best. (Dr. Schwartz's talk is compelling and inspiring; I highly recommend it. In accordance with TED practice, it is 20 minutes long.)

Dr. Schwartz has been amply proven right by the unfolding of events at my school. The harder we try as teachers, administrators, adults--as an institution--the less effort we require of our students. The rules that have been devised for our school have all been conceived as a means of trying to find ways to overcome these problems which bear directly on our students' performing at lower levels than students from wealthier, more politically savvy, better educated demographic areas. Most of these obstacles to our students' achievement are largely beyond our control, so good people have expended a great deal of energy trying to dream up ways that we can, as an institution, somehow contrive to provide the support structures that our students don't get at home so that we can meet all the testing benchmarks demanded by compliance with NCLB. We have accepted the role assigned to us; we have accepted full responsibility for all students' achievement. Unfortunately, in the act of accepting that responsibility, we have ensured our own failure, because by absolving students and parents of responsibility we ensure that the very students who most need to learn how to advocate for themselves, how to work on their own behalf, and how to take charge of their own lives--to move out of a world in which they are victims of every force that comes along by simple reason of having no idea how to resist it--get none of those things. We can, indeed, compensate, in a great many cases, for enough obstacles to ensure a minimum level of achievement on the part of our most at-risk students so that at least many fewer students are "left behind," at least in the sense of passing a very few minimum skills tests, the accumulation of which, if it truly represents all that students have accomplished in high school, is woefully inadequate for a life. In succumbing to the temptation to rule by rules, we ensure that no teacher can demonstrate any level of genius. We ensure a minimum standard for all teachers, and so we allow all teachers--and, consequently, all student--to settle for much less than their very best. The end result is that all children are left far behind where anyone with a belief in the power of education to give people real power over their own lives would want them to be. Nobody wins.

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