Lorain Schools should scrap grading system

Lorain City Schools teachers were forced to adopt a confusing grading system this year, but it needs to go away until the teachers are properly trained on it.

And the blame falls on Lorain Schools CEO David Hardy Jr. for implementing the new system on such a short notice.

Three months into the 201819 school year, the Lorain Schools’ new standards based grading method is causing frustration for students, parents, teachers and school district supporters.

The new standards based grading method replaces letter grades with numbers on a scale of 1 to 5.

A grade of 1 indicates a student is performing at a limited level of understanding about a subject, while 5 shows an advanced level of understanding,

The teachers, already dealing with trying to improve academics in the troubled district, now are trying to cope with a new student grading system that they had very little time to prepare for.

The teachers should concentrate on teaching, not learning a new grading system.

Jay Pickering, president of the Lorain Education Association, spoke Dec. 3 at a Lorain school board meeting and told members the elementary and junior high teachers received no training on the new grading system and that it is confusing in the classrooms.

Pickering said 350 teachers also want the public to know they had little instruction about the standards based grading system and that they did not request the system.

His remarks prompted 30 minutes of discussion among board members Tony Dimacchia, Mark Ballard, Yvonne Johnson, Bill Sturgill and Timothy Williams, who lamented the abrupt introduction of the new grading scale.

Hardy did not attend the Dec. 3 school board meeting.

The school board and Hardy have had a frosty relationship since he became CEO in 2017 under House Bill 70, which granted the state a takeover of Lorain Schools.

During a Nov. 28 meeting of the Lorain Academic Distress Commission, Hardy agreed Lorain teachers should have been better trained about the system before the school year started.

Pickering said previous comments from Hardy have implied the teachers were trained on the grading system.

But Pickering said the teachers are caught in the middle because they are the ones dealing with parents who want to know how their students are doing.

Before classes started this year, Pickering said the teachers had seven days of professional development.

In those seven days, there were no agenda items for instruction on standards based grading.

The announcement for standards based grading came the week of Sept. 10, when Lorain Schools teachers were told to erase all the grades in the computerized grading program that they had entered for the students so far.

This seems like an odd time of the year, after school started, to erase the grades and start a new grading system.

The Lorain Education Association reached out to Kenan Bishop, chief equity and achievement officer, and met Sept. 16 and 24.

On Oct. 25, Pickering said the teachers union learned the administration intended to continue with standards based grading.

So far, during this school year, the teachers have had three, half-day sessions for professional development.

In those times, Pickering said there was one meeting for second- and third-grade teachers to discuss the standards based grading.

There also is confusion about the grade scale itself and whether it should be a scale of 1 to 5, or 1 to 3.

This confusion falls directly on Hardy.

Dimacchia said this fall, a teacher’s conference for his own child was a waste of time because the teacher was not trained on the grading scale.

The October Titan Touchpoints newsletter from Hardy included an explanation of the grading scale of 1 to 5, but a sample grade two report card used scale of 1 to 3.

Dimacchia said he understands why people are confused because some of the literature has one through five, yet the actual report cards say one through three.

Dimacchia said, “I don’t know if it’s a five-point or a three-point, and it is alarming to me that the president of our teachers’ union does not know that either, nor do our teachers. So, what is it that we’re trying to accomplish by changing this system in the middle of a grading period or a school year?”

The lack of clarity and understanding shows the timing is not right for this ill-advised grading scale.

Lorain Schools have not reached the halfway point of the academic year, which is Dec. 21.

Hardy should consider scrapping this grading system so that the teachers can concentrate every second they can on educating the students.

The students deserve it.