Teachers reconsider Ds and Fs during pandemic
SAN DIEGO — Don Dumas, a U.S. history teacher at Bonita Vista High School, has decided he will not fail students during the pandemic.
Some of his students have lost an aunt, uncle or grandparent to COVID-19, he said. Others are “essential workers,” working extra hours at grocery and fast food jobs because their parents have lost income during the pandemic.
Sweetwater Union High School District schools are closed, with most students learning online from home, because of high COVID-19 levels in south San Diego County.
“Kids have so much to concern themselves with right now. They’re under so much stress,” Dumas said. “I’m not going to add to their feelings of inadequacy or feelings of failure by failing them in my class.”
Despite his intentions, the number of D and F grades in Sweetwater schools has ballooned, representing 28% of its high school grades and 32% of its middle school grades on recent progress reports.
By comparison, last year Ds and Fs were 20% of high school grades and 19% of middle school grades, according to district data. Sweetwater is not alone. Schools nationwide and across San Diego County are seeing a surge in poor grades fueled by the pandemic. The trend is in line with school officials’ and national experts’ predictions that school closures, along with obstacles to online education, will cause massive learning loss this year.
The surge in failing grades shows schools are likely feeling pressure from parents, researchers and others to prove that they are serving children well during the pandemic by maintaining high standards for learning, said Janelle Scott, a professor of education and Afri
can American studies at UC Berkeley.
The national consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimated that students who do not receive full-time, in-person instruction until 2021 will lose an average of seven months of learning this school year. Latino students may fall behind by nine months, and Black students by 10 months. Low-income students may fall behind by more than a year, the firm said.
Most school districts in San Diego County have reopened to some degree, but most are providing in-person instruction to only some students or on a part-time basis.
Some, including San Diego Unified and Sweetwater, are serving only small groups of students with limited, in-person sessions.
Experts say that bad grades are largely a result of the many challenges students face because of the pandemic and school closures, such as unreliable internet, a lack of adult support, lack of a quiet home environment to do schoolwork, anxiety, depression, hunger and homelessness — all factors outside a student’s or teacher’s control.
Before the pandemic,
some experts found that traditional grading practices tend to be inequitable and subjective. Now the pandemic is exacerbating those inequities.
“It illuminates … how poor our traditional grading practices are,” said Joe Feldman, an Oakland-based consultant who works with schools to make grading more equitable. “Traditional grading practices have always disproportionately hurt students who have fewer resources or weaker support nets.”
Some north San Diego County school districts reported higher numbers of students failing this year compared with previous years.
For example, Ds and Fs made up 30% of grades in the Escondido Union High School District during the first grading period, ending Sept. 25, and 36% in the second period, ending Nov. 6.
“This is mirroring the trend across our state and nation, with our students in high school struggling to succeed academically,” said April Moore, assistant superintendent for instructional services, at a Nov. 10 school board meeting.
In Poway Unified, where only elementary students
are attending school in person, F grades for middle and high school students more than doubled compared with the same time last year, according to district data. Ds and Fs made up 11% of Poway’s middle and high school grades this year, up from 7% last year.
“Our teachers are being encouraged to balance accountability and rigor with grace and understanding,” district spokeswoman Christine Paik said. “Many are allowing corrections, retakes, and resubmissions.”
Despite those numbers, she said, school officials don’t expect lower graduation rates this year, since the district offers various options to improve grades.
Students also will have the opportunity to retake classes and can recover lost credits through independent study or summer school if needed, Paik said.
San Marcos Unified School District saw a slight increase in failing grades this semester, said Tiffany Campbell, assistant superintendent of instructional services.
In the most recent grading period this fall, 24% of high school students were failing at least one class, compared with 19% the same time last school year. And 18% of middle school students were failing at least one class versus 15% last year.
“We have seen that the failure rate of our English learners in high school is very high; this group of students has been invited on campus for small-group cohort support,” Campbell said.
School administrators have tracked students who are at risk of failing, she added. Educators have found that their challenges include technical obstacles and social-emotional issues as well as academic problems.
At Grossmont Union High School District, where students can attend in-person classes for up to one day a week, 31% of grades during the first quarter were Ds or Fs. Comparable data to previous years is not yet available, but the district says it is offering additional outreach and support classes for struggling students, said Catherine Martin, district spokeswoman.
San Diego Unified, the state’s second-largest district, has not released grade data for this school year.
But Scott and other experts suggest it is unfair to students to use traditional grading practices during these nontraditional times.
“There are lots of reasons to suggest we need to adjust our grading expectations to accommodate this homebased variability that is none of our students’ fault,” Scott said.
Scott and Feldman argue that teachers should be using alternatives to traditional letter grades.
Scott suggests teachers write narrative assessments of what a student knows. Feldman argues for “pass/ incomplete” grades. He says it would be inaccurate, even dishonest, to use traditional grading practices because so many circumstances have changed.
For example, only 19% of teachers have covered all or nearly all the content they would have covered by this same time last school year, according to a recent nationally representative Rand survey of educators. Therefore, a grade for the same course by the same teacher this year doesn’t mean the same thing it did last year, Feldman said.
“Teachers should only assign grades that they feel accurately represent a student’s understanding of the content and when the student has had sufficient opportunity to access the learning,” Feldman said.
Feldman also recommends that schools take out nonacademic factors from achievement grades. Grading students based on behavior factors, such as whether a student turns work in late or is tardy to Zoom class, may end up punishing students who lack reliable technology or internet or who have more distractions at home that make it harder to comply.
Alternative ways of grading are generally not common among teachers and frequently draw backlash from community members.
San Diego Unified, for example, recently decided to remove nonacademic factors from academic grades to be more equitable. Afterward, some community members criticized the district, saying it was going easy on disadvantaged students.
Experts insist that alternative grading does not lower standards and often raises them, because it takes away loopholes that allow some students to get good grades without mastering the content.
Feldman said there can still be consequences for students who turn in work late or who commit other misbehaviors; those consequences just would not show up in a student’s academic grade.
“There’s a tendency to assume it’s mushy ... if there isn’t a letter grade,” Scott said. “But I think a holistic assessment is much more humane and can be much more rigorous.”