IT’S DE-GRADING! Shutdown dilemma for teachers & students
“Remote learning” has become a grading nightmare for teachers and students.
Days into the city’s seismic shift to stem the coronavirus spread, Queens high school math teacher Bobson Wong has spotted a pattern among students who aren’t turning in assignments.
“Almost all the cases … it’s like, ‘My whole family has the flu,’ or, ‘We don’t have a laptop,’ ” said Wong, who teaches at Bayside High School.
But Wong, like teachers across the city, is still expected to grade student work during the shutdown, and is struggling to translate the messy new reality into clean number grades. “With all these factors coming in for every assignment, it’s even harder to quantify grades in the way we’re used to,” he said.
Teachers and school leaders across the country are struggling to maintain a semblance of structure and normalcy during remote learning while adapting to its many limitations.
Grades are at the center of that debate. “I don’t know what that grading system should look like, but I’m trying to keep it as close to what I was doing in the school year, so not everything changes all at once,” said Crystal Alexander-Thomas, an English as a Second Language teacher in Washington Heights. “It’s a huge part of education whether we like it or not.”
Education Department officials say they’re “stress[ing] the importance of flexibility, particularly when it comes to grading.”
But some teachers, students and parents want a more aggressive rollback.
“In a time like this, trying to picture myself taking a test with my younger siblings running in the background is too much,” said Leanne Nunes, a Bronx high school senior and executive high school director of the student group IntegrateNYC. The group surveyed 700 city students about their biggest concerns during school closures, and testing, grades and graduation requirements were central.
The group is asking officials to cancel the state Regents exams, promote every student to the next grade, and ensure all seniors graduate.
“A lot of teachers are just going off how they used to grade things before, but to grade things you kind of need a classroom environment to see who’s putting in a lot of effort and who isn’t,” said Nunes. “And not knowing the home environments is going to block that assessment.”
The flood of new online assignments, with the possibility of grades attached, is also ratcheting up pressure on some parents overseeing their kids’ home learning.
“I’ve honestly never felt so micromanaged in my life,” said Stacie Johnson, the mother of a first-grader in Brooklyn. “I’m still unclear how they will assess my daughter’s ‘academic performance’ through these platforms.”
School districts across the country have taken different approaches to the dilemma.
“It’s a challenge for the system because no school district wants to be accused of lowering standards,” said Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College.
Some have already moved to pass/fail grading, conceding it would be impossible to assign fair grades under the circumstances. Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest district, announced that while teachers will continue to grade work, grades during home learning will not count against students, and can only help them.
A city Education Department spokeswoman said “grades will be assigned for remote work and academic progress will be monitored by teachers,” and grading policies will vary from school to school.