COUNTY SCHOOLS SEEING SURGE IN POOR GRADES

Experts say low marks reflect disruptions, lack of student resources

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 schools are closed, with most students learning online from home, because of high COVID-19 levels in South 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 percent of its high school grades and 32 percent of its middle school grades on recent progress reports.

By comparison, last year D’s and F’s were 20 percent of high school grades and 19 percent 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 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. Hispanic students may fall behind further, 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 only serving 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, a lack of a quiet home environment to do school work, anxiety, depression, hunger or 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 County school districts reported higher numbers of students failing this year compared to previous years.

For example, D’s and F’s made up 30 percent of grades in the Escondido Union High School District during the first grading period ending Sept. 25, and 36 percent 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 to the same time last year, according to district data. D’s and F’s made up 11 percent of Poway’s middle and high school grades this year, up from 7 percent last year.

“Our teachers are being encouraged to balance accountability and rigor with grace and understanding,” said district spokeswoman Christine Paik. “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, including office hours, tutoring and in-person and online counseling.

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 percent of high school students were failing at least one class, compared to 19 percent the same time last school year. And 18 percent of middle school students were failing at least one class versus 15 percent 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.

“For most students already struggling, the pandemic has not improved their performance; though some have found that they have thrived in an online environment that wasn’t available to them before,” Campbell said.

At Grossmont Union High School District, where students can attend in-person classes for up to one day a week, 31 percent of grades during the first quarter were D or F grades. 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 any grade data for this school year.

Nontraditional times

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 African-american studies at UC Berkeley.

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 recommends teachers write narrative assessments of what a student knows, while Feldman argues for “pass/incomplete” grades. Feldman said it would be inaccurate, even dishonest, to use traditional grading practices because so many circumstances have changed.

For example, only 19 percent 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.

“We do better by being honest and humble than to, sort of, create the myth that things are normal in our grading and assessment.”

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.”

As for Dumas, in addition to not failing students this year, he is accepting late work — something he already did before the pandemic — and he is not giving zeroes anymore.

Both are strategies that grading experts like Feldman have recommended to encourage students to improve, rather than punish them without giving them a chance to learn content they missed.

“This pandemic is teaching us all so much about resiliency, that students right now don’t really need that hard lesson from their teachers,” Dumas said.