No extra credit, plenty of retakes: This Philly middle school has embraced ‘grading for equity’

Imagine school with no quizzes, where students redoing both assignments and tests is a way of life. There’s no extra credit, and less emphasis on deadlines.

It’s called “grading for equity,” and it’s routine at Science Leadership Academy Middle School, a school for fifth through eighth graders in University City. SLAMS is the first Philadelphia public school to adopt the practice.

The idea is to eliminate nonacademic factors from grades, to focus on mastery, on deep and meaningful learning and assessments that are a true reflection of kids’ knowledge and don’t give an advantage to any student over another.

On a Wednesday afternoon in mid-October, SLAMS sixth grader Aubrey Pearson and her dad, Abdul Pearson, met with Sarah Bower-Grieco, Aubrey’s adviser, for a formal interim conference — instead of a conference after grades are finalized in late November. SLAMS, which educates 360 students, got permission from the Philadelphia School District to shift its conferences as a key part of its equity grading move.

When Aubrey, her dad, and her adviser met, Aubrey led the conversation, talking about her strengths, what she needed to work on, and set a course for how she’ll finish out the marking period while she still has plenty of time to affect her grade. She can retake tests and rewrite assignments as many times as she wants to during a unit.

“I feel like it’s way better,” said Aubrey, 11. “There’s a lot of feedback, and if you’re having a bad day or something is happening at home, you can retake a test. Now, I can see what I need to go in and change.”

The move to equity grading was a mindset change, said Abdul Pearson, but he’s impressed with how Aubrey is able to take charge of her learning, and now, “I’m kind of jealous,” he said. “When I went to school, we didn’t have this option.”

SLAMS opened in 2016 as a middle school patterned after Science Leadership Academy, the nationally acclaimed project-based high school in Center City. SLAMS kept the project focus, and has long steered students toward performance-based learning. Each teacher writes their own rubric so families have a clear understanding of class and grade expectations.

“We’ve never been a school that did homework, because we know that kids go home to wildly inequitable home situations,” said Timothy Boyle, SLAMS’ principal since its inception.

Grading for equity was the next natural step in the school’s evolution, Boyle said.

Schools have awarded grades in largely the same way for more than 100 years, and that’s worthy of examination, said Boyle, who first learned about equity grading several years ago. The concept derives from the work of Joe Feldman, a former California teacher and administrator who wrote a 2018 book about the topic.

Traditionally, “we’re grading an executive function skill if a student is on time with everything,” said Michael Franklin, the SLAMS pre-engineering teacher. “It was essentially saying, ‘If you are arbitrarily able to do this skill by Tuesday, you got this grade.’ When you knew something was almost as important as how much you knew.’”

Think of it this way: Typically, grades are essentially an average of students’ performance over time, which works for well for students who get a concept from the beginning. But if a student starts out with lower grades, it’s tough to overcome early struggles, even if that student makes tremendous progress and ultimately masters the material as well as the student who got it right away.

That style of grading can perpetuate inequities: The student who got the concept from the beginning might do so because they had a family who paid for tutoring or something else that bolstered their educational background, and the student who struggled might do so because they lacked those resources. Assessing only how a student performs at the end of the learning process wipes away those built-in disadvantages, equity grading proponents argue.

Grading for equity also keeps student behavior out of the mix, as well as extra credit — assessment is only about a student’s grasp of the material in a certain time frame. (Students can retake tests or resubmit assignments as much as they like, within reason. You can’t redo something in November from a unit your class moved on from in September.) If a student starts out with a C but moves up to a A, the final grade is an A.

“We’re not giving kids bonus points for having a pencil, or participating in class,” said Boyle. “We are actively building structures so that we know what kids can and can’t do, and give them opportunities to get better at what they can’t do yet.”

The move to grading for equity requires a real shift for everyone — students, parents, and teachers.

The Philadelphia School District recommends students receive three graded assignments per week; “we’re not coming close to that,” Boyle said. Marcie Hull, SLAMS’ veteran art teacher, cut down the number of projects students work on, from 10 to 5, and shuffled timelines.

Hull loves the move to conferences at the midway point of the marking period, not the end.

“It’s mind-blowing for them,” said Hull. “It’s a total game-changer to sit in these meeting with kids and their parents and hear them say ‘Wait, they have five weeks left to get it right?’”

It’s a truer way of assessing students, but also a fairer way, not counting student behavior into the mix, Hull said.

“It does take a teacher’s blind spots and biases and helps to stand them on their head,” she said.

It’s not always an easy sell; some parents cling to the traditional trappings of school and worry that equity grading waters school down. (The principal disagrees — getting a grade bumped up by random extra credit points doesn’t actually reflect mastery of the subject, and as for hard-liners who ask, “How does this prepare kids for the real world and jobs that will someday require them to get something right the first time?”, Boyle says, “this is middle school. The real world is really far off.”)

Equitable grading can also be tough for “your perfectionist kids,” Hull said — those who are focused on points and grades and who may be off-put by not getting things perfect the first time.

The district is on board with grading for equity, said Tomás Hanna, associate superintendent of secondary schools.

“Students are at the center of this work,” Hanna said. “It’s such a good thing, to give our young people voice and agency in their work.”

Others in grading for equity circles have likened the move to a physical versus an autopsy, and Franklin, the pre-engineering teacher, likes that comparison.

“We’re much more intentional with how we’re grading, what we’re grading, and providing feedback to students,” Franklin said. “I tell them all, ‘I just want to make sure you understand the material as deeply as you can.’”