Should Philly students be graded during the pandemic? | Pro/Con

After schools closed due to the coronavirus, the Philadelphia School District began graded digital instruction on May 4. Although students’ final grades for the year will be an average of their pre-pandemic performance, their work starting from May 4 can raise their grades if they do well — while their lack of participation can lower them. The district says it is trying to factor in students’ individual circumstances at home. While some believe grading is necessary to keep students on track, others argue it is punishing during a crisis.

A physician and local parent debates a policy analyst: Should Philly students be graded right now?

By Jonathan Butcher

Most of us will spend at least a dozen years in school starting at age 5. For an increasing share of young adults, the education experience lasts 16 years or more, as the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolling in college has risen from 35% to 41% since 2000.

Pandemics, mercifully, do not last as long as our school-age years.

Each school year builds on the prior one, so officials must prevent the 2019-20 school year from becoming a lost academic experience for Philadelphia students. Abandoning student grades during the pandemic would put everyone — policymakers, taxpayers, parents, teachers, and students — at a disadvantage next fall.

Thousands of students will return to physical, hybrid, or virtual city classrooms in August. Without some measure of how children finished the year, teachers will not be able to match instruction to each child’s needs.

Philadelphia already put some teachers and families at a disadvantage early on in the pandemic when district officials told teachers to stop offering virtual instruction to any students over equity concerns. District Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. told local media, “If that’s not available to all children, we cannot make that available to some.”

Odd that Hite would make this judgment now. According to a U.S. Department of Education report, nearly 37% of Philadelphia students were “chronically absent” for the 2015-16 school year, missing at least three weeks annually. In a class of 17 students, Philadelphia’s student-teacher ratio, 37% is six children. If equity were more important than success, Philadelphia schools should have stopped teaching years ago.

In Tests, Testing, and Genuine School Reform, Hoover Institute fellow Herbert J. Walberg says research demonstrates that setting clear goals and measuring progress “substantially increase student motivation and performance in learning, sports, and work settings” — motivation that would be valuable to students at present.

» READ MORE: Who’s showing up for school during the pandemic? In Philly, it’s just over half of students.

This does not mean schools should issue a bunch of tests. Rather, officials should think bigger than grading on a curve. The pandemic offers an opportunity to make meaningful changes to help current and future generations of students.

State lawmakers should grade students consistently, rewarding those who were motivated to show up for online work. For students who did not have internet access or a computer, teachers should make thorough notes about the material that students will need to catch up on over the summer or next year. Educators should be allowed to follow up with these students in the coming months to complete their coursework.

There is still room for policymakers to innovate: With state testing canceled, lawmakers should make comparisons between schools by allowing educators to choose tests that best fit their instructional practices. Standardized tests, such as the Stanford Achievement Test and the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, along with others allowing comparisons between schools, such as the Measures of Academic Progress, could be used to gauge student progress now and help inform teachers next year.

Students who do not want to lose a semester of learning shouldn’t have it taken from them.

These results will also give policymakers insight into the schools that performed well during trying circumstances, which cannot help but inform future policies. Officials have a unique opportunity to make instruction and measurement more student-centered, making tests more useful to teachers and students.

Truancy data show that Philadelphia already has equity problems. With school paused early on in the pandemic, students have already lost instruction. Easy solutions are hard to come by now. But we should give every child a quality opportunity. Students who do not want to lose a semester of learning shouldn’t have it taken from them.

Jonathan Butcher is a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

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By Rotonya M. Carr

There are few doctrines written with such simplicity and such power as the Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm. Although I primarily apply this oath as a physician, I thought about it recently when I learned that the Philadelphia School District — where my kids are enrolled — decided to resume grading for its “digital learning during COVID-19” curriculum.

School Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. has, in fact, promised that grades during the pandemic will “do no harm” to students. To achieve this, the district left it open for teachers to determine grades case-by-case depending on a student’s situation at home. The uncertainty around criteria raises the question: Why bother with grades at all?

I have been unable to reconcile how the stress of any kind of grading in this unprecedented situation aligns with our district’s core values or stated goal to “ensure that [the digital learning structures] do not contribute to stress for students, families, educators, and leaders.”

To be fair, the district also outlined that no child who participates in online learning can have their grades go lower than the pre-pandemic average — at face value, a seemingly equitable policy that means kids can only improve their marks. What’s so misguided about that? Win-win for everyone, right? Unfortunately, no.

Approximately 20% of children in the city’s School District live below the poverty line. Between the third and 12th grades, 40% to 60% of students surveyed in the spring of 2019 didn’t have computer access to the internet at home, and in three neighborhoods, fewer than 30% have access. To facilitate virtual education, Chromebooks were made available to district children, but there is no data on how many families successfully integrated into the virtual classroom environment.

» READ MORE: When coronavirus hit, schools moved online. Some students didn’t.

Parents in my West Philly neighborhood (a socioeconomically diverse neighborhood with a National Blue Ribbon public school, which my children attend) often complain about challenges with technology and frequently interrupted internet access, resulting in an inability to complete assignments. This is the reality for parents throughout the district and magnified for those who lack home internet service.

How then can children who had either borderline or below-normal performance prior to the pandemic realistically participate enough to improve performance if they cannot reliably access the virtual curriculum? Any grading schema unfairly penalizes these students, while having much less impact on students with more resources and access.

Students have lost their schools, teachers, friends, activities, and even food security.

An alternative approach is to apply the principle of the Hippocratic oath to vulnerable children. Here, one can define harm as adding to the stress, pain, and suffering of students who are experiencing profound and protracted loss. Students have lost their schools, teachers, friends, activities, and even food security. Some students have lost the experience of rites of passage like graduations and proms. Others have lost loved ones, whom they are unable to mourn in traditional ways because of the restrictions placed to maintain social distancing.

Amid all this distress, my district has potentially compounded this trauma by adding the stress of clinging to grades. It has opted not to follow the lead of others throughout the country who have placed the principle of nonmaleficence above all other priorities. Those districts have decided to either cancel grades altogether or give all children A’s for simply surviving this upheaval.

Our children have adapted to this new normal and with a grace many adults have been unable to demonstrate. In my view, their adaptability and resilience are the true tests — and for that they all deserve an A+.

Rotonya M. Carr is a physician and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania.