Based on the comments, it seems everyone thinks they're doing away with grades as in A, B, C, D and F. I think they're actually just doing away with grade leves 1-12.
A good analogy for the gamers out there would be they switching from a level based system to a skill based system. Currently, after each school year, you level up to the next grade. In other words, when you pass a grade, you move to the next grade level in all subjects.
In the new system, your math level is independent of you english and history levels. In one school year, you could advance two levels in math, one level in english and half a level in history. To graduate on time, the overall goal would be to average passing at least one level of each subject per year.
> Based on the comments, it seems everyone thinks they're doing away with grades as in A, B, C, D and F. I think they're actually just doing away with grade leves 1-12.
It looks like this site is coming down with the same RTFA-itis that plagues other news aggregators. And I no longer have the down vote ability to help correct this...
Back on topic, I'm curious how slow progression or level skipping could be handled. I would think this kind of system would make it hard to synchronize lesson plans or teaching sessions, if all the students in a given classroom are in differing levels. The "little red schoolhouse" never really scaled up, after all...
The way it works at my wife's school is she ends up acting more like a classroom moderator as the students work through workbooks independently. She's there for one-on-one help if the students have trouble with the content.
Not sure if this is how they're doing it in Denver however.
> She's there for one-on-one help if the students have trouble with the content.
I hope Denver really vets its teachers well then. I remember going through public school in the 80's, and having to be careful which questions I asked in class because the teacher would be literally learning the material at the same time as the students. The teachers under this new system, in order to be effective, will have had to already gain familiarity with the course content ahead of time; they won't be able to afford any "Yukari Tanizaki" type teachers who drop all prep work when away from school...
"I remember going through public school in the 80's, and having to be careful which questions I asked in class because the teacher would be literally learning the material at the same time as the students."
I'm curious: Do you have more details? Because it seems to me that it's just absurd that such would occur. Not because I don't believe you; I do. But... at the risk of sounding snotty, there just isn't anything that a public school could cover that should have the teacher scrambling to learn the material, unless the school did something radically stupid. The curriculum just isn't that large, and by definition, teachers were at least smart enough to get through college.
The only thing that leaps to mind that this could have happened with is "new math". I could see how that could cause trouble, since it was pretty stupid. But what else could throw the teacher for such a loop?
> But... at the risk of sounding snotty, there just isn't anything that a public school could cover that should have the teacher scrambling to learn the material, unless the school did something radically stupid.
In my experience, it was usually just that. Either the teacher was given a new textbook or curriculum the prior summer with no evaluation period, or the instructor was transferred from one subject to another due to a financial or staffing pinch.
For example, I had a teacher who specialized in teaching algebra and trig, but had to be pressed into teaching calculus one year. While he knew enough of the material to grade and write assignments, his ability to explain the more obscure stuff in lecture was hobbled by his forgetting most of the material was about last time he was exposed to it. I've also had instructors bounced between teaching English and Social Studies because administrators thought they were similar because the tests of both subjects involved essay answers.
My experience may also be atypical, since at the high school level, I tended to take "honors" courses, which usually were an afterthought funding-wise than the majority of the "college prep" or "remedial" classes.
Unfortunately, this is where you hit up against the other side -- pay. You cant really expect teachers to spend their free time outside of school as well as spend 40+ hours a week IN school when you pay them at secretary rates. And we do.
I consult with a school on a variety of issues -- they continually have trouble finding qualified teachers who are willing to work extra hours for tutoring, etc, as well as spend the extra time to create lesson plans outside of the classroom.
Personally, I blame the teachers union, but in reality thats just one small part of the problem.
The school in the article is making great strides in one part, hopefully they can also make huge strides in the HR side as well.
> She often uses a video game analogy: Students are engaged, take as much or as little time as they need to at each level, and can't move on to the next level until they've mastered the one before it.
There is your elevator pitch.
This is brilliant. This lets kid move at their own pace without resorting to grouping by ability, and it turns school into a set of things to accomplish rather than a length of time to tolerate.
My wife teaches at a small private school similar to this. It mostly works well for them, but the kids who don't want to work can fall behind. I think this problem would be exaggerated in public schools because of the larger classrooms, but hopefully it will work out in Denver.
Perhaps we could let them tier themselves into a trade. I don't think it would be so bad for society. Either they're going to end up in a trade, or worse, or they'll have a chance to realize where they're going early to work themselves back into HS and College.
I was studying business/project management full-time while running a couple companies. My biggest beef was that the grading scale rewards consistent mediocrity over inconsistent excellence - basically the opposite of the real world.
Out in the wild, let's say you run three advertising campaigns. Each costs $1,000. Two return almost nothing - utter failures. The third returns $9,000. In the real world, you've got +$6,000 and you've tripled your money. In academia, you've got an average of 33% and you've failed the course.
The problem is, once an assignment is "near perfect" and gets an A, there's nothing to separate "excellent" (an "A") and the "best paper ever put together in this topic" (...also an "A"). In the real world, you can do excellent work and make $100,000 in a year, or do the best work ever done in a field and make millions. Academia has a mild learning component and a significant credentialing component (it is a major plus, and I do look at degree/grades when hiring), but the atmosphere is not conducive to experimentation and prioritization - two crucial skills for making it big in the real world.
Passing heavy homework-laden courses shows you can take orders and execute on them sufficiently well and consistently, which has some value for people who want to be employees, but considerably less value for people who want to do great things. A mix of real world learning from experiences, and accumulating some credentials in other ways is more and more becoming a viable option.
In Spain, the ESO (a high-school reform) implemented a system of no grades. The only grades were "needs to improve" and "is progressing fine".
Guess what, it didn't work: they did away with any incentive for students to really improve. Overall knowledge and performance of students went down.
I conceptually agree that grades are not proper for an evaluation system. But the alternative can be worse! I hope they really, really worked out and tested an alternative that wasn't just politically correct or fair (ugh) but rather, a proper, better evaluation system.
Were kids held back for receiving "needs to improve" in a given subject?
If not, then this isn't really the same idea. I totally agree that having "did great" and "did not so great" as your two types of grade is rather ridiculous if there are no consequences/benefits either way, but basing advancement on mastery rather than age seems like a no-brainer to me.
In the US it is next to impossible to hold kids back. One of my son's classes (7th grade) a 65% is still a C. If kids could be held back on some subjects easier while moving them forward in other subjects that would be great. It might not work out but they admit in the article things are so bad they don't know what else to do.
I'm a little confused what a percentage could mean, in this context. Does it mean you have a good understanding of 65% of the material you need to move on? Because that's not good, if you need an understanding of 100% of Foo to learn Bar, which incorporates Foo... this isn't to say that you shouldn't start teaching Bar in order to motivate students to go back and finish learning Foo, just that a % is a measure lacking in meaning.
I think a better way to gague knowledge is the A/C/F system a lot of my professors used in advanced math courses at Rutgers. An 'A' means you have a solid understanding of the material, a 'C' means you don't really understand it, but have a good enough grasp that you can move on and back-track to finish learning it as necessary. 'F' means you don't understand it well enough to move on, and should retake the course.
This requires a lot more thought on the side of the professor, but the motivation for students becomes a lot more clear: understand the material, and move on.
I had a class where a 40% was an A. It was tough to get 40% in that class.
What a good %age is can be dependent on how hard the work was. It's not trivial to make all the things being tested such that you can easily see where people need help AND you simultaneously get the traditional >90% = A.
Now, I think I'd rather the teacher knew where I hadn't grasped enough. When you're doing it though, trying hard and only getting half the stuff right can be frustrating.
A good analogy for the gamers out there would be they switching from a level based system to a skill based system. Currently, after each school year, you level up to the next grade. In other words, when you pass a grade, you move to the next grade level in all subjects.
In the new system, your math level is independent of you english and history levels. In one school year, you could advance two levels in math, one level in english and half a level in history. To graduate on time, the overall goal would be to average passing at least one level of each subject per year.