Educators at the San Leandro Unified school district in Northern California had a grading and assessment dilemma.
In 2013, some students getting D and F letter grades were meeting content standards on state and local assessments. Some students getting A’s were struggling on state tests and Advanced Placement coursework. Some students, who educators thought would need an intervention course, didn’t actually need it based on various measures other than grades.
Even after the district shifted in 2014 to allow for project-based learning—for which students demonstrate their content knowledge in a variety of ways—the mismatch between letter grades and test scores persisted, said Sonal Patel, an assistant superintendent of the district. Students taking the same course but switching teachers saw their grades vary depending on which teacher they had.
This prompted district leaders to invest in teacher training and reimagine grading so that each letter grade carries equal weight, an F is not overweighted, and grades are based solely on students’ knowledge of required academic content—excluding factors like extra credit or classroom behavior.
District leaders at the time called it “assessing student learning accurately.” Today, it’s an approach known as “equitable grading,” a phrase coined in 2018 by Joe Feldman, author, former educator and the CEO of Crescendo Education Group, which has worked with more than 200 schools, districts, and colleges on grading practices, including the San Leandro district.
As more districts grapple with grade inflation amid declining ACT and National Assessment of Educational Progress scores, equitable grading has gained traction as a strategy for ensuring consistency. In the San Leandro district, the approach has led to more accurate and consistent grades that better reflect students’ content knowledge and offer families a clearer understanding of what grades actually mean, Patel said. It’s also painted a clearer picture of where the district has room for improvement.
But the approach is not without critics. In 2023, Arizona’s schools Superintendent Tom Horne urged schools to abolish equitable grading, claiming it “promotes mediocrity.” Horne remains opposed today, a spokesperson for the state’s education department said in an email to EdWeek.
And under the current federal administration, education initiatives labeled as “equitable” can draw legal scrutiny. While President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools and universities, some state legislators have also introduced bills to restrict DEI efforts, such as maintaining DEI offices and hiring DEI coordinators.
For San Leandro educators, though, consistency, accuracy, and transparency in grading and assessments remain the driving goals, regardless of what the policy’s called.
“Our drive around bringing in the set of practices to analyze how we set up our assessments and how we set up our grading practices didn’t come from us calling it an equity initiative,” Patel said. “It was more of us calling it an initiative to ensure high-quality, responsive, and rigorous instruction, because we were noticing both grade deflation and grade inflation.”
Training teachers is key to any grading policy change
As Feldman puts it, grading for equity means that letter grades should only reflect a student’s understanding of course content, helping motivate students by providing a clear rubric to follow.
This means grades cannot factor in things like extra credit—which students from higher-income families are more likely to access—or classroom participation, he said. Some students with extroverted behaviors, for instance, can get an advantage in grading but such behaviors don’t necessarily reflect their learning.
More broadly, Feldman added, grades should exclude variables outside students’ control, such as race, socioeconomic status, or home language.
“It’s not grading for equality. It’s grading for equity because different students have different circumstances, and … we have to be aware that those exist in order to exclude those factors from the grade,” Feldman said. “It’s only by recognizing those differences that we can ensure that our grades don’t reflect those differences and only reflect the students’ learning.”
In San Leandro, consistent grading guidelines that only factor in students’ content knowledge appealed not only to leaders and teaching staff struggling with grade inflation and deflation, but it also helped ensure that students were placed in appropriate courses—whether advanced or in need of interventions, Patel said.
When the district began working with Feldman in 2015, Patel realized that a major barrier to changing the district’s grading policy would be teachers and administrators’ lack of training in grading. Educators often reported learning about grading on the job, or they simply inherited a standard grade book from their predecessors.
The district began working with middle and high school teachers on a voluntary basis to pilot new grading practices. That went on for about six years until 2021, when the district formally changed the grading policy based on lessons learned from the pilot years. Teachers reported being able to focus on students’ learning, and students demonstrated higher levels of self-efficacy.
“You could always change policy, and it’ll never get implemented,” Patel said. “So we wanted to make sure that we had the practices and that we could see the benefit before we changed the policy.”
Coming out of the pandemic, district leaders aimed to have all teachers on board with the new policy by the 2024-25 school year, requiring them to submit their syllabi for review.
Not all teachers welcomed the news, and soon families began raising concerns around the grading policy, which led to a frequently asked questions page on the district’s website, Patel said.
Even during the initial training process, Patel and others found that unlearning long-standing grading practices became the biggest challenge to overcome.
For instance, some teachers would give a student who performed at a B level on an assignment a C because the student turned it in a day late. Under the new policy, the student may be allowed to turn in the assignment late and still get the B grade.
While Patel understands the desire to instill the value of timeliness and respecting deadlines, the point of the grade should be to determine how well the student understands the content, which informs where they will be placed the following year or if they require academic intervention, she said.
Though students are given more leeway with late assignments, teachers still set reasonable makeup deadlines and instill in students that while they get second chances, it’s ultimately imperative to get the work done.
Clear communication can address criticisms
Training prior to the San Leandro district policy change also involved educating school board members and principals on why the change was needed and how it works to ensure clear communication with community members.
Clear communication around shifting grading policies is key, especially under the current political climate, Feldman said.
While he hasn’t seen a decrease in districts’ interest in equitable grading, he has seen more local pressure to be more explicit about what it is and isn’t. He currently works with 50 schools and districts in assisting with grading practices.
“When [districts] engage in this kind of a dialogue with parents, parents are in agreement and parents will say, ‘Well, I didn’t know this was an example of equity, or I wish you hadn’t called it that, because I didn’t understand what that was,’” Feldman said.
Patel has experienced this scenario firsthand. She’s heard families echo concerns shared by leaders such as Arizona’s Horne, who claims that equitable grading “essentially rewards procrastination and lazy habits while penalizing industrious students.”
Inherent in such critiques is an understanding of grades as a form of competition, Patel said.
“People often think about equity in terms of high levels of differentiation, or just support for different students, and that’s the way we think of it, too. But in terms of the grading, we really wanted the practices to be available to everyone. We do think it’s an all boats rise thing,” she said.
After years of shifting grading practices, Patel said there was no sudden surge of students getting A’s. Rather, some A’s dropped across the district. Educators got a better sense of where students’ understanding of content stood.
Under the district’s current grading policy, exceptional students can still distinguish themselves through advanced coursework and extracurriculars, Patel added. But now an A grade more clearly signals to universities and future employers a gold standard of mastery over academic content.
“You might have the same amount of students in the end getting A’s, but it becomes a little bit less predictable based on other demographics,” she added.
As the district continues to refine its practices and better inform families about the changes, Patel understands some districts’ concerns over engaging in anything tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion at this time.
Regardless of the national conversation around DEI, Patel advises districts to first examine their data and community concerns around grading and assessments and find a compelling reason to engage in changing policies and practices.
“It can’t start from any sort of broad-based initiative around equity or broad-based goal,” Patel said. “It really has to start from the teaching and learning place, in my opinion, because the work is really complex, and it really challenges long-held beliefs about how students should demonstrate their learning, how we give feedback in the classroom to students, how we structure support, how we design assessments, even how we hold ourselves to standards and learning progressions.”
