Policy revisions under consideration by the Board of Trustees have the potential to significantly change the way students are graded.

In an effort to better align district policy with the California Education Code and the district mission statement, two proposed policies, BP/AR5113 and BP/AR5121, address administrative concerns supporting the principle that grades should be based only on academics and that attendance should no longer effect a student’s grade.

At the Jan. 23 board meeting, many teachers district-wide expressed their concerns about the policies. The board will have its first chance to pass the policies at the next meeting on Feb. 6.
According to Michael McDowell, Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services, the importance of these revisions comes from the administrative belief that behavior should not impact academic grades.

“Things such as absences, tardies – those should be reflected separate from that particular content grade,” McDowell said. “When you put those things together, it is very difficult for us to identify what specifically does that student need.”

At the board meeting, teachers expressed concern about what they saw as a gray area in terms of what constitutes “behavior” – such as attendance and cheating. Science teacher Wendy Doherty said that new behavioral incentives to maintain attendance need to be set in place before they are completely removed from the current grading policy.

“A few teachers are saying ‘I need [the old policy] in order to keep control of my classroom,’” Kimbrel said. “Most of our teachers are right in the middle with really thoughtful analysis of these policies and great questions about how to make that happen.”

Equity is driving the policy changes, as a disproportionate presence of low socio-economic status and minority students were enrolled in summer school due to loss of credit, according to McDowell.

“Many of our minority and low income students were significantly over-represented in one-credit redemption [summer school] courses,” McDowell said. “Many of these students have the academic knowledge, the challenge is that they weren’t showing up to class on time.”

Teachers had mixed opinions stemming from the difficulties that will come with implementing the changes in their classrooms, although the proposed policies received full support from the community, according to Kimbrel. She said that there have been many criticisms from parents and students about how grades that are currently based on behavior are calculated, and especially that they cannot be improved.

“We’ve had several years of discussion and reports about data of how the students achieve here to rely on,” Kimbrel said. “There have been a significant number of complaints over the years from parents and students that grading is a mystery and that students don’t understand how their grade is calculated.”

McDowell said that if the Board of Trustees approves the policies, he is ready to begin implementing them. Kimbrel said that the next step would be for teachers and administrators to work together to fulfill the expectations of the policies.

“We would be looking at what are the things we need to do right from the get-go to be able to start to put some of these things into play,” McDowell said. “One step that I would argue for is that students who have one-credit redemptions, we’re going to let that pass.”

One piece of the policies that remains unchanged is the statement that teachers of the same course should have similar grading guidelines and classroom expectations.

“Just because the policy is written doesn’t magically make it happen,” Kimbrel said. “Grading should be the same from teacher to teacher within a course and across a district. That is something that is in our current policy and isn’t happening.”

Kimbrel and McDowell both emphasized that missing any class time already puts a student at a disadvantage.
“A kid who doesn’t care about their attendance probably doesn’t care about their grade either,” Kimbrel said. “Attendance is imperative to student achievement. Your behavior and attendance affects your grade naturally.”