Most teachers say their public schools have adopted at least one “equitable grading” practice to keep minority students from failing, with negative consequences for academic motivation.
The conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute reported Wednesday that 52% of 967 surveyed K-12 teachers said their school had a “no zeros,” no homework, no participation grade, no late penalties or unlimited test retakes policy last year. Over a third said their campuses followed several of them simultaneously.
Fordham’s analysis of the teachers who participated in a fall 2024 Rand Corp. panel found they rejected most of these ideas as harmful to student engagement.
The report found that teachers of color, those on minority-dominated campuses and those with at least 10 years of classroom experience were significantly more likely than others to complain. It is the first to offer firsthand teacher feedback on the practice.
“About half of schools have tried out at least some of these controversial grading reforms, but only a few are trying to implement the whole program,” Adam Tyner, the institute’s national research director and a co-author of the report, said in an email. “And teachers are very skeptical of this stuff, responding that practices such as ’no zeros’ and eliminating late penalties are harmful to student engagement.”
Education theorists introduced equity grading, which considers traditional assessment methods biased against low-income racial and linguistic minorities, during the late 2010s.
Dozens of K-12 public school districts from Oregon to New York embraced the practice as Black and Hispanic test scores plunged during pandemic school lockdowns in 2020-22.
Equity grading advocate Elika Dadsetan-Foley, a social worker and executive director of the Massachusetts mental health nonprofit Visions Inc., said the Rand survey confirms that most teachers remain “tethered to outdated learning models” that measure rather than prepare students.
“Instead of emphasizing exams and grading mechanics, we should empower students to decide how they want to demonstrate their understanding,” Ms. Dadsetan-Foley said Wednesday. “Real-world demonstrations of learning not only validate student voice, they also mirror the kind of skills that today’s world demands.”
Growing numbers of parents and teachers have countered that removing deadlines, the impact of homework on grades, and the grading of class participation and behavior rewards poor habits that hurt students later in life.
The Rand survey found that 81% of all teachers participating in last year’s panel rejected the “no zeros” policy, which required them to give an automatic 50% grade to all incomplete or unsubmitted work.
More than 50 teachers used the survey’s anonymous open-response section to criticize the policy.
“Being given a 50 percent for doing nothing seems to enable laziness,” one teacher wrote.
The next most-hated policy was “no late penalties,” which 56% of educators labeled harmful.
More teachers found “unlimited retakes” helpful than those who labeled it unhelpful. But teachers who favored basing student grades partly on classroom participation and behavior outnumbered those who opposed it.
Fordham researcher David Griffith, the report’s other co-author, said the findings confirm anecdotal accounts of teachers pushing back on equity grading over the past year.
“Our sense is that equitable grading is one of several factors contributing to grade inflation, which is bad news if we think high expectations are good for kids and the soft bigotry of low expectations is bad for them,” said Mr. Griffith, a former high school social studies teacher.
The report noted some pushback on equity grading, including widespread objections that led the Atlanta Public Schools to end “no zeros” less than a week into its fall 2023 introduction.
In Northern Virginia, where officials at Fairfax County Public Schools implemented “equitable” grading reforms, teachers circulated a document criticizing the changes and pointing out potential unintended consequences.
Omekongo Dibinga, a professor of intercultural communications affiliated with American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, insisted that such issues are no reason to jettison equity grading entirely.
“Everyone doesn’t do it right, but when done right, it’s very effective,” Mr. Dibinga said.
