Dublin Unified reexamining grading policies, prompting community reaction

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The Dublin school board last week discussed updating current grading practices in favor of policies that Superintendent Chris Funk says would be more equitable and impartial to help create a bias-free learning environment.

The public hearing on June 27 received significant community reaction prompting over an hour of public comments both in support and opposition of the new policies proposed for Dublin Unified School District.

Showing support for a shift to standards-based grading, Funk provided a presentation detailing the reasoning for updating the grading practices and gave ideas on how they could be altered.

"What we're focusing on is standards-based grading with an equity lens because the current grading system is not coherent across all of our teachers, across all of our classrooms and across all of our schools," Funk said during the meeting.

"There's no question that the grading system that's been around is an inequitable practice. Much of the grading that is involved does not grade anyone's mastery of the subject content," Funk added.

According to the meeting staff report, standards-based grading is used to create "impartial, consistent reflection of the quality of the student's work and their mastery of the course content standards."

During the presentation, Funk listed the main problems with the current grading system, including saying many students are judged in a way that negatively impacts their relationships with learning.

"Zeroes in a grading system do not accurately reflect a student's proficiency," Funk said. "Awarding zeros as discipline is not an appropriate consequence as they can be almost impossible to recover from."

Funk instead shared alternative ways of grade evaluating that he argues could be more fair and reasonable.

He suggested grades based on summative assessments only, rather than calculating grades over time which he said can penalize students for mistakes during the learning process.

Funk noted the California Department of Motor Vehicles driver's license test and California Bar Exam as two well-known examples of evaluations that do not punish participants for failed attempts. This is due to the fact you can take either test an unlimited amount of times until you pass without penalty.

He introduced the concept of bias-resistant grading that is designed to inherently dissuade bias in grading. According to the staff report, these grades are "based on evidence of the student's knowledge of the standards delineated in the course outlines and are not influenced by implicit bias or a reflection of the student's environment."

Funk also supported the removal of nonacademic factors from the official grades, these include general behavior, punctuality, effort, work habits and participation.

"It can be inequitable to include grades besides mastery of content, like turning work in on time, not placing name and date on the specific place that the teacher required," Funk said. "Our students aren't dogs that follow tricks; our students are humans that read that interaction and they should be graded on the mastery of content standards."

Following the main presentation, the board welcomed 37 public comments on the item for over an hour.

One Dublin High School student, Manesh Leah, stepped forward and shared her comments on standards-based grading.

"I appreciate what you're doing for the education community and the students, but I do not agree with everything so I would just like to speak out as a student," said Leah, a rising junior.

Leah spoke about her perspective and experience learning in a classroom. She felt that the new style of grading might be unfair or discouraging to already proficient students.

"If students have more time outside of the instructed unit, what motivates them to do well the first time?" Leah said. "What makes it fair to a student who gets an A or a B the first time, compared to a student who gets more time or gets retakes to achieve the same grade? There's no pressure or structure to motivate students."

Lisa Disbrow, a retired public school teacher from West Contra Costa Unified School District and now a Dublin resident, criticized the proposed policy calling it a political effort.

"This is not about academics. If it was, we would be focusing on the quality of instruction. We would be spending our dollars on those who need more support and those who are excelling," Disbrow said. "What every student deserves is an excellent teacher."

DUSD Trustee Wiliam Kuo gave his comments on the issue, emphasizing the need for more data to move forward.

"These are things that sound good on paper but in practice, I want to hear from the teachers to see what they think," Kuo said. "If we do go down this path and learn more about it, I would like to see more data and convince the community that this is not going to impact how their students will be graded, because I do hear the concern."

Kuo suggested seeing how the policy would work with younger grades such as K-6.

"I personally do not want to see this occur at the secondary level yet. I'm not saying to completely stop it, but we need more data and feedback," he said.

While implementing a new grading system has been an interest of the DUSD board for the past several years, no official action has been taken yet.

In February 2020 the board presented a plan to update its grading policies; however, the COVID-19 pandemic quickly halted these discussions and placed the issue further down the list.

In late 2021, the DUSD revisited its desire to review district grading policies and assembled a group known as the Grading Task Force composed of teachers, parents and staff members. Over the course of a year, the task force researched and discussed how standards-based grading could be implemented into DUSD.

It was last May that DUSD staff showed a presentation detailing the work culminated from the task force and placed the item on the June 27 agenda.

DUSD board members and staff are expected to continue discussing implementing standards-based grading into district schools.

"Obviously there's more work to be done here and we will bring something back," Board President Gabi Blackman said. "August is when the board comes back, and so I imagine we'll have more discussion and more progress on this."

To stay updated on DUSD news and board meeting, visit the website dublin.k12.ca.us.