The immediate crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic may be over, but its long-term impacts on our nation’s children—and their grades—are still front and center.
Earlier this winter, the National Assessment of Educational Progress released its showing troubling trends in U.S. 4th and 8th-grade scores in reading and mathematics. These trends mirrored our own organization’s data highlighting that academic recovery from the pandemic’s disruptions remain elusive.
Yet, surveys of parents and families asking how they perceive their students are doing in school show a different picture. Many families are sharing that they believe their students are doing fine in school.
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There is a glaring disconnect. And more concerning is the rise of parents sharing they are no longer confident that grades are a good measure of learning, even though grades are still the predominant marker of student academic progress.
At the height of the pandemic, hints of changing grading standards and possible grade inflation rose as an issue as many parents raised concerns about the accuracy and fairness of their children’s grades in light of all the disruptions and shift to remote learning.
More recently, in 2023 that grade inflation has been rising for over 10 years. The report added that grade-point averages rose several percentage points from 2010 to 2022 but there were no significant increases in ACT scores.
Grades are no longer the go-to marker
This drop in confidence in traditional grades may be a tipping point. Instead of doubling down on grades as the “go-to†marker, district leaders and educators can leverage this moment to find more meaningful and engaging ways to discuss academic progress with students and families. Start with these:
- Examine how your district understands student progress. Start with how you currently assess student achievement and progress. What information and data make up a student’s academic profile and why? If you’re implementing an assessment, whether a short quiz, benchmark test or an end-of-year assessment, dig into why and how that data is used. See if this is enough or if more evidence of learning is needed.
- Note any behavioral data that may be used as part of academic grades (for example, tardiness, absences, turning in late work, incomplete work, etc.) If it is, remove it from achievement when calculating academic grades. Behaviors can be evaluated and communicated in other ways but they often skew or say nothing about what that student knows, what subjects they are proficient in or where they still need help academically.
- Support your teachers with appropriate professional development. Measuring and communicating about academic growth and achievement must be consistent across classrooms and buildings, not idiosyncratically weighed and determined by each educator. Professional development must build up your teachers’ skills in both understanding how academic achievement and progress is measured and how to effectively talk about it with families.
- Get on the same page regarding language. As a school community, determine common terms for discussing academic achievement and develop relatable, understandable definitions. For example, what’s an interim or summative assessment, what does it mean if a student is at the 50th percentile, what does “proficient†mean? How those are defined should be consistent across your school community, even across schools.
- Give students a voice. Set goals together, share what makes up their academic profile and why that’s important. Build up their ownership over their academic journey. A step toward that is having student-led conferences where they share their progress with families reinforcing they have a voice and agency over their own learning.
One thing is certain in the wake of the COVID pandemic: millions of U.S. students are still struggling to catch up academically. To achieve truly transformative outcomes, we must prioritize building strong family-school partnerships—and that starts with a fundamental shift in how we measure and communicate student progress.
