‘The Future of Grading is Antiracist’
A public school administrator offers a timely prescription for addressing historical injustices in the classroom.
“We need to radically rethink how we grade our students.”
So claims Benjamin Johnson, who currently serves as one of the five vice principals at my high school. A former college Division II fullback who looks as if he could literally carry the weight of the world on his broad shoulders, at fifty years old Johnson still cuts a striking figure. He and I were once teaching colleagues in the same department, even sharing a classroom for a time, before he moved on to a leadership role in the building. Johnson finished the coursework for a doctorate of education several years ago but has not yet completed his dissertation.
In a wide-ranging conversation conducted with me over Zoom earlier this fall, Johnson began by describing evolution in how he viewed assessing students — an evolution motivated in part by this summer’s racial reckoning compounded by the ongoing pandemic. Afterward, I followed up via email to ask him several additional questions and to clarify some of his statements.
“Early in my career I was really taken with the idea of a ‘colorblind’ classroom, of not letting race or gender or other differences factor in to how I assessed my students,” — he explained.
Johnson, who eventually became a high school mathematics teacher after majoring in business management and minoring in philosophy, was influenced by the writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. but also by John Rawls and his veil of ignorance, which asks us to imagine how we would rebuild society if we didn’t know our eventual place in it.
“But,” Johnson continued, “as teachers or administrators, we don’t ignore our students’ prior abilities. We don’t ignore special needs. We don’t ignore the challenges and baggage that a student comes to our school with. We make allowances for it. If a student joins our class one marking period into the school year, do we test him on what he wasn’t there for? No — we differentiate our instruction and adjust how we test him. So why should we ignore culture, ethnicity, gender, race? It doesn’t make any sense that we should.”
“When I was a new teacher, I mistook equality for equity. It sounds trite and obvious now, but, to tell you the truth, I just didn’t understand that equality of opportunity is not the same as equality of outcome. Maybe I didn’t think about it in those terms. I mean, you could have equality of opportunity by giving no one any opportunities! So we need them both: equality, but especially equity or ultimately there can be no equality.”
“The opportunity gap here [at the high school] is as pervasive as the achievement gap,” he explained. “So how do we create more equitable opportunities for our students?”
Four years ago, Johnson spearheaded a program to recruit more students who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) into the Advanced Placement program at my school. He was looking for students who had high enough grades, standardized test scores, and the required courses completed to qualify on paper, but were reticent to sign up for AP classes due to non-academic reasons: for example, not feeling a sense of belonging or community among the other predominantly White students in the classroom. Though non-White students comprise a significant percentage of the student body, they are especially under-represented in AP classes in my school.
Once the cohort of BIPOC students — typically anywhere between fifty and one hundred — are identified by Johnson while still in their freshman or sophomore years, they are given additional supports in the second half of the school year prior to them joining the AP class(es): after-school enrichment, community- and confidence-building sessions, and, most importantly, an intensive three-week pre-AP summer program at the high school. (This past summer, due to the pandemic, the program was conducted virtually.)
Little by little, Johnson’s AP recruitment program has made inroads, steadily increasing the percentage of BIPOC students in Advanced Placement courses at the high school — by 37 percent as compared to five years ago, right before the initiative began.
As hard as it is to achieve equality of opportunity, Johnson said, working to achieve equality of outcome in a high school has been significantly more challenging.
He told me how, when he was still a classroom teacher over a decade ago, he would field students’ complaints about grading by delivering an adage: “I don’t give grades. I just keep score.”
“I looked at myself like a judge or an umpire, calling balls and strikes. It was a Platonic ideal — the ‘harsh but fair judge’ who presides over the classroom with gavel in hand. I was naive, and kids were scared of me then. I probably intimidated them, the way I looked and acted.
“The hard truth is,” Johnson continued, “when Dr. King referred to us being ‘colorblind,’ he wasn’t talking about a ‘race-neutral’ or ‘race-blind’ society. Rawls didn’t believe that either; the whole point of Rawls was that there was difference, so how do we best make an equitable society that accounts for that difference, no matter who you are? I think I really didn’t understand these ideas until I read Kendi.”
Johnson, with all the fervor and energy of the newly converted, pointed to a passage from the bestselling book How to Be an Antiracist, celebrated historian Ibram X. Kendi’s most influential work to date. Kendi has become one of the foremost public intellectuals of our time. “The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity,” Kendi writes. “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.”
“Look at how Kendi talks about ‘discrimination’ — as a tool or a means to an end, which is equity,” added Johnson. “To me, that’s where we need to get as a school, and we have to use all tools at our disposal in order to achieve that.”
So was Johnson suggesting that there should be purposeful discrimination when teachers grade students?
“Look, there is already ‘discrimination’ in how we grade kids now,” he said, nodding in agreement. “These are the unwritten rules of grading. Look at how we excuse assignments for students who have been sick, or absent, or have just joined our class. Or how we modify tests for one reason or another, for some groups of kids but not for others. These are adjustments we make on the fly in how we assess students, rather than treating every student in the same way, so we are already purposely not grading students as one-size-fits-all, right?
“Teachers might not want to admit this, but there are unconscious biases in how they grade right now, despite them trying to be impartial and objective. Some of these are positive biases, like if a student is well-behaved, they are graded easier or given the benefit of the doubt whereas a disruptive student might not be. If a student’s handwriting is nice and neat, a teacher might grade that student in a more forgiving way because the student’s work appeals to their aesthetic sense. More troubling are studies that have shown that physically attractive students get better grades than similarly qualified students.
“But there are also unconscious negative biases at play. Look at stereotype threat. You see Black students and female students and other subgroups performing badly because of negative group stereotypes.”
Psychologist Claude Steele and others have documented the deleterious effects of stereotype threat, finding evidence that even subtle reminders of group identification can inhibit academic performance. In a controlled experiment which had students sit for a subset of the GRE (the Graduate Record Examinations), a stereotype-threat condition was informed that the test “diagnosed intellectual ability,” while a no-stereotype-threat condition (the control group) was simply told that the “test was a problem-solving lab task that said nothing about ability.” When the results were examined, Whites scored higher than Blacks (matched by SAT scores) in the stereotype-threat condition, but in the no-stereotype-threat condition, Blacks and Whites (again matched by SAT scores) performed effectively the same.
Johnson took a deep breath and continued. “Yes, teachers at our school need more implicit bias training, [and need to] recognize their biases, especially when dealing with young people. But at the same time we need to ask ourselves, Why is it that our Black students have higher failure rates in our classes than our White or Asian students? Why do we see our Black students, especially our male Black students, being suspended more, having disproportionately more disciplinary actions taken against them, than our other kids? This is the major failing of our time as educators. There is a level of discrimination and negative bias that needs to be addressed,” Johnson said, “because you’re either racist or antiracist, there is no in between.”
In his book, Kendi dismisses the idea of a “safe space” between being racist (which he treats as an action verb, rather than as a noun) and antiracist (again, an action verb). “[T]here is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist.’” A person can shift between racism and antiracism at a moment’s notice, simply by actions taken. Both racism and antiracism are performative in nature, rather than being something innate or personality-defining. Johnson calls this a “hopeful, optimistic outlook,” because even “someone branded as a racist can grow, can change.”
Moreover, Kendi argues that “[t]here are ideas that express hierarchy and inequality. There are policies that create equity and inequity.” When taking antiracist action, he says, everything comes down to addressing power and policies.
This is where Johnson sees value in the prescriptions Kendi offers: those of action, of changing policy to remedy racist discrimination. According to Johnson, “People didn’t realize how bad the achievement gap in this country was until there was national, standardized testing with NCLB [No Child Left Behind]. Now I know that law was criticized a lot — teachers were complaining, ‘Why do we have to do all this testing all the time now?’ — but it brought to everyone’s attention the historical injustices we were dealing with. They couldn’t be hidden or swept under the rug anymore.
“So how do we correct these injustices to achieve equity, rather than just talking about it? Obviously we need to hire more diverse faculty that can take into account a wider range of student experiences, and that students of color can better relate to. But my larger thinking is that one thing we really need to do now is change our grading policies. San Diego just did something like that.”
The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) revised their grading practices this school year.
The district’s two key changes were (1) Eliminating non-academic factors, such as behavior, as a part of academic grades, and (2) Affording students multiple opportunities to revise their submitted work and thereby demonstrate improvement toward mastery. Additional time to complete assignments as well as test retakes are also part of the newly implemented antiracist district policies.
As SDUSD School Board President John Lee Evans said, “Our current grading system is working very well for what it was intended to do, and what it was intended to do was to classify students and to put them into categories and basically push them in a certain direction. We’ve been for too long on this idea where you had a chance, you didn’t succeed, so therefore we’re gonna categorize you as a failure, and your option is to start all over.”
“This is part of our honest reckoning as a school district. If we’re actually going to be an anti-racist school district, we have to confront practices like this that have gone on for years and years,” added SDUSD Vice President Richard Barrera.
Joe Feldman, an expert on equitable grading practices whose research helped inform SDUSD’s changes, argues that averaging grades over the course of a term, or even giving extra credit, “can perpetuate inequities for disadvantaged students…. [T]he practice of producing one cumulative course grade by averaging a student’s performance from beginning to end can discredit improvements that a student made over time and can penalize students who started class behind grade level.”
Johnson told me that the changes that SDUSD made, at a minimum, would be a first step our school needs to take in order to address the equity gap. “We could also grade students in a more — I don’t want to say ‘forgiving,’ I don’t necessarily mean that — in a more inclusive way, a more holistic way,” he explained. “Yes, teachers need to have autonomy when it comes to grading. But teachers also need to be cognizant of the different backgrounds students have and what they come into their classrooms with. Whether it’s disadvantages that are related to socioeconomics or differences in background and prior knowledge.”
“There are more steps we can take, but we have to be careful not to look paternalistic, either,” Johnson said.
“I’m concerned with getting teacher, student, and community buy-in — all the stakeholders — before we move forward with anything more radical.”
Assuming that buy-in was obtained, what would those more radical steps be?
Johnson paused before answering. “Well, we have to disrupt the systemic racism that we’re seeing everywhere in society. That means, again, looking to increase our AP numbers. It means rethinking our Gifted program, which is also underrepresented in terms of Black students, students of color.
“But it also means using the tools of antiracism to grade students differently than we’ve been doing, because what we’ve been doing has not been working at all. Right? I know that you see that in your classroom too. The community sees that our students of color are failing classes at higher rates than other students. What is the cause of that? It is historical injustice, anti-Black racism, and lack of opportunities and disadvantages in the home caused by the digital divide, and so on. These disadvantages have been exacerbated by the pandemic. But at the end of the day, the community wants to know: What can we as educators do about it?
“We should be moving toward grading practices like competency-based grading, where we move away from assigning lots of homework and definitely not including behavior as part of the academic grade. Instead, we should focus on quizzes and tests only, just testing skills directly and striving toward mastery. We should put in additional academic supports. We should eliminate giving F’s and even D’s and move toward assigning incompletes if the material has not been mastered yet, just like they’re doing in [the] San Diego [Unified School District]. Because students are failing, in some cases, because they’re losing points from not doing homework assignments or for behavioral reasons. What does that have to do with content mastery? Nothing.
“Kendi would consider traditional grading policies racist by definition. Here, look at this part I highlighted from the book [How to Be an Antiracist].”
Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities…. A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people.
“These traditional grading policies have produced and reproduced racial inequality in high schools around the country,” Johnson continued. “I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not taking anything off the table. So yes, if you’re asking, ‘Should we grade students differently to account for or to correct these historical injustices?’, then, to tell you the truth, my answer is yes. This could be an antidote to a lot of the disparities we see today in grading outcomes. It seems to me to be Kendi’s antiracist action taken to its logical conclusion in the classroom, so that grading policies finally align with justice. I get it, this is controversial for me to say. But it’s the right thing to do, the moral thing.
“I’m not sure if that would mean retraining teachers on how to grade in an antiracist way, or if we could just plug in variables for each student into an algorithm and then their grades would be adjusted as needed. But we have to do something to right the wrongs. Arguing against antiracism at this point should be as un-American as arguing against motherhood and apple pie.
“The one thing I don’t like is that Kendi uses the word ‘discrimination’ in a neutral way, but I guess you could call it ‘discriminating,’ that’s how we can put the final nail in the [coffin of the] outcome gap and have true equality for all students. I don’t want to be circumspect here, but I would rather call it ‘adjusting to our students’ needs’ — like we do with everything else in the classroom.
“Look, whatever you want to call it or how we choose to do it, it’s clear to me that the future of grading is antiracist.”
