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Last year, according to Summit administrators, 74 percent of Summit students met or exceeded Common Core standards for English Language Arts on California’s state tests, compared to 49 percent of students statewide, and 51 percent of Summit students met or exceeded the standards for math, compared to 37 percent statewide. The college acceptance rate for Summit graduates perennially pushes 100 percent.

Even some of personalized learning’s biggest backers admit that it’s easy to get it wrong.

“Personalized learning is easy to bastardize. It’s easy to do it superficially.”

he problem is that it’s a shorthand form of communication used by people who do not agree (or even discuss) what the symbols mean.

hat’s grading about? Why do we give grades, and how can we make grades more consistent and more effective communications?

The primary purpose of grading is a measure of “quality” (cf. Socrates, Pirsig), specifically the quality of a student’s performance.

Grading of any sort is a relatively modern innovation. Yale may have been the first university in the United States to issue grades, with students in 1785 receiving the Latin equivalents of best, worse, and worst. Prior to that time, U.S. colleges employed the Oxford and Cambridge model, in which students attended regular lectures and engaged in a weekly colloquy with their proctor, in writing and in person.

It's no coincidence that a single system was in place by the early 20th century. Schools at the time were bursting at the seams, given the sudden increases in immigration and the rise of compulsory attendance laws.

« Twitter, Simply Complicated. The Homework Option Plan May 22, 2011 by tomwhitby I was recently asked, along with several other educators, to comment on a post dealing with grading homework. The premise on which we were asked to comment involved a teacher grading homework and giving a zero as a grade to those students who did not do the assignment. This is not an uncommon practice amongst educators. I employed this strategy myself for many years. It was and probably still is an accepted strategy, but after decades of teaching, I have grown to a point where i am not a big believer in giving homework. I stated my homework philosophy in this post, Hmwk: Less Value or Valueless? If homework is to be given by a teacher, students need to believe that the teacher will value their efforts in completing it. Homework requires a sacrifice of personal time on the part of the student. If students observe that the teacher is not at least checking homework, they will not spend time, which is important to them, doing the assignments that are not valued. A mistake often made however, is that rather than assess the work, the teacher records a zero, or a failing homework grade for the student. This would also apply to a project prepared outside of the class that was to be presented at a specific time, a deadline. I see assessment having two functions. The formative assessment is to tell me how much the s

he zero seems more like retribution for not finding value in what the teacher values, or has been told to value. It’s more of a control thing, and not an assessment thing. If a student consistently performs well in class, how is it that when assessed on the same skills performed outside the class in the form of homework, the work gets a zero? It is a power issue.

If the grade is an assessment of the work, and the student’s understanding, but it was not done, how can it be assessed?

Then, I can’t upload the photo directly to my eportfolio, so I have to email it to myself, but we’re not allowed to receive outside emails (school settings prevent this as a way to protect kids), so I have to login to my personal email (also not allowed during school hours), then upload it to google drive, log back into my school account, and finally upload the picture into my Digication eportfolio. But I don’t like the way it looks, it’s so 2006.”