Bumpy road to standards-based grading for Santa Fe Public Schools

It’s not just academics HahnHansen expects will contribute to her future as a multihyphenate. She also secured a place among the local chapter of the National Honor Society, founded a botany and sustainability club and serves as a junior officer in Santa Fe High’s student government. She’s even been in a few short films.

This school year, however, HahnHansen said she ran into an unexpected challenge in maintaining her high GPA and busy schedule of extracurriculars: standards-based grading.

It’s a grading system that seeks to communicate students’ strengths and weaknesses in relation to state standards. At Santa Fe Public Schools, standards-based grading has been implemented in stages during the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years.

And it has elicited strong reactions all around.

District officials call the practice an admittedly imperfect means of making grading more transparent — a perspective backed to an extent by education researchers.

“It was really about providing an opportunity to give students and parents some clarity on expectations and standards of the content or the grade level,” said Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Hilario “Larry” Chavez.

But students and parents at Santa Fe High argue the grading change-up’s main byproducts are confusion and frustration, further taxing an already stressed-out student body and teacher workforce.

All of that has led HahnHansen to one conclusion: “I think that standardizing education in Santa Fe ... is a frankly terrible idea.”

What is “standards-based”?

For about a century, U.S. schools have been relying on a grading system based in the accumulation of points.

It’s a familiar equation: More points equals higher grades.

The problem is, points don’t always indicate how much students are learning, said Matt Townsley, an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Northern Iowa and one of the leading researchers on standards-based grading.

Offering up points for participation in class, turning assignments in on time and extra credit work doesn’t actually measure whether students have mastered academic material, even if those actions are good indicators of other skills like extraversion, time management or self-advocacy, Townsley said in an interview.

“It’s kind of like an apples and oranges gradebook: Sometimes [the points] mean one thing, sometimes they mean others,” Townsley said. “In a traditional grading system, parents, students and sometimes even teachers have never really stopped to ask, ‘Why? What does this point mean?’ ”

The points system can also fall victim to teachers’ biases, with factors like race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status sometimes creeping into students’ grades, Townsley said. Studies have shown Black and Latino students are subject to disciplinary action more frequently than their white peers, while low-income students perform worse than affluent ones.

“If a teacher chooses to award or subtract points for students’ behaviors — which is, again, separate from the learning — in doing so they are often susceptible to implicit bias or misinterpretation,” he said.

Enter: standards-based grading.

It’s a grading system designed to “communicate students’ strengths and areas for improvement in relation to the state standards,” Townsley said.

In a standards-based grading framework, students are graded on a scale — with individual measures indicating their mastery of academic material — and they often have multiple opportunities to demonstrate proficiency.

It can also take away some of the inequities of the traditional grading system, Townsley said, by removing subjective factors like behavior, participation and effort from the gradebook.

Townsley likened the grading system to a mechanic’s diagnostic tool: It shows what parts of the car are functioning properly and what needs improvement.

What it looks like in Santa Fe

Santa Fe Public Schools’ reason for adopting standards-based grading was to clarify uncertainties surrounding how students receive a particular grade, Chavez said — though critics argue the system adds more confusion.

“It really came to light that a lot of parents [and] students were confused about how they were receiving a grade,” he said. “So that’s when we started undertaking this initiative — to really take a look at the way grades and instruction are being provided to our students.”

The district’s transition to the grading model began with initial investigation during the 2020-21 school year — amid pandemic-era online learning — school board documents show. It ramped up the next year, with additional training and professional development for school staff.

The district partnered with the American Alliance for Innovative Systems, a consulting firm that provides professional development and technical assistance in school redesign and renewal efforts — including the shift to standards-based teaching and learning.

David Holden, CEO of the alliance, said in an interview the company’s team consults with educators on the philosophy behind standards-based instruction and shows them examples of what it could look like, with the goal of working toward a more equitable system.

The total costs for these services varies, Holden said, though it typically adds up to tens of thousands of dollars.

Initial implementation — during which standards-based grading was in place at some schools — began in 2022-23.

All of the district’s schools fully implemented the system this year.

Here’s how the district’s version of the model works: Students receive a score on a scale from 0 to 4 on a particular state standard, with 0 meaning the student shows little to no understanding and 4 meaning the student shows understanding beyond what was taught.

For instance, in the final quarter of a high school-level environmental science course, district documents indicate students should be able to “analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth systems.”

Teachers then grade students using a proficiency scale, a rubric that identifies key indicators of understanding — like understanding of certain vocabulary words or the ability to perform certain tasks.

On the proficiency scale for environmental science, using terms like “global climate models” and “rate of change” is one indicator of a score of 2, while the ability to write valid and reliable scientific claims after analyzing climate data is one of four factors that amount to a score of 3.

The proficiency scale’s granular feedback on what students accomplished will show students “exactly what areas that they hit, what areas that they missed,” Chavez said.

Eventually, the students’ numerical scores get translated into traditional letter grades. And at their teacher’s discretion, students can redo the assignment to show improved mastery.

Still, the superintendent admits Santa Fe Public Schools’ version of standards-based grading isn’t perfect. The district has received feedback on the new system, he said, including criticism in comments from parents and students at recent school board meetings.

The district is planning to tweak its version of standards-based grading during the spring semester and this summer based on feedback from students and families.

“We shouldn’t be static, and we should always want to improve,” Chavez said.

Parent, student objections

Joel Berendzen first heard about standards-based grading in mid-September, when his daughter, Anissa Berendzen — a junior at Santa Fe High — came to him in tears.

After being absent for a day, Anissa’s grades had plummeted.

“Her grades went from the straight A’s she was used to, to a couple of F’s overnight,” he recalled. “She went to bed with an A and woke up with F’s.”

The experience typifies parents’ and students’ primary complaints about standards-based grading: Despite efforts to the contrary, the new system is opaque and hard to understand, generating malaise and frustration among already-taxed high school students and teachers.

Joel Berendzen summed up the issue this way: “I am not concerned about exactly what letter grade my child gets. … I’m more concerned about my child saying, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ ”

Compared to the traditional grading system, Anissa Berendzen said, standards-based grading is a “totally different ballpark.”

“They have entirely changed the rules of the game on us,” she said.

In addition to having to learn a new system of grading, the 0-to-4 scale makes grades volatile — subject to a drop unexpectedly with a score of 1 or 2. Some assignments count toward a grade, Anissa Berendzen said; others don’t.

Even for a self-described “adaptable” student like HahnHansen, the roller coaster of suddenly plummeting grades takes a mental toll.

“It did emotionally impact me when I saw my grades drop,” HahnHansen said. “I’m a person [who places] a lot of their self-value onto their academic success.”

The collective result, she added, is a “very noticeable shift” in morale at Santa Fe High: Students just don’t seem as motivated as they were in previous years.

Research shows resistance from students and families is common when districts choose to switch to standards-based grading.

“Parents and students often have a confidence in the known; they feel that they have a clear snapshot of what the gradebook should look like and what it represents,” Townsley said. “Now, the gradebook represents something different.”

If parents have come to expect a particular type of information from their children’s school, they may be hesitant when that information changes form.

Usually, Townsley said, it comes down to how the specifics of the new grading system are communicated to students and families.

In Santa Fe Public Schools, Chavez said, teachers and administrators told students and parents about the new grading system at parents’ nights, in brochures and handbooks, and on the district’s website.

“It’s ongoing. It’s going to be something that we continue to try to inform our students, our staff and our parents,” he said.

Teachers, too, can resist the shift in grading systems, said Thomas Guskey, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky’s College of Education and a standards-based grading expert.

Without seeing real results for their students, teachers are slow to believe in new initiatives, Guskey’s research revealed, meaning they might hesitate to buy into standards-based grading before confirming it works for themselves.

And the shift to standards-based grading tends to add more work to teachers’ plates, Townsley added.

Standards-based grading is more work, and it’ll take time to ensure students and parents fully understand the new system, said Martín Matehuala, a Spanish teacher at Capital High School. But overall, he said, it’s benefited students and teachers by clarifying grading measures and providing direct feedback.

“It’s different than traditional teaching,” Matehuala said in an interview in Spanish. “In traditional teaching, we only evaluated the students’ performance, but not their abilities.”

Grace Mayer, an art teacher at Milagro Middle School and president of the Santa Fe branch of the National Education Association, declined to comment directly on how standards-based grading is affecting the union’s members.

During a March 14 school meeting, though, she discussed a few challenges related to the change in grading system at the high school level, namely that a lot gets lost in translation when converting the district’s new 0-4 grading scale into A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s and F’s.

“The reality is, we’re not really doing it,” Mayer said of standards-based grading. “We’re doing some sort of hybrid version … because we’re converting these into traditional grades, and they’re not.”

The mix-up, she added, has rendered grading “very frustrating” for teachers and students.

HahnHansen said the translation between the numerical scale and letter grades eliminates the possibility for a B. At a 3 or 4, students receive an A, she said, while a score of 2 equates to a C.

In addition to generating confusion, standards-based grading fails to tackle some of the district’s most persistent problems, like high rates of chronic absenteeism and low proficiency rates in reading and math, Joel Berendzen said.

At Santa Fe High, more than two-thirds of students regularly miss school, and reading proficiency hovers at 43%, according to the latest data from the state Public Education Department.

“Why did we spend our money fixing this — the problems with grading systems — when we don’t actually have the [resources] for students that need to get reading support?” Joel Berendzen asked.

He said he’s particularly concerned about the student groups covered under the 2018 ruling in state District Court in the Yazzie/Martinez lawsuit, in which a judge determined the state failed to provide sufficient education to low-income kids, Native Americans, English language learners and disabled students.

If the district’s highest-performing students are confused and frustrated by the new grading system, how will the change hurt students who are already at a disadvantage, he wondered.

“My kid is going to be OK, but I really worry about other kids that I know are not going to be OK and are not OK right now,” Joel Berendzen said.