Editor’s note: This commentary is by Curtis Hier, of Fair Haven, who is a teacher at Fair Haven Union High School.
“Compare linear and exponential functions of discrete and continuous types.” This is a “proficiency” on a local school’s trendy new report card. Say your child earns a 2.5 on that. What does that mean to you? What should you do with that information? And do you want pages and pages of such data instead of a traditional report card?
Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe, a Shumlin appointee kept on by Gov. Phil Scott, wants to do away with traditional report cards. In fact, she wants to do away with class ranking, valedictorians and earning credits for passing classes.
Here’s how it will work: A, B, C, D will be replaced by 4, 3, 2, 1. Some schools will break them into decimals. In many schools, homework won’t be graded. Retakes on quizzes and tests will be allowed.
This is the current fad in education. The flavor of the month. But it’s sending teachers through an arduous process, it’s confusing, and it has no proven track record. Nobody can answer all the questions people have about it, because it’s basically an airplane being constructed in flight.
I do know that the new practice is anti-rigor and anti-content. In some classes, students are demonstrating proficiencies by making their way through packets of worksheets. And in many classes, formerly high-achieving students are stuck earning 3s, because their teachers are at a loss to explain to them how to earn 4s. A number of schools have conversion tables back to a 100-point scale, making the entire process a meaningless waste of teachers’ time.
Vermont and Maine were leading the nation in requiring proficiency-based graduation requirements. But Maine dropped their mandate, because it faced significant backlash. Nevertheless, the University of Southern Maine managed to do “qualitative” research on schools that had already implemented it. These schools self-reported “improved student engagement.”
Qualitative research in education is notoriously flimsy, and “improved student engagement” is code for no improved achievement. In fact, the early literature shows there is no improved achievement. And the University of Southern Maine report itself acknowledged the many “challenges” of proficiency-based grading.
A blogger observed a Maine proficiency-based learning classroom and noted: “Students have a pile of worksheets and other assigned tasks to work through, teachers don’t so much teach as try to push them along through the stack, and students are ranked on whether they are ahead, behind, or on pace.”
Some people think disrespectful kids are the biggest issue facing teachers. It is not. It is a bureaucracy that will simply not let teachers teach. This bureaucracy does everything to take the art and the joy out of teaching.
Proficiency-based grading saps teachers of their time, energy and enthusiasm. Teachers are afraid to speak out, although one anonymous teacher commented on a discussion board: “The record keeping for this, however, has most of us ready to throw ourselves off a bridge.”
Vermont is consistently among the top states in NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores. Leaders of our education institutions should stay out of the way of teachers and let them continue to achieve these results.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Curtis Hier: The proficiency fad.
