lausd homework policy 2021

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Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

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A few years ago, high school teacher Joshua Moreno got fed up with his grading system, which had become a points game.

Some students accumulated so many points early on that by the end of the term they knew they didn’t need to do more work and could still get an A. Others — often those who had to work or care for family members after school — would fail to turn in their homework and fall so far behind that they would just stop trying.

“It was literally inequitable,” he said. “As a teacher you get frustrated because what you signed up for was for students to learn. And it just ended up being a conversation about points all the time.”

These days, the Alhambra High School English teacher has done away with points entirely. He no longer gives students homework and gives them multiple opportunities to improve essays and classwork. The goal is to base grades on what students are learning, and remove behavior, deadlines and how much work they do from the equation.

The changes Moreno embraced are part of a growing trend in which educators are moving away from traditional point-driven grading systems, aiming to close large academic gaps among racial, ethnic and economic groups. The trend was accelerated by the pandemic and school closures that caused troubling increases in Ds and Fs across the country and by calls to examine the role of institutionalized racism in schools in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer.

Los Angeles and San Diego Unified — the state’s two largest school districts, with some 660,000 students combined — have recently directed teachers to base academic grades on whether students have learned what was expected of them during a course — and not penalize them for behavior, work habits and missed deadlines. The policies encourage teachers to give students opportunities to revise essays or retake tests to show that they have met learning goals, rather than enforcing hard deadlines.

“It’s teaching students that failure is a part of learning. We fall. We get back up. We learn from the feedback that we get,” said Alison Yoshimoto-Towery, L.A. Unified’s chief academic officer.

Traditional grading has often been used to “justify and to provide unequal educational opportunities based on a student’s race or class,” said a letter sent by Yoshimoto-Towery and Pedro A. Garcia, senior executive director of the division of instruction, to principals last month.

“By continuing to use century-old grading practices, we inadvertently perpetuate achievement and opportunity gaps, rewarding our most privileged students and punishing those who are not,” their letter said, quoting educational grading consultant Joe Feldman.

The urgent need for change became painfully apparent during pandemic-forced school closures as educators grappled with how to fairly grade students living through an unprecedented disruption to their education. Some of the challenges that students faced were unique to the pandemic. Others had long been present and were more visible.

Suddenly, teachers had an inside view of the crowded home conditions of some low-income students. They saw how some teenagers were caring for younger siblings while trying to do their own work and witnessed the impact of the digital divide as students with spotty internet access struggled to log on to class.

“The COVID pandemic just highlighted across the nation a trend of looking at the inequities in learning circumstances for students,” said Carol Alexander, director of A-G intervention and support for L.A. Unified. “But those different circumstances of learning have always been present.”

Feldman, a former teacher and administrator who wrote the book “Grading for Equity,” had been working for several years with school districts across the country as they reconsidered grading policies. In October and November of the 2020-21 academic school year, he suddenly found himself fielding a “tidal wave” of calls from districts, as teachers issued progress reports and realized that Ds and Fs were skyrocketing.

“Our traditional grading practices have always harmed our traditionally underserved students,” Feldman said. “But now because the number of students being harmed was so much greater, it got people more aware of it and ready to tackle this issue.”

Several school districts across California, reflecting a diversity of demographics, are taking steps toward revising grading with an eye toward equity. Some have formally adopted new policies while others are offering training and support for teachers who want to grade differently.

Last year, West Contra Costa Unified, which is majority Latino, issued a memo encouraging secondary teachers to give students a five-day grace period to turn in work and eliminate zeroes in grade books.

Placer Union High School District, where a majority of students are white, has directed teachers to base grades on “valid evidence of a student’s content knowledge and not...on evidence that is likely to be influenced by a teacher’s implicit bias nor reflect a student’s circumstances.”

In Los Angeles, the district had begun to train teachers on practices including basing grades on whether students are meeting academic standards. But when faced with a flood of Ds and Fs during school closures, officials quickly moved to change policy , giving students additional time to make up work.

Falling grades, stalled learning. L.A. students ‘need help now,’ Times analysis shows

A Los Angeles Times analysis of data offers an alarming assessment of the impact of the pandemic on L.A. students.

Oct. 21, 2021

A recent L.A. Times analysis of L.A. Unified’s assessment and grade data showed how grades fell significantly during school closures for students in Los Angeles. The gap in grades that existed before the pandemic between Black and Latino students and white and Asian counterparts widened to as much as 21 percentage points.

There were also significant gaps in the rate of students meeting University of California and California State University admissions requirements, which say students must complete certain courses with a C or better. During the 2018-19 school year, about 59% of students met the requirements. For the class of 2022, about 46% of students are on track to meet the requirements — with a gap of 17 percentage points or more between Black and Latino students and white and Asian students. Officials have said they expect more seniors will meet the requirements before the end of the school year.

Despite the broad decline in grades, educators said the pandemic also showed how giving students extra opportunities led many to improve their marks. In the fall of the 2020-21 school year, after the district directed teachers to give students several extra weeks to make up their work, almost 15,000 grades were improved.

In the recent guidance, teachers were directed to base final academic grades on the “level of learning demonstrated in the quality of work, not the quantity of work completed” and mastery of standards.

“Just because I did not answer a test question correctly today doesn’t mean I don’t have the capacity to learn it tomorrow and retake a test,” Yoshimoto-Towery said. “Equitable grading practices align with the understanding that as people we learn at different rates and in different ways and we need multiple opportunities to do so.”

The district’s guidance says academic grades should not be based on attendance, including unexcused absences, late work, engagement or behavior, which can be reflected in separate “citizenship” or “work habits” marks that do not count toward a student’s GPA.

Students earning Ds and Fs should also have the opportunity to take an incomplete grade in order to have extra time to improve their grade or retake the course for a better grade or credit recovery.

Gary Garcia, principal at John Marshall High School in Los Feliz, said many teachers have been moving toward more equitable grading practices for years. But shifting away from traditional grading to basing grades on whether students have mastered standards is not easy.

“It is a heavy lift, which is difficult in this pandemic time with the challenges teachers face,” Garcia said. “But, I think over time, over the next few years, we’ll see more and more schools adopting mastery grading and learning.”

Gavin Tierney, an assistant professor in the Department of Secondary Education at Cal State Fullerton, who teaches aspiring educators on equitably assessing students, agreed that asking teachers to fundamentally change their approach to grading — which often replicates what they experienced in school — requires more training and support.

“It’s hard work to rethink how we are assessing and grading on a deep level,” Tierney said. “We can’t just say to teachers, ‘do this work.’ Because they’re trying to just figure out how to get through a lesson a lot of times.”

In San Diego, district officials said they were compelled to make changes following calls for social justice in the aftermath of Floyd’s death and the pandemic’s exposure of long-existing racial inequities.

“Our goal should not simply be to re-create the system in place before March 13, 2020. Rather, we should seek to reopen as a better system, one focused on rooting out systemic racism in our society,” the board declared last summer.

Similar to Los Angeles, the San Diego changes include giving students opportunities to revise work and re-do tests. Teachers are to remove factors such as behavior, punctuality, effort and work habits from academic grades and shift them to a student’s “citizenship” grade, which is often factored into sports and extra-curricular eligibility, said Nicole DeWitt, executive director in the district’s office of leadership and learning.

Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said he thinks some of the changes seem sensible — like giving students a chance to retake tests. But he’s skeptical of others, including removing deadlines and behavior from academic grades.

“The questions that are getting asked here are certainly worth asking,” Hess said. “My concern is that by calling certain practices equitable and suggesting they are the right ones, what we risk doing is creating systems in which we tell kids it’s OK to turn in your work late. That deadlines don’t matter... And I don’t think this sets kids up for successful careers or citizenship.”

Thomas Guskey, author of “On Your Mark: Challenging the Conventions of Grading and Reporting,” said the United States lags behind other countries in modernizing grading.

In Canada, for example, it’s common for students to receive separate grades for academic achievement, participation, punctuality and effort. That makes each mark more meaningful than a grade that is a hodgepodge of factors that can vary from teacher to teacher.

“We in the United States are more bound by tradition in grading than any other developed nation in the world,” Guskey said. Grading reform is not about watering down expectations; it’s about ensuring that grades are meaningful and fair, he said.

“I want us to honor excellence,” Guskey said. “I just want it done in ways that are defensible and not really pitting one kid against the other.”

Watch L.A. Times Today at 7 p.m. on Spectrum News 1 on Channel 1 or live stream on the Spectrum News App. Palos Verdes Peninsula and Orange County viewers can watch on Cox Systems on channel 99.

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Paloma Esquivel is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She was on the team that won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for public service for investigating corruption in the city of Bell and the team that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for coverage of the San Bernardino terror attack. Prior to joining The Times in 2007, she was a freelance writer, worked in Spanish-language radio and was an occasional substitute teacher. A Southern California native, she graduated from UC Berkeley and has a master’s in journalism from Syracuse University.

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Lausd: new plan caps homework to 20% of grade, the proposed homework policy will be unveiled and discussed 6-7 p.m. march 1 at walter reed middle school, 4525 irvine ave., north hollywood..

Suwanee Editor , Patch Staff

The Contra Costa Times reports that the proposed recommendations were crafted by a 15-member committee of administrators, teachers and parents after Superintendent John Deasy suspended last year's policy that limited homework to only 10 percent of a student's grade, because of a lack of public input.

Plans now call for the recommendations, along with guidelines on how much time should be spent on outside assignments, to be unveiled during hour-long public forums that begin Thursday, and for the final policy to be approved by the school board in time for the 2012-13 school year.

Find out what's happening in North Hollywood-Toluca Lake with free, real-time updates from Patch.

Read the rest of the story here.

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$500 microgrants offered to uplift north hollywood neighborhoods.

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News | LAUSD may revisit social distancing policy,…

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News | LAUSD may revisit social distancing policy, instructional schedules in future

Beutner: it's reasonable to expect schools to offer more in-person activities in future.

The Los Angeles Unified School District may change its policy on how spread apart students must remain in the classroom for the summer and fall — when on-campus activities are also likely to increase — Superintendent Austin Beutner said Tuesday, March 23, offering hope to parents who want the district to provide in-person instruction five days a week to students in all grade levels.

The district is currently locked into maintaining 6 feet of distancing between desks because of an agreement it negotiated with the teachers union on how to safely reopen schools, though recent changes to state and federal guidelines suggest 3 feet of spacing is OK.

But that agreement, effective through June 30, is valid only for this school year, which means the terms could be renegotiated in the months ahead.

By reducing the amount of physical distancing required, schools could fit more desks in a classroom and potentially eliminate the need to split up a class of students into two cohorts, thus allowing all students to return to campus five days a week, parents who have been advocating for schools to reopen say.

“For now, our plans have been built around 6-foot (distancing),” Beutner said during Tuesday’s school board meeting. “We think that’s the appropriate standard. We talked to our scientists and advisers.”

That said, the superintendent said the board may see changes coming in the summer and fall and that it would be reasonable to expect more in-person activities offered as health standards relax.

“As more of the community is vaccinated, we would expect health restrictions and health precautions to ease somewhat,” he said. “That will mean we’ll look at issues like the 3-foot, 6-foot for desks and things like that. We’ll also have the ability to build from scratch instructional schedules, if that’s appropriate, to accommodate as much in-person instruction as possible.”

The district has taken a beating for its hybrid learning model for middle and high schools this semester. Not only will students be on campus for only half the week, but they will continue learning online rather than receive in-person instruction from their teachers, as they would be required to remain in one classroom the entire time.

Beutner has noted that other districts have also struggled to come up with a better hybrid plan while keeping students in stable cohorts to minimize the risk of viral transmission.

Middle and high schools are slated to reopen the week of April 26. About 60 elementary schools and early education centers will reopen the week of April 12, with the remaining elementary and early education sites welcoming students back the following week.

Families should learn by the end of this week the exact date that their children’s schools will reopen, district officials said.

In anticipation of coming back onto campus, all students and staff will be required to be tested for the coronavirus the week before their return. Once students are back in the classroom, weekly COVID-19 testing will occur at their desks.

Some families are still deciding whether to send their children back to campus this semester.

About 64% of families have informed the district of their plans so far, and officials are encouraging those who haven’t submitted a survey to do so in order for administrators to properly plan for the reopenings.

Based on the responses thus far, 41% of families districtwide plan to enroll their children in the hybrid program while 59% will have their kids remain in distance learning full time, said David Baca, chief of schools for the district. At the moment, 50% of elementary school families plan to have their child return, as do 36% of middle school families and 26% of high school families.

Families in low-income neighborhoods that have been ravaged by the pandemic are also more reluctant to send their children back, officials acknowledge.

To help families feel more comfortable about having their children return to school, the district is partnering with St. John’s Well Child and Family Center to vaccinate family members of LAUSD students starting April 5. The vaccinations will be administered at Abraham Lincoln Senior High School in East L.A. and George Washington Preparatory Senior High School in South L.A.

Because the effort is intended to prioritize family members from hard-hit communities, St. John’s will be verifying an individual’s ZIP code to determine eligibility, said Jim Mangia, president and CEO of St. John’s.

“This partnership is about vaccine equity – making sure that those most impacted by COVID in communities of color and low income neighborhoods have access to the COVID vaccine,” he wrote in an email.

Meanwhile, LAUSD officials have been on a campaign to highlight the health and safety measures they’ve undertaken at schools and to promote the hybrid program for elementary students as a full-day program.

Elementary students in the hybrid model will receive three hours of in-person instruction with their teachers — most likely in the morning — five days a week. Afterwards, they’ll be able to go home or, if they choose, can stay for the district’s Beyond the Bell program, where they’ll have an opportunity to participate in enrichment activities or receive help with homework.

“If you look at a traditional elementary school day a year ago, you would’ve seen the academic instruction spread out over the course of a day,” Beutner said. “All we’ve done is concentrate it in the morning or the afternoon, and the rest of the activities will be very much like what an old elementary school day would look like — a chance to play with friends, supervised by adults, whether you’re doing your homework or in one-one-one tutoring, an activity.”

Although elementary students will have recess, they won’t be allowed to use the play structures on the playground — a decision which school board member Nick Melvoin said he’d like district staff to reconsider.

Board members were also told that students from different cohorts may be combined for afterschool child care.

District administrators have held a number of meetings and town halls in recent days to answer additional questions from the public and are preparing a document of “frequently asked questions” which they hope to share with families soon.

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California Charter Association Sues LAUSD For Limiting Sharing of Campuses

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The lawsuit, filed on April 2 in Los Angeles Superior Court, claims that the policy discriminates against charter students by not providing them with facilities “reasonably equivalent” to public school campuses.

In a statement on April 2, the association’s president, Myrna Castrejón, called the policy a “shameful and discriminatory attack” on public school students.

“Families choose to send their children to [LA Unified] charter public schools because they have found programs uniquely tailored to their needs,” Ms. Castrejón stated. “This policy limits options for those parents among the most vulnerable across L.A. Unified.”

She added that the district “shares a responsibility to house” charter schools under Proposition 39, a law passed in 2000 that requires school districts to provide space to charter schools that is “reasonably equivalent” to what districts provide public schools.

In the statement, Ms. Castrejón said she is offering to work with the board on a new policy that would improve the process of sharing campuses but claimed “[LA Unified] disregarded the voices and needs of charter school families and adopted a new policy to harm their schools.”

Citing concerns that sharing a campus with a charter school takes away resources from the district’s schools, L.A. Unified’s school board first approved a resolution on Sept. 26 that bans charter schools from co-locating on campuses with large numbers of high-needs students—including those that are part of the district’s Black Student Achievement Plan.

The board gave final approval to that policy on Feb. 13; however, the charter association in the following weeks claimed the board’s vote violated state open-meeting laws—also known as the Brown Act—due to trustee George McKenna’s virtual participation in that meeting.

In response to the charter association’s claim, the board reconvened in a special meeting on March 19 to affirm its previous decision in a 4-3 vote—with board president Jackie Goldberg and trustees George McKenna, Rocio Rivas and Scott Schmerelson voting in favor of the policy.

In an initial statement on Sept. 26, district officials expressed concern that co-location of charter schools created a “pipeline” that encourages students to leave the district’s public schools to enroll in charter schools.

There are more than 270 active charter schools with more than 112,000 students enrolled in LAUSD, according to the state’s Education Department.

In addition, charter schools in the district have seen an enrollment increase of about 1 percent per year since 2018, according to education database EdData.

The resolution will not affect any existing charter schools, according to district officials, but only new charter schools applying for co-locations.

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