Off The Mark: How Grades, Ratings, & Rankings Undermine Learning (But Don't Have To) w/ Jack Schneider & Ethan Hutt

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I think my great hope for this book is not that people will read it and say, great, look,

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we're going to go with double clickable transcripts, we're going to go with overwriteable grades,

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we're going to restore the use value of education.

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That's not our hope.

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At least it's not my hope.

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My hope is that we will just make visible the water in which we swim.

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That's my hope.

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Let's start with the bad news, is how the conclusion to my guest book about changing

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grading practice begins.

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No one is coming to save us, no consultant is going to sweep through and fix things for

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a fee, no new technology, digital, online or otherwise, is going to change the game.

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The game, of course, is school, and the currency of that game is grades.

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Jack Schneider is Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor in the College of Education at UMass

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Amherst.

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He's the Executive Director of the Beyond Test Scores Project, Director of the Center

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for Education Policy, co-editor of the History of Education Quarterly, and co-host of the

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Have You Heard podcast.

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Ethan Hutt is the Gary Stuck Faculty Scholar in Education and Associate Professor at the

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UNC Chapel Hill School of Education.

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Their 2023 book, Off the Mark, How Grades, Ratings and Rankings Undermine Learning, But

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Don't Have To, is a thorough and at times frustratingly pragmatic exploration of the

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flawed necessity of the load-bearing pillars of real school.

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Grades, transcripts and standardized tests, their origins in our nation's history, the

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distorting effects they tend to have on the outcomes and goals of education, why nothing

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has arisen so far to replace them at scale, and why there are no magic potions.

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No one is going to wake up one morning and realize that the answer was staring us in

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the face all along, they remind us.

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Balancing the real with the ideal, they also chart a path toward the possibility for something

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different.

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And like the grand experiment of public schooling itself, it's something we'll have to figure

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out and build together.

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Jack and Ethan, thank you so much for taking the time to be with me today.

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Yeah, thanks for having us.

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That was an amazing introduction.

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I think we're going to have to transcribe that and use it ourselves, yeah.

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So I figured we would just start right away with that bad news part.

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Let's start at the end, right?

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Tear the bandage off right away.

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Because if I understand the book correctly, we won't be getting rid of grades, transcripts

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and standardized tests for public schools at scale anytime soon.

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So why the heck not?

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So let's start there.

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Yeah, it's a really good question.

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And one of the things that I continue to joke about when we're doing interviews about the

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book is the fact that we probably could have sold a lot more books if we had said something

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different.

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If we had said, you know, all you need to do is follow the Hutt-Schneider four-step

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plan for weaning yourself off of grades, tests and transcripts.

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The problem is that they are so baked into not only the infrastructure of schooling and

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education and credentialism, but also to the culture of schooling and American life.

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So let's start with the latter of those two, right?

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If you dropped your kid off at a school that didn't give grades, right?

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What are the odds that you would say, this is fantastic.

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I love that the school is going to focus on intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic

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motivation or any of the other positive things you might say about that, right?

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I think most of us would say, well, how is my kid going to get into college then if there

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are no grades, right?

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If you dropped your child off at a school that had no transcripts, right?

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Let's imagine it's a college or university, right?

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If your child has already successfully passed that hurdle, you would likely wonder, well,

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how is my kid going to be motivated to work hard knowing that, you know, he or she or

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they is, they're now 18 years old, living on their own, and there is nothing holding

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them accountable for making good on tuition payments there.

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So there's the cultural piece that we need to deal with, which is reinforced by the fact

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that we've all been through school ourselves.

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So this isn't just about the culture of the present and the ways that we use grades, tests,

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and transcripts in our lives.

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It's also about the fact that we have expectations about what a real school is and does.

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And then there's the infrastructural piece, which is that there are all kinds of decisions

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that are being made all the time on the basis of test results, grades, course titles, right?

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That's a feature of transcripts that we often ignore.

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We often think of transcripts merely as places where grades and test scores reside forever

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permanently, but they're also places where course titles live.

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That offers an additional venue for students to game these metrics, and that's something

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that I'm sure we'll get into in this conversation.

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But that infrastructure would be very hard to totally upend when we're talking about

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13,000 school districts, 98,000 public schools, never mind 20,000 or so, 30,000 private schools

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that we could add into the mix, and thousands of colleges and universities.

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So it's a major, major undertaking to do anything.

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I think what we're trying to do in this book is convince people this is worth our time

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and energies.

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One of the things that we try to do as historians of education is try to understand where did

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these practices come from?

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And what Jack is talking about, both the cultural piece and the idea that it really holds our

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system together, the idea that we use common metrics, the idea that we have a common way

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of presenting the work of school, and that works not just for parents of students, but

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also future audiences of those transcripts, so colleges, employers, that all of these

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things, and we often in the book talk about grades, tests, and transcripts as technologies

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because that's what they are, that these technologies were invented for a particular purpose, and

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those purposes endure in our system.

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So we need to communicate, we need to motivate, we need to synchronize our system, and so

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as much as we would love to sell more books and just be like, well to hell with grades,

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you're removing a core function of the system, and you should expect that the system is going

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to respond, and so I'm sure talk about it, but it's not that people have had no ideas

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about alternative ways, but it's whether those ideas can actually fulfill the purposes for

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which we first invented these things.

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And so part of the conversation in the book, and one that we're hoping to have with educators

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around the country is, okay, let's think about those purposes, let's think about what our

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technologies are doing, and maybe it's time to take advantage of new technologies to update

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some of our practices, but you're never going to get away from those sort of core functions

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that grades, test scores, and transcripts perform, and if you pretend otherwise, you're

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just selling something.

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Yeah, I think you all said it very well in the book over and over again that schools,

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you know, the American education system, as much as it might be anathema now to kind of

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say this, but they're inherently conservative institutions that resist, you know, these

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kinds of radical changes, and we'll get to, I think, the solutions that you all offer,

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but really reducing the potential for both top-down and the bottom-up reforms back to

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those first principles and really seeing how can we change it to help meet communication,

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meet the need for synchronization, and meet those other needs that grades, transcripts,

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test scores help communicate really does chart a very clear path forward.

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But I think before we get to that forward path, let's actually look back to perhaps the

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origins of the book.

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You know, you wrote in the introduction that the project started before COVID.

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I don't know if that was, you know, 2019 or just early 2020, but, you know, COVID for

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all of its horribleness did provide a kind of case study for how the education system

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responds to these drastic, dramatic changes.

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And perhaps we can talk about more of what we saw in that.

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But I just want to know, too, what led you both to start collaborating on this topic,

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on this project, the stuff that eventually became off the mark?

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Well, we're looking at you.

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The project started, I think, way back when we were in graduate school together.

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Ethan and I shared a dismal basement office with each other.

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And, you know, to bring people really behind the curtain, this office was so bad that if

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you sat at Ethan's desk and your office mate was not sitting at his desk, that the light

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sensor that needed to sense movement from you in order to provide illumination would

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not register that anybody was in the office.

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So I would often come back to our office and Ethan would be quietly working in the dark.

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But we have been friends and collaborators for, gosh, at this point, you know, 15 years,

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maybe closer to 20 years.

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And one of the things that we're both really interested in, and I'll defer to Ethan for

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a more detailed description here because he tends to be more precise in the way he talks

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about this stuff than I am.

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But one of the things that we're both really interested in is the way that behaviour and

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action is shaped by things like rules and measurement and systems that are often based

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on really thin information.

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Right?

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Just speaking only for myself here, we are such interesting, complex, thoughtful, capable

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life forms, and yet we pin ourselves in with these very thin rules that are not able to

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capture the thickness of life or the richness of what we can work through in terms of human

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deliberation.

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And for me, that irony, and it's a kind of tragic irony, is really interesting and we

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could look at it anywhere, but I think it's most interesting and sometimes most tragic

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in education because we do it at such large scale and we do it for what we think is, you

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know, the best interests of 50 million young people who are in the schools.

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Yeah, I mean, we've always, I think Jack and I have always shared an interest.

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We had a mutual mentor in David Tyak who always talked about the important part of the grammar

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of schooling.

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So those things in the school that we take for granted and they're just, you know, when

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Jack was talking earlier about, like, when you show up at a school, how do you know it's

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a school?

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You know, all those things, you know, that's part of the grammar of schooling.

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It's what we expect.

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It's how we communicate about education systems.

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And I think we've always shared an interest in kind of thinking about, OK, the pieces

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of that grammar and where they came from and what they do.

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And I've had in my work both with Jack and without is a particular interest in how we

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communicate about the work of schools to the public.

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So, you know, whether it's test scores and grades.

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And so one of the interesting things about these technologies, these assessment technologies

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is that they have multiple audiences and those audiences have expanded in scope over time.

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And so thinking about how these practices have evolved has always just been really

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fascinating to me and just, you know, we we wrote a piece, our very first, I think,

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collaboration together, I think it was in 2014.

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We we first wrote about the grading system and, you know, we just kept coming back to

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those kinds of of questions.

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And then obviously, you know, we've all experienced together No Child Left Behind,

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which added another layer of this sort of communication.

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So thinking about those practices and again, coming from them, as you said, like from a

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place of like there's preserved wisdom and in some of these inherited practices doesn't

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mean they're perfect and can't be improved.

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But I think especially when you look at the history of school reform, too often we have

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reformers who are like, I know better.

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The teachers don't. Everything is broken.

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Let's throw it out. And, you know, my sister is a second grade teacher.

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My mom was a teacher. When you talk to teachers, they have a lot of understanding and

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knowledge about the system.

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And so this idea that schools are conservative or that reform should approach things in a

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conservative way.

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What we're talking about a lot of times is preserving the both the shared experience of

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folks, but also the the knowledge when teachers look at a lot of reforms, they go, that's

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not going to work. You can make me try to do this or maybe I will just not do it, but it's

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not going to work. And so thinking and treating the system with care rather than just taking

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a wrecking ball to it, which may may speak to our kind of like our deeper, you know,

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let's let's burn it all down.

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But practically speaking, those reforms are not are not built to last.

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That's what I think I mentioned in the intro, right, was that frustrating pragmatism as

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someone who kind of considers them, you know, myself as a when I was in the classroom

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practicing grades, really leaning into ways that I can diminish the salience, the

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importance of grades and grading, really changing reporting practices in my own

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practice. And now, you know, working at that big systems level to try and say, how can

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we improve the system both for students, but also make it workable for teachers and

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community and parents alike, like trying to triangulate all of those needs can't be

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done simply by changing one part of that equation, right?

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You have to get all of those folks at the table and ask what is going to work to meet the

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needs of everybody. And really, you know, primarily the work that we that my organization

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does is focus groups with kids, with community members.

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And when you actually sit those two groups down and look at what they say about the

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changes they want the system to be, kids and parents predominantly like agree on the

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ways in which that system could change.

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So there's a lot more, I think, collaboration there than, again, leaders who are kind of

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at the top of the system trying to move those top-down reforms without getting buy-in from

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teachers or teachers not getting buy-in from students or schools not getting buy-in from

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parents, right? We've kind of lost that community aspect to it.

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I really want to know then in the process of researching and writing the book, which

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sounds like it's been going on for basically this is the culmination of a decade of work

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on this, a 15-year collaboration.

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What about that process of research and writing this book, either challenged, affirmed or

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changed your perspectives on grades, transcripts, testing, any one of those kinds of

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concepts that you guys look at?

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So it's interesting. I mean, there's so much that you learn.

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I think the very first thing that I learned was, you know, is sort of where you started,

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where, you know, you kind of are led to believe, you know, when you enter like, oh,

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American public education is bad and Finland has the answer and Germany has the answer

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and, you know, Korea has the answer and the Soviets have the answer.

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And like the very first thing you sort of realize as you look at other practices and

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especially if you take seriously the idea that, you know, it's that there's a cultural

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element to these practices that there's no secret sauce.

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And I mean, it's like you can you can take some exotic practice.

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It's like taking a plant out of, like, you know, the rainforest and then moving it to

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like the desert of L.A. It's like it's like there's so much that goes into these

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practice. It's not a it's not a technical problem in the sense of like, oh, you just

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you just grab something off the shelf or grab some secret practice.

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I spent time abroad and I figured this out.

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You know, once once you sort of give up the idea that there is some holy grail out

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there of practices.

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And as you say, focus on like the sort of human element, like what are the problems

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that these folks were trying to solve over time?

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You know, you just realize how embedded they are.

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Like one of the things that never really had occurred to me.

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You know, in a real concrete sense, until I got into it was like how there really is

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historically a real symbiotic relationship between this idea of local control, the idea

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that we want communities to be able to make decisions for themselves and have flexibility

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and talking about what practices make sense, what courses make sense, what trajectory

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for our students makes sense and this need because we live in a very large country

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that has a decentralized system.

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And I think most of us like on on a regular basis like that, that we have a school

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board and we have teachers that have flexibility, that that almost requires

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somewhere in the system, some standardization, some points of synchronization, as we

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call it in the book, that allows people to move from that decentralized local practice

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to some higher level.

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And you see this with transcripts and this idea that we need a common currency to record

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like, well, how much learning is learning?

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We need a unit and we give time, you know, pride of place there.

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But same with, you know, things like the SAT.

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I've done work on the GED, like having these these tests that kind of sit on top and

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allow for flex in the system, those practices come together.

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So we often talk about standardized tests and grades as separate.

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And one of the things that we really liked about the book, because we had done that in

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our own writing, having them separate, was putting them together and actually say like,

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you can mess with these, but often the other one is picking up the slack.

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So if you want to get rid of the SAT, you're putting more weight on grades.

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And if you want to get rid of grades, like some countries do that, no one looks at

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transcripts, you're going to put all the weight on, you know, a test.

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So thinking about how these are actually sort of in conversation, they're linked in the

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system was one of the big revelations is that we have to think about these as a whole

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system set of practices and not just like tinker with one practice or the other.

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Yeah, Ethan got into this in his response there.

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But one of the things that I learned from him along the way was to be a cold hearted

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realist about this and not just be a dreamer.

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I am a former classroom teacher and and I think it is my inclination to try to take

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big swings at things.

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And I think had I tried to write this book or do any of this work without Ethan, I might

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have verged into, you know, not snake oil sales, but, you know, I think dreaminess,

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right? Like I'm good at identifying all of the problems that exist.

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I can just rattle off all of the ways that grades distort motivation and undermine the

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kind of communication that educators in their hearts want to do with young people.

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I can tell you all of the ways that standardized testing, whether it is run by the state or

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an external entity like the College Board, is designed in a manner that fails to incentivize

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real authentic learning, undermines the practices of educators that are responsive to the

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real needs of young people.

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Right. I can go on this all day, but what I don't naturally do is think about the usefulness

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of things like standardized tests or the ways in which grades actually do serve a real

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important purpose, including for equity, which is often a critique that I will level against

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grades. But, you know, one of the things that I learned from Ethan in doing this project

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was that a grade has just enough vagueness to it, right, that it can allow for important

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kinds of slippage. And what I mean by that is that we take for granted that a course

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title has a particular meaning and that a grade in that course has a particular meaning.

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And that allows for formal equity in our educational system in a way that I think it is

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hard to imagine existing if we said, well, let's allow people to just use their own

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judgment with no formal guidance, no restrictions, no rules here in interpreting what it

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means that a student in a high poverty community from a historically marginalized group took a

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particular math course and has a particular kind of recommendation from their teacher.

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Right. And so although I earlier in our conversation made a little speech about the

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thinness of information and the way we pin ourselves in with rules, I think I'm speaking to

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my natural interests there. But one of the things that I learned in this project is rules

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also at the same time are really important. And so one of the things that I think we do in this

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book is try to help people think in clear ways. We have a lot of faith in educators and in

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families and some faith in policymakers, but to try to structure for them a way of thinking

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through when are rules useful? Right. When is data productive? When are these kinds of

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assessment technologies really important? And then where do we need to really blur the edges?

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Where do we need to remove some of the rules? Where do we need to pull the guardrails a bit

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wider?

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I will say it was definitely interesting to read because I felt that tension, that push and pull

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between, you know, that pragmatic realism and then that, but that the pull of the push of the

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idealism there too. And I think as an idealist or as a dreamer, you know, myself, I found myself

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having to sit in that tension, right, and grapple with that reality of it. And, again, I

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appreciated how the book just brings it back to the first principles to the history of how these

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practices even emerged and just kind of distilled them down into their most component parts to say,

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look, we can kind of change within this range of options here to diminish distortions or to

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increase equity. And basically, we can fiddle with the sliders. But these three ideas have

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emerged to serve a particular role. And I think kind of shifting the conversation perhaps towards

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those potential solutions where you where you guys found them, either internationally, there's a

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whole section in the book where you spoke with international teachers abroad and spoiler alert

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for anyone out there, right? They didn't find magic potions out there either, in any country that

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they talked about. But what, you know, what does the successful reform of these practices be they

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grades or transcripts or the standardized testing components? What does that look like in your view?

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Like, what examples did you find abroad here at home, contemporary ones in the mastery transcript

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or historical examples that you pulled you guys draw from such a wide well of of disciplinary

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knowledge, right? And then how do we realign the goals of grading assessment reporting with the

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goals of learning?

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So I'll give my favorite one. And then Jack, I know has a different favorite one from from the

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book. So and first, I'll say, you know, any idealist out there who just needs someone to ruin

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their day, I'm happy to get on the phone and just, you know, tell you, I've often joked that I should

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just start, start a consulting firm that's just called dude, that's not going to work. And I'll

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just explain to you why it's not going to work. And you can take it early, you know, you don't please

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don't listen to me. That's no fun. That it's what's nice about writing with someone who has a little

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bit of a different temperament is like you do get that push and pull. And I am glad that it that it

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came out in the book as as being a real conversation between, you know, the two of us. And

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we've had people say, so which sections did you write? And which section? And it's like, no,

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there, it's, it's really like, it's, it's really interwoven in that way. So I'm glad it comes to.

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So I'll give a good example of something that it feels like the the history of the practice helps

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inform, you know, kind of a new way of thinking about it that recognizes the value and recognizes

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the, the, the challenge, but actually moves us forward. So, you know, historically, if we think

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about a transcript, there were very concrete, practical, physical reasons why you needed a

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transcript to be short. It needed to have, it needed to, to, to distill all the richness of an

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education to a single sheet of paper, because in the world before computers, like those transcripts

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were housed in physical spaces in filing cabinets, and you needed the school to keep that for a very

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long time. So there's a real physical space reason why it made sense for schools to try to distill

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and have a real economy of communication, economy of record keeping around student transcripts and

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student, you know, student performance. But those space constraints don't really apply anymore. I

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mean, we, you know, my transcript takes up like a few bytes of space on a computer that basically

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has with the cloud, like infinite space. So one of the ideas that we talked about is that, you know,

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if one of the challenges of the transcript is that the information is so thin, I can, I can bug

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Jack to give me a slightly higher grade, and he can record an A instead of an A minus, or let's

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be honest, an A minus instead of a B plus, then we can, you know, then I know that, you know,

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mission accomplished, no one's ever going to see that essay, and no one is ever going to be able

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to decide whether my final project was or wasn't an A minus or B plus or whatever. It's like once

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it's on the transcript, like that's the end of the game. But, and for reasons like I explained,

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like the lack of space means that there's no work behind that grade. And so one of the things we

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talk about in the book, one of the things that seems very within reach is if we made transcripts

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what we call double clickable. So if you could, for instance, not only deliver your transcript,

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but behind the grade of that transcript existed any amount of work that reflected the work

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behind that grade, we argue, and I think it's, it feels right to me that that helps focus the

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learner and the whole enterprise of education around what is the learning that is associated

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with that grade. By reattaching the work and the work product to the grade that sits on the

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transcript, you allow people to focus on not just the letter, but what's actually learned. And you

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can tell someone, a student, say, look, these are not going to be detached forever. Like someone's

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going to look, and you should actually want them to look, because then they can see all the things

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that you did and all the things that you accomplished, and maybe they even see the whole

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process of your accomplishment. So by making a transcript, by thinking about like, okay,

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the limitations no longer apply, we can recenter learning, we can recenter the actual product of

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learning, rather than just have students motivated by that, by that letter on that transcript.

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Yeah, Ethan allowed me to go with my favorite here. So I am really enamored by the idea of

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overwritable grade. So, you know, I'll start with the buzz phrase there, where we are referring to

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basically the digital capacity to replace old information with new information. And I'll back

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into an explanation of how we arrived at that as a possible way of tinkering towards reform.

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So one of the things that we talk about in the book is the fact that these assessment technologies

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arose to serve different purposes. And those purposes can be, you know, sort of shorthand

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conveyed as the purpose of communication. And they're actually two distances of communication

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that we talk about in the book, a short haul communication, an educator trying to communicate

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with a student and or their family, and a long haul communication, right. So the school, the educator,

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and sometimes even the student themselves having an interest in this communicating with distances.

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And the long haul communication, where an educator, or sometimes the students themselves

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have an interest in communicating with audiences at a distance that is either geographic or temporal,

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right, communicating with people who are really far away, or who are in the future. So that's

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communication. Then there's also motivation. That one's pretty obvious, right, the use of

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assessment technologies as a way to try to get young people to work hard and show up. And we'll

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just name the fact that, you know, we have compulsory education laws for a reason, right,

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there are lots of other things to do in this life than go to school. And then third is synchronization

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to try to stitch together the component parts of a very large cumbersome and mostly decentralized

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system. Well, let's just talk about the communication function that grades served in their origin,

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right. They were serving a short haul communication function. They really were an effort to

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communicate in shorthand with students' families. And that was related to motivation very much,

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right, because the idea was, maybe we can get these young people to work a little harder if

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their families know that they aren't applying themselves in school. And maybe we can get them

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to continue to work hard if their families praise them for all the good work that they're doing.

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So these purposes aren't always necessarily disconnected from each other, although they do

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often work across purposes. And so let's just consider how the fact that grades over time,

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so as we move from the early to mid 19th century into the 20th century and into the mid 20th century,

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we can see the grades are increasingly being used by the time we arrive at the mid 20th century

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as a way of communicating with much more distant audiences, right. By the mid 20th century,

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high school enrollment is pretty close to universal. We are moving closer to universal

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high school graduation. We still aren't there yet. We may never arrive there, right. But we

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get close enough that we get far more students attending college as a way of trying to distinguish

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themselves. And we see very real labor market benefits for students who get high school

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diplomas, who have good grades as a result of hard work in high school, and who go to college,

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right. And very real labor market returns for students who graduate from college and get good

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grades. And so we can see that students develop this very real interest in getting good grades

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in order to reap the rewards of what is essentially a credentials market there.

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So we've got two different forms of communication there. And if we think about the ways that they

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are not really designed to work together, we can begin to see problems. So the idea that grades

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were originally intended to serve a short haul communication function, and then eventually get

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used to serve this long haul communication function leads to a problem where educators will

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often want to say, hey, you don't get this, right. I'm trying to communicate to you with this grade

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that you do not fully understand this material. And I would actually like your family to know this

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because lo and behold, families care about the young people who live with them and want the best

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for them, and often can intervene. And we could have a whole separate conversation about how we

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end up in this country mostly offshoring the responsibility of giving extra assistance to

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families and the free market rather than doing it systematically, which is something that grades

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could actually serve a useful function in. But we can see that if you're trying to send this message

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to students and their families, hey, you don't get it. You're also doing something at the exact

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same time, which is ruining that student's future, right. That's how the student is going to interpret

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it is, hey, you thought that you were sending me a message by giving me a C in algebra, but do you

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know what you actually did? You actually put a black mark on my record. And this can be

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not just a problem for ambitious students who want to get into highly selective colleges and

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universities who want to have pristine transcripts, you know, and have more than a 4.0 grade point

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average. This can be devastating when we're talking about students for whom school isn't

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a natural fit, for whom, you know, there are headwinds rather than tailwinds. These black

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marks on their records pile up. And if the incentive is, hey, go to school and work hard

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because that's going to open up social and economic opportunities for you. Well, if they see, hey,

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listen, I've already got a bad enough academic record that I'm not going to benefit from this,

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right. Then that further undermines the motivation of those students. So that's a long wind up to

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a way of dealing with this problem, which is to say, well, if you made it possible to overwrite

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the student's grade, once the student gained the relevant knowledge or skill, you could actually

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have it both ways. You could actually communicate to the student and their family, hey, you don't

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get it right now, right? Right now, you've got to see in algebra or geometry or English literature

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or physical education, right? You've got to see. But that's not where this story needs to end.

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And the example that I always give, right, Ethan's going to get sick of this example,

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is that none of us knew how to ride a bike once upon a time. Nobody came out of the womb

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00:36:11,920 --> 00:36:21,200
on a bicycle, as far as I know, right? But if we had been graded at the point in time where somebody

421
00:36:21,200 --> 00:36:26,080
had arbitrarily said, let's see if you can do it, many of us would have failed. And we would have

422
00:36:26,080 --> 00:36:30,720
had to carry around on our transcripts an F in bike riding, despite the fact that the vast majority

423
00:36:30,720 --> 00:36:37,440
of us later learned that skill, right? Why carry around outdated information? Maybe you did fail

424
00:36:37,440 --> 00:36:44,320
algebra. And maybe you then learned that skill. Why carry the F forever on a transcript,

425
00:36:44,320 --> 00:36:48,800
instead of being able to overwrite that information with more accurate information

426
00:36:49,360 --> 00:36:54,960
that actually is going to better serve the purpose of communicating to future audiences

427
00:36:54,960 --> 00:37:00,480
what you know and can do? I think that's another thing that I appreciated about the book was,

428
00:37:01,280 --> 00:37:10,080
uh, in the sense that you explore historical examples of narrative reports and of portfolio

429
00:37:10,080 --> 00:37:15,440
systems and all of these other kind of one size fits all replacements, right, that were meant to

430
00:37:15,440 --> 00:37:22,720
replace, upend, a revolution in grading, testing, reporting, and all these things. And really, I

431
00:37:22,720 --> 00:37:28,000
think a message that I took away from the book was certainly that, you know, these hybrid models

432
00:37:28,000 --> 00:37:33,680
where we're kind of Frankensteining together the best purposes of every kind of system are going

433
00:37:33,680 --> 00:37:39,280
to be the things that are ultimately going to make any successful grading, reporting, testing,

434
00:37:39,280 --> 00:37:45,600
reform work in the long run is not trying to replace one, the flaws of one one size fits all

435
00:37:45,600 --> 00:37:50,080
with the flaws of another one size fits all, but really trying to take the good where we can find

436
00:37:50,080 --> 00:37:56,160
it and wherever that might come from. And again, that that's not a huge appeal to my dreamer

437
00:37:56,160 --> 00:38:00,720
idealism, but gosh, that makes a lot of pragmatic sense as somebody who has to work within the

438
00:38:00,720 --> 00:38:06,640
system, who has kids in the system too, who has to attend to systemic coherence. So again,

439
00:38:06,640 --> 00:38:13,520
I appreciated that long view both historically and then, you know, in terms of depth of our system

440
00:38:13,520 --> 00:38:20,400
and the need to communicate from K-12 and beyond to employers to to the whole nine yards. I think

441
00:38:20,400 --> 00:38:26,080
then one thing kind of wrapping up the conversation here is just to get from both of you

442
00:38:26,800 --> 00:38:33,120
kind of a sense of what do you think is really missing in the public conversation around

443
00:38:33,680 --> 00:38:40,480
grades, transcripts, testing the focus of the book and what would be your goal about how we can speak

444
00:38:40,480 --> 00:38:46,480
about these things differently or how we can enrich the public conversation, short of buying

445
00:38:46,480 --> 00:38:53,040
your book, of course, but then how can we speak to people differently about these distortions and

446
00:38:53,040 --> 00:39:00,240
the problems and the benefits and the equity and the need to communicate? I'm going to beat Ethan

447
00:39:00,240 --> 00:39:06,320
to the buzzer here just so I can respond to the thing that I think we both want to respond to

448
00:39:06,320 --> 00:39:13,440
before the question, which was your comment there. And both of us owe a debt of gratitude to

449
00:39:14,240 --> 00:39:21,440
David Tyak and Larry Cuban because totally embedded in the way that you were just describing

450
00:39:22,000 --> 00:39:29,600
our project are some ideas that entirely come from them. And this idea of Frankensteining or

451
00:39:29,600 --> 00:39:38,000
hybridizing, that's a Tyak and Cuban idea. And the idea that, you know, we can't just wash away the

452
00:39:38,000 --> 00:39:47,360
past, that every layer of educational policy, every layer of the culture of schooling builds

453
00:39:47,360 --> 00:39:53,680
upon the previous layers, right? That's a Tyak and Cuban idea. And even our dedication of the book,

454
00:39:53,680 --> 00:40:00,880
right? The book is dedicated to our students is a ripoff of David and Larry, which is not to say

455
00:40:00,880 --> 00:40:08,880
that the rest of the book is, but we would encourage people to read side by side our book

456
00:40:08,880 --> 00:40:15,760
with Tinkering Toward Utopia by David and Larry. So now I'll actually answer the question and try

457
00:40:15,760 --> 00:40:22,240
not to be so long winded and then kick it over to Ethan. But I think my great hope for this book is

458
00:40:22,240 --> 00:40:28,240
not that people will read it and say, great, look, we're going to go with double clickable

459
00:40:28,240 --> 00:40:33,280
transcripts. We're going to go with overwritable grades. We're going to restore the use value of

460
00:40:33,280 --> 00:40:40,960
education. That's not our hope. At least it's not my hope. My hope is that we will just make visible

461
00:40:40,960 --> 00:40:47,440
the water in which we swim. That's my hope because I know that I speak for both of us that we have

462
00:40:47,440 --> 00:40:53,200
tremendous confidence in the three and a half million educators who are at work every day in

463
00:40:53,200 --> 00:40:59,280
this country. We have tremendous confidence in the ability of the 50 million students who are in

464
00:40:59,280 --> 00:41:04,640
our public schools to speak up for themselves, including in the kind of work that you guys do.

465
00:41:06,080 --> 00:41:14,080
We have a lot of faith in families who really want the best for young people, but we inhabit

466
00:41:14,720 --> 00:41:22,320
an educational policy space and an educational culture that makes invisible practices that

467
00:41:23,040 --> 00:41:30,160
are totally ordinary to us. Not ordinary because they don't have any negative unintended

468
00:41:30,160 --> 00:41:36,400
consequences or don't matter, but ordinary because we completely expect them. We talked earlier about

469
00:41:36,400 --> 00:41:41,600
quote unquote real school and the grammar of schooling. It would be odd to us if we didn't

470
00:41:41,600 --> 00:41:47,520
see grades, tests, and transcripts. And in fact, we totally expect the unintended consequences as

471
00:41:47,520 --> 00:41:54,240
well. We say things like, well, tests are just a part of life. Or we will say out of one side of

472
00:41:54,240 --> 00:41:59,360
our mouths, hey, you should be really focused on learning this material. This material really

473
00:41:59,360 --> 00:42:03,040
matters. And then out of the other sides of our mouths, we'll say things like, hey, you have to

474
00:42:03,040 --> 00:42:10,400
get a better grade in this course. You don't want to have this on your transcript. And so what my

475
00:42:10,400 --> 00:42:17,440
big hope is, is that people will read this book and think about grades, tests, and transcripts

476
00:42:17,440 --> 00:42:26,400
not as ordinary features of real schools, but as technologies that we continue to choose to use

477
00:42:27,040 --> 00:42:36,400
often inappropriately every single day in school. 180 days a year for all 13 years of the K through

478
00:42:36,400 --> 00:42:44,480
12 experience and then into higher ed for students who go to four, or in our case, 10 more years

479
00:42:44,480 --> 00:42:51,840
after that. So if we can see what is presently invisible to us, then we can talk about it. And

480
00:42:51,840 --> 00:43:02,160
if we can talk about it, then we can act. I'm not an ideas person. I'm a grumpy person. I'm

481
00:43:02,320 --> 00:43:08,080
not going to work. But I do think that it strikes me when I listen to people

482
00:43:10,960 --> 00:43:17,040
struggle against our grading system. And we saw this in the pandemic where lots of things were

483
00:43:17,040 --> 00:43:22,960
disrupted and people were having really difficult conversations in the public about what was fair

484
00:43:22,960 --> 00:43:28,000
and what was possible and what would happen and the long-term consequences. And could we set this

485
00:43:28,000 --> 00:43:33,520
aside and should we just give everyone an A and what would happen? It struck me as that what we

486
00:43:33,520 --> 00:43:40,320
lacked was a real common language for having these conversations. And so, especially I think

487
00:43:40,320 --> 00:43:46,400
the project started before the pandemic, but what the pandemic I think really added to the book was

488
00:43:47,200 --> 00:43:52,880
really, it foregrounded for me and Jack that we needed to give people, one of the best things we

489
00:43:52,880 --> 00:43:58,560
could do is give people a language to talk about all of these different functions that grades serve

490
00:43:58,560 --> 00:44:03,920
and then they're underlying, like where they come from in the system. And once we provided that,

491
00:44:03,920 --> 00:44:10,480
and if you look at the last chapter, we really imagined the last chapter being like, we thought

492
00:44:10,480 --> 00:44:19,040
like, well, maybe my sister and her colleagues would sit down with the book and say, okay,

493
00:44:19,040 --> 00:44:23,040
let's think about our practices. And now that we have this language, maybe we can talk about,

494
00:44:23,040 --> 00:44:28,080
okay, what about this? And what about this? Because we really do believe in the strength

495
00:44:28,080 --> 00:44:34,880
of a plural approach to learning and that there isn't a one size fits all. And so providing a

496
00:44:34,880 --> 00:44:39,520
language that people could be on the same page and talking about it, but arrive at different

497
00:44:39,520 --> 00:44:44,880
conclusions about what makes sense for them and their students or their communities, that to me

498
00:44:44,880 --> 00:44:51,600
was the big step that we can take forward because I will not, I mean, we have solutions, we pitch

499
00:44:51,600 --> 00:44:56,240
some to your listeners, but it would be totally fine with me if everyone decided that those were

500
00:44:56,240 --> 00:45:03,040
bad ideas. If they said, okay, actually, what we need is not the double clickable. What we need is

501
00:45:03,760 --> 00:45:09,120
this and this, and we can serve those functions. So providing some clarity and hopefully the

502
00:45:09,200 --> 00:45:14,640
history kind of comes through and people can see why we got to where we were. It wasn't just

503
00:45:14,640 --> 00:45:21,200
bad actors. It wasn't just random. It wasn't just some like factory model that someone, you know,

504
00:45:21,200 --> 00:45:26,320
these are learned things that have accreted over time. So that's the big thing that I hope people

505
00:45:26,320 --> 00:45:29,840
will take from the book, whether they like our solutions or not. And that's the whole thing I

506
00:45:29,840 --> 00:45:34,320
hope that we'll endure and sort of animate or help illuminate conversations in the future.

507
00:45:35,280 --> 00:45:40,480
Right. None of these systems fell from the sky in a single piece to be implemented as is, right?

508
00:45:40,480 --> 00:45:46,720
They're the result of, you know, that both the social construction, the historical construction,

509
00:45:46,720 --> 00:45:52,960
but I think to emphasize that construction part recognizes how it's situated in the past

510
00:45:52,960 --> 00:45:58,240
and in a collective reality, but also kind of recognizes the potential and possibility that,

511
00:45:58,240 --> 00:46:03,440
hey, we can do something different to help meet our needs and the needs of our kids here in the

512
00:46:03,760 --> 00:46:11,440
present or perhaps in the future too. So again, I just, I really appreciate that balance of that

513
00:46:11,440 --> 00:46:17,920
realism, that idealism, that pragmatism. I think for me it was a huge appeal of the book. So the

514
00:46:17,920 --> 00:46:23,120
book, of course, is Off the Mark, How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning, but

515
00:46:23,120 --> 00:46:28,320
don't have to, from Jack and Ethan. Thank you guys both so much for joining me today.

516
00:46:29,120 --> 00:46:30,000
Thank you for having us.

517
00:46:30,000 --> 00:46:31,280
Yeah. Thanks for having us. This was fun.

518
00:46:34,160 --> 00:46:38,000
Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this

519
00:46:38,000 --> 00:46:42,240
conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening,

520
00:46:42,240 --> 00:46:45,840
please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player. Plus,

521
00:46:45,840 --> 00:46:50,240
find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website,

522
00:46:50,240 --> 00:46:53,600
HumanRestorationProject.org. Thank you.

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