Conflicting Signals Are Worth Heeding

When your teachers assign grades to students that disagree with their California Standards Tests (CST) results, do you have a problem? Tom Barrett thinks so. When he was assessment director of Riverside USD, he believed this would be a useful way to diagnose teacher grading policy. If a teacher was handing out grades that weren’t well aligned to CST results, a principal needed to step in and redirect that teacher’s grading policy.

Tom applied this policy to students taking Advanced Placement (AP) courses in Riverside’s high schools. He analyzed all students in all AP courses and discovered a surprisingly high percentage of teachers who were handing out “A”s and “B”s liberally, but whose students were scoring in the low zone—1 or 2 out of 5 on the AP exam, which is licensed by the College Board.

Tom was willing to step outside the usual boundaries of assessment work. He was also ready to intrude in the usually protected world of a high school’s academic departments and its classrooms. His commitment to work outside the box brought a much needed corrective to Riverside’s high schools. It also opened up the door to additional reviews in elementary and middle schools, where he compared teacher-assigned grades with the CST results, student by student.