Grading for Equity Blog

TO OUR AMAZING TEACHERS: A HEARTFELT THANKS (AND A GIFT!)

I come from a family of many teachers, and I did the legwork to get (hopefully) most of it right:

2 Preschool Teachers
3 Elementary Teachers
3 English Teachers
1 Science Teacher
1 Physical Education Teacher & Coach
1 Business Teacher
1 Art Teacher
5 teachers (Subject and Division Areas Unknown)
1 Librarian with 1 Assistant Principal Husband
1 Elementary Teacher with 1 Principal Husband
1 Principal-Turned-Superintendent
And 1 great-grandmother who was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse

Phew! That was an intense data dive.

But I wanted to get into the nuts and bolts because it feels important: first, to show the sheer number of teachers around us at any given time; and second, to make the often invisible work of teaching visible.

Do you know how amazing you teachers are? Here’s just a glimpse of your greatness: paying for classroom supplies; staying up all hours of the night perfecting lesson plans; taking on extra responsibilities–euphemistically referred to as “wearing many hats”–that are not necessarily reflected in salaries; buying and keeping snacks in your desk for students who are hungry; giving focused content or skills support to kids who need the extra help; fundraising; coaching; cheering; dressing up for Spirit Week; allowing students to escape into your classroom during lunchtime; presenting to the school board or at a community meeting, whether in opposition to or support of an issue; learning another language to better communicate with families; calming students down; exciting students about learning; supporting social-emotional growth… and who can forget the grading?! Grading “in the wee small hours of the morning” before school starts. Grading during your planning period (if you don’t get asked to cover a class, an event, or a field trip). Grading on the train, or on the bus, or as you stand waiting for either one.

I could go on and on about the countless things–many of them invisible–that teachers do. Instead, I’m laser-focusing my praise and lifting up the teachers who–in addition to the incomplete list above–lean into the challenge of reshaping their grading practices. The task is neither a light one nor one that should be taken lightly. It requires a willingness to unlearn years of learning, to allow ourselves to believe new information, to reflect on practice, and, sometimes, to confront the daunting reality that maybe we didn’t get something right (perhaps because no one prepared us).

And despite this, teachers still embrace the opportunity to improve how they grade!

We want to take a moment to shout out, to big up, and to celebrate the teachers we have worked with this year, last year, and anytime before. Whether we were together for 45 minutes, two hours, a day, two days, all school year, or multiple school years, we salute you!

Thank you for looking at your current grading practices under a microscope.
Thank you for putting your time, energy, and thinking into whatever presentations you attended with us.
Thank you for learning about action research in your context.
Thank you for designing action research plans even if it was your first time trying them.
Thank you for scheduling coaching sessions, many of which happened during your planning periods.
Thank you for considering implementing redos and retakes, even though it might have meant additional time grading and huge shifts in your teaching, reteaching, and assessing.
Thank you for analyzing (and maybe even constructing) new rubrics.
Thank you for designing qualitative data collection tools, then using the data you gathered to inform your practice, your grading, or your day-to-day interactions with students.
Thank you for being willing to understand proficiency scales more deeply.
Thank you for reimagining scales that are more mathematically proportionate than the typical 0-100 scale.
Thank you for looking at graphs of Maria and Ellis multiple times (#IYKYK).
Thank you for being vulnerable by opening up to your colleagues about your work and results of new grading practices, even when they weren’t perfect.
Thank you for collaborating with our grading coaches, many of whom are current classroom teachers just like you. (And thank you to our grading coaches for making this work so much more accessible, approachable, and manageable for the teachers in our care while never losing sight of your own progress.)
Thank you for your time, your precious time! You could have done so many other things with the brief windows of time that are yours alone, and instead you chose to spend that time planning and honing your equitable grading practices.
Thank you for sitting in the discomfort of questioning some aspect of education as you knew it, which can be scary.
Thank you for working to make your corner of the world a little more just.

As a tangible thank-you, we are offering a free course for all teachers who sign up for the following Crescendo Education Group online course:

Grading for a Growth Mindset: Implementing Redos and Retakes

Sign up for this courses during Teacher Appreciation month (May 1-31, 2025) for free. Follow this link for more information!

If you are a classroom teacher, school leader, or education administrator who is looking for more information about how equitable grading practices can transform teaching, learning, and school culture, and ways to help teachers implement those practices successfully, please take a moment to fill out our contact form here!

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*Courtney Fenner is a career educator with 19 years of experience across a breadth of schools where her roles have included classroom teacher, grade team leader, and Director of Equity & Inclusion. She holds an MA in English Education from Brooklyn College, an MFA in Creative Writing from Virginia Commonwealth University, and a BA in Studies in Women & Gender from the University of Virginia.

She is the author of the book, Kollege Knowledge: A Grrrl’s Guide to Surviving the First Year, and was the 2013 Young Women’s Leadership Network’s Teacher of the Year.

A Prophet in Their Own Land: Why School Leaders Struggle to Lead Grading Reform

“You can’t be a prophet in your own land” is a familiar expression that captures one of the most frustrating realities of organizational change. It’s what behavioral scientists call the messenger effect — documented as far back as Hovland and Weiss’s landmark 1951 study on source credibility and research has re-affirmed consistently — whereby the same idea receives substantially different reception depending on who delivers it. The idea is simple but powerful. When an administrator or teacher-leader tries to introduce a new way of thinking to people around them–their colleagues, their staff, the community they work in every day–they are often met with resistance, skepticism, or polite indifference. But when an outside voice delivers the exact same message, something different happens. The idea is evaluated on its merits, without the baggage of organizational history and power relationships.

I see this play out constantly in my work around grading reform. Principals, superintendents, and department heads who have read the research, internalized the implications for fairness and professional integrity, and genuinely believe in the need for change find that when a member of my organization or I facilitate workshops, even when the content echoes what they’ve read about or what the leader has told them, something’s different. People become more open, more curious, and momentum shifts in the direction of grading reform.

This is not a failure of individual leadership. It is a structural feature of organizational change, and it’s worth examining why it is pronounced when the change is about grading.

Why Grading Is Unique

There may be no reform more necessary and more charged in American education than changing how we grade students. Grading is not like other instructional topics. In my experience as a former teacher, principal, and district administrator, no conversations with teachers was more potentially fraught with implications for labor contracts, professional integrity, and adult relationships within our school building, than those regarding grading practices. The reason becomes clear when one considers the broader context in which teachers work today and the expectations placed on them.

We ask teachers to implement new curriculum with fidelity while differentiating for every learner, and adapt and integrate new technology in real time. We ask them to navigate politically charged community expectations and address the full spectrum of students’ social, emotional, and academic needs. We ask them to manage classroom behavior, support individual students with complex histories, be culturally responsive and sustaining across race, gender, and class, and to accept compensation that, at least monetarily, does not reflect the difficulty or importance of the work during a time of declining union power.

Into that context, grading means something greater than entering points in the gradebook software. Because grading is, as I have often described it, teachers’ “last island of autonomy”, it is more than one more teaching task; it represents professional identity and trust in professional judgement. Grading is how a teacher’s professional expertise is formalized, enduring, and must be critically protected. That’s why many teacher contracts and state education codes explicitly enshrine a teacher’s grades as unalterable except under the most extreme circumstances. A teacher’s grades, after all, deserve that protection; no one is better situated to evaluate and report a student’s performance than their teacher.

That protection, though, creates a dilemma for leaders who want to do right by students and to support the integrity of each teacher’s instruction. After all, when every teacher is grading students differently, and no teachers have had sufficient access to grading research or support, leaders who want to talk about grading are really trying to support both teachers and students, yet when a principal says, “I’d like us to look at how we’re grading,” teachers often hear, “I’m not trusted,” or “I want to take away your professional autonomy” because that’s their experience from previous grading conversations with administrators.

This is the heart of what we could call the “native prophet” problem. The very person most responsible for student outcomes, and who understands how grading is a key lever for improving those outcomes, is also, by virtue of their institutional role, can be the least credible messenger for grading reform.

The Urgency of Grading Reform

I understand why leaders sometimes decide it’s not worth the fight. Grading reform is emotionally charged, legally complicated, and slow. Yet there are few aspects of education as proven–through both academic research and at the classroom level—to be in as critical need of examination and improvement as grading.

Grades determine who takes advanced courses, who believes they are capable of academic success, what opportunities are available to students beyond high school. And with decades of evidence, it’s clear that many of our most common grading practices—including averaging scores across a semester, offering extra credit, including non-academic behaviors in the grade, and using the 0-100% scale—make grades more inaccurate and less fair. Plus, students from low-income families, students whose parents work multiple jobs, students experiencing housing instability, students learning English–these students are disproportionately hurt when grades measure compliance and circumstance rather than learning.

Traditional grading doesn’t harm students because teachers intend it; it’s that the practices have been inherited and unexamined for generations. Without professional support to improve grading, we will continue to replicate what we’ve experienced, and every student pays the price. But traditional grading practices undermine effective teaching as well, turning classrooms into pressure-cooker performance spaces where everything a student does is evaluated, diluting teacher agency through the use of over-complicated gradebook calculations, and overwhelming teachers with dozens of daily grade data entries and tracking. Every teacher is harmed by traditional grading, too.

What Leaders Can Do

Be willing to recognize when you have a “native prophet” problem and find external voices to engage teachers’ curiosity in ways that you can’t. Inviting outside expertise is not a concession of your leadership authority or skills; it is an exercise of it. The leader who understands their own land and organizational dynamics well enough to create space for an outside voice is exercising more sophisticated leadership than one who insists on serving as the sole messenger for institutional change.

To maximize your investment in that prophet (or to “profit” from your grading “prophet”):

When you’re assessing potential external support, ensure that their ideas, language, and takeaways move the work forward and align with your vision. You don’t want to be surprised by what they say and then scramble to mend gaps between your ideas and theirs.
Coordinate with the outside grading support so teachers walk away from their workshop or conversation with clarity on their next steps or subsequent support. You want to avoid having the teachers experience one more professional development experience that goes nowhere.
While the external person is working with your teachers, listen closely for content and ideas you can reference later as well as for how your teachers are responding—that way you can follow-up with tailored and meaningful next steps.
Engage external support initially on a short-term basis to assess their impact, their approach, and how their teachers feel about future partnerships with them. Prophets can help in many ways, and the more that you and the teachers trust them, the more they can accelerate change that you’re leading.

A Long Journey With Many Prophets

This work takes time. Schools and districts that have made real progress with equitable grading have done so over years, not months—building shared professional vision and vocabulary, creating opportunities for teachers to pilot practices, and celebrating evidence-based results that show not just that improved grading practices are possible, but that there are immediate benefits for both teachers and students.

The native prophet problem is real, and school leaders must recognize that the authority that gives them their platform to lead grading improvements simultaneously can limit their credibility to advocate for it. Effective leadership requires utilizing resources—their own skills or those of others, both prophets inside the school and outside—to achieve their goal of successful learning outcomes for every student.

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*Joe Feldman is the author of several articles on improved grading and Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms (Corwin, 2nd ed. 2024) and founder of Crescendo Education Group, which partners with schools and districts as a “prophet” to implement more accurate and fair grading practices.

Equitable Grading in Higher Education: A Faculty – Student Partnership Perspective

Authors: Teacher Candidate, Pre-service elementary school teacher in the Denver Metro Area, and Elizabeth Cordova, Crescendo Education Group Coach

This article is written in partnership between a professor and a pre-service elementary school teacher currently earning her master’s degree and teaching license. We intentionally bring together two vantage points: one as a longtime practitioner and professor who has implemented equitable grading practices across secondary and concurrent enrollment contexts, and the other as a student navigating the realities of higher education, student teaching, licensure requirements, and graded coursework.

Our collaboration reflects a belief at the heart of equitable grading itself: that systems are best examined when those most affected by them are part of the conversation. Throughout this piece, we draw Elizabeth’s instructional practice and survey data from preservice teacher candidates, while also integrating this teacher candidate’s personal experiences to illuminate how grading practices are lived and interpreted by students preparing to enter the profession.

Adopting Equitable Grading in a Preservice Teacher Program

As a veteran of implementing equitable grading tenets in secondary classrooms, I (Elizabeth) adopted equitable grading practices in a college course for preservice teachers with some discomfort.

My students are not only students; they are interns, student teachers, employees, and future educators. They balance coursework alongside licensure benchmarks, unpaid placements, and employment. If equitable grading is meant to resist bias and more accurately reflect learning, then it must contend honestly with that reality while preparing students to become teachers.

The principles of grading for equity are grounded in three pillars: accuracy, bias-resistance, and motivation. While some practices transfer more easily than others from K–12 settings, focusing on this broader framework has helped me work toward a more equitable grading system in higher education. In some ways, higher education sharpens these questions even further – particularly around attendance and participation.

A student might reasonably ask, “If I’m paying for this course and passing the assessments, why do I need to come to class?” That question forces us, as professors, to reflect on what we are truly valuing, not only in our grading systems, but in our instructional design. It can be intimidating work. Staying grounded in accuracy, bias resistance, and motivation has helped me navigate it, and transparency has emerged as especially critical when teaching preservice teachers.

Grades and Learning: What Do They Tell Us?

When I asked students how accurately their grades reflected their learning, most responses clustered in the middle range. Many acknowledged that grades often reflect what they are able to demonstrate in a given moment, rather than what they actually understand.

Several students noted that learning in a preservice program is deeply experiential and difficult to quantify. Others described grades as accurate only insofar as they reflected what students had time and capacity to show, not their intellectual engagement or curiosity.

One response captured this tension particularly well: learning was happening; readings and discussions were meaningful, but life circumstances often prevented that learning from consistently showing up in graded artifacts.

This distinction matters. Equitable grading asks us to interrogate whether grades reflect learning, performance under constraint, or compliance with academic norms (and whose norms those are).

Student Perspective: When Disagreement Becomes “Incorrect”

Teacher candidate

After a lesson focusing on how to handle classroom management, we were asked to think about the different ways we would implement classroom management tools into our future classrooms using the resources we just learned about. I chose to write about the “carrots and sticks” method, noting that while the research we analyzed in class pointed to this method being ineffective in traditional classroom environments, I believed it could work to develop good habits in a kindergarten classroom.

I received a grade I felt was biased simply because I didn’t agree with what we had learned in class, even though I offered strong reasoning to support my argument. In the feedback for this assignment it was noted that we learned the “carrots and sticks” method was ineffective and therefore should not be used in a classroom. I felt this was unfair because I had followed the assignment guidelines and backed up my argument with other resources from the class. I felt that my opinion differing from the professor and the resources we learned about had impacted my grade unfairly.

Grading can unintentionally reward alignment with instructor beliefs rather than depth of thinking. For preservice teachers, this is especially concerning: we are encouraged to be reflective and responsive practitioners, yet sometimes assessed as though there is a single “correct” pedagogical stance.

Motivation: Relevance Matters, but Grades Still Signal Priority

Students were candid about motivation. While many named relevance, future teaching, and licensure as intrinsic motivators, grades still functioned as a powerful organizing force.

When time is scarce (and it often is during student teaching), work rises to the top. This is not a failure of motivation; it is a rational response to structural pressure.

This created a real tension in my equitable grading approach. When formative work is ungraded, students may deprioritize it—not because they don’t value learning, but because grades remain the dominant currency of higher education.

Students were clear about what helped: they engaged in ungraded work when it was clearly taken up in class, when it fed directly into future assignments, and when instructors explicitly followed up and referenced it. Equity here requires instructional follow-through, not point values.

Student Perspective: Grades as Survival, Not Apathy

Teacher Candidate

The number one motivator to complete assignments is point value and weight in the grade book. While I willingly enrolled in a higher education program and I am excited about the content I’m learning, between work, student teaching, and other courses, something has to determine what gets done first. For me and many of my peers, that’s the grade book.This does not mean we don’t care about learning. It means we are navigating competing demands within systems that still communicate priority through points.

Bias is Not Obvious, but Power Can Be

When asked about bias in grading, student responses varied widely. Some reported no experiences of bias. Others described favoritism, inconsistent expectations, or grading tied to tone, communication style, or perceived compliance rather than academic work.

One student described grading as a “power play” rather than an evaluation of learning.

Importantly, even students who did not identify bias in this course named it as a persistent feature of higher education more broadly. This reinforced something critical for me: bias resistance cannot rely on individual goodwill. It must be built into systems: rubrics, policies, transparency, and consistency.

Student Perspective: When Rubrics Aren’t Real

Teacher Candidate

I’ve had a professor tell students, in a very straightforward manner, that she “doesn’t really use the rubric,” and that it’s more of a guide. She then continued to explain that grades are based on how she feels about the work we produce at that moment. This professor is also somewhat well known for having inequitable grading practices as a result. By grading like this, the professor is putting immense pressure on students with no real solution. We continue to be anxious and wary each time we submit an assignment and receive a grade. Personally, it does keep me up at night thinking about if I will receive a passing grade. Essentially, my entire focus has come off the project or assignment and has shifted to being on the grade and my own self-esteem instead of reflecting on how to become a better educator.

In another class, a rubric stated that projects should follow example layouts exactly. A few friends and I followed the rubric and examples to a tee, only to be given drastically different grades. We each got entirely different letter grades for the assignment, despite following the example and rubrics in the same fashion.

Despite identical adherence to expectations, outcomes varied widely. Experiences like these make grading feel arbitrary and personal – conditions under which bias can easily thrive (and are highly demotivating!).

Clarity and Transparency

One of the clearest throughlines in the survey data was the importance of clarity. Students overwhelmingly reported consulting rubrics before beginning assignments. When expectations were clear, they felt more confident, less anxious, and better able to manage competing demands.

Students requested clear success criteria, explicit connections between assignments and course goals, and word counts or concrete scope indicators.

These are not minor preferences; they are equity supports. Ambiguity advantages students fluent in academic norms and disadvantages those balancing heavy workloads, new professional identities, or unfamiliar expectations. Transparency made grading feel less personal, less arbitrary, and therefore less biased.

Formative Work, Attendance, and Worth

I chose not to grade discussion posts or attendance, while still emphasizing their importance to learning and community. Students largely agreed with this approach in principle.

Their attendance decisions were driven not by points, but by whether class felt worth their time. That worth came from face-to-face interaction, instruction that extended prior learning, applied experiences, and clear links between class activities and future teaching.

Equitable grading, then, is inseparable from equitable instruction. If grades are not the incentive, learning time must be meaningful enough to stand on its own.

Concluding Reflection

Writing this article together has reinforced a central lesson of equitable grading: systems feel very different depending on where one stands within them. By combining practitioner experience, student survey data, and lived student perspectives, we see more clearly how grading practices communicate value, power, and belonging.

For those of us preparing future teachers, equitable grading is not only about fairness in our own classrooms. It is also a model for the systems our students will one day create themselves.

Elizabeth taught secondary social studies for fifteen years in Denver, Colorado. She is an adjunct professor of social studies at the University of Colorado Denver and works for TEACH Colorado. Elizabeth holds a Master of Arts from the Teachers’ College at Columbia University, where she also completed her work as a James Madison fellow for the state of Colorado, and a Bachelor’s Degree from Lake Forest College in Illinois. She loves to run, do yoga, and spend time with her four-year-old and baby.

Community of Practice as a Lever in Grading Redesign

Where Action Research Meets Community of Practice in Grading Redesign

Grading redesign work rarely fails because educators do not care. It stalls when people are asked to carry complex change alone.

Across districts, we hear a familiar story. Leaders and teachers want grading to be more accurate, fair, and motivational for students, but the work often feels isolating. Sometimes the work begins within a small pilot cohort. Sometimes it is experienced as a top-down approach. Frequently, educators quietly experiment, unsure whether what they see is evidence of progress or simply the discomfort that comes with trying something new.

Many leaders advancing grading redesign are doing so by intentionally bringing teams together. They create a “community of practice” with teacher leaders, administrators, and instructional coaches to advance the initiative. Even then, the work can remain siloed if those teams do not have opportunities to learn alongside others navigating similar challenges in a variety of contexts.

Even when teachers engage in action research – the process of testing practices, gathering evidence, and reflecting to inform their next steps- people can find themselves navigating this on their own, without sufficient shared coherence across the school or district.

At Crescendo Education Group, a recent partnership allowed us to explore this question alongside district leaders within a California county who had intentionally convened to lead grading redesign.

So, what becomes possible when a community of practice and action research are intentionally designed to work together?

Why Community Alone Is Not Enough

Community matters deeply, but community by itself is not sufficient for systemic change.

Professional communities that are disconnected from action research can become spaces for sharing ideas without examining how those ideas play out in classrooms and schools. For grading redesign, shared values are essential, but values alone do not redesign grading systems.

What leaders and teams need is a community anchored in practice. A space where teams bring real dilemmas, real artifacts, and real questions from authentic implementation.

Why Action Research Alone Is Not Enough

Action research is a powerful lever for grading redesign. It allows educators to test practices in real classrooms, respond to local context, and learn through iteration rather than theory alone.

Many educators describe how meaningful it is to be given permission, not just individually but as a team, to try something new.

“Being put into this position to honestly try new things is what ultimately got me to step outside of my comfort zone.”

At the same time, action research can feel overwhelming. Even when leaders bring teams together to do this work, those teams can struggle to interpret what they are seeing if they are learning in isolation.

Without broader sense-making, it becomes difficult to distinguish between what is not working, what is unfamiliar, and what needs more time to develop.

As one participant reflected:

“Having the freedom to try new things and the support when those things work and do not work has allowed me to fine-tune my outcomes for the better.”

The challenge is not the action research process itself. It is the isolation, even when the work is team-based.

A Hybrid Model That Honors Both

When community of practice and action research are intentionally designed together, something shifts.

In this model, district leaders organize teams to serve as living labs. These teams test grading changes within their own contexts, which can include policy constraints, leadership structures, community expectations, and student needs.

At the same time, districts within a county came together where the community of practice becomes the learning engine. District leadership teams come together to surface patterns, share dilemmas, and create meaning across contexts.

Learning travels not as prescriptions, but as insight.

One district leader captured this clearly:

“Seeing how other districts are implementing equitable grading helps us identify opportunities to increase impact in our own district.”

Here, no single district or team is expected to have all the answers. Each contributes to a shared understanding without erasing local context.

Co-Creating the Community Before the Work

Rather than defining “Community of Practice” for participants, we invited them to co-create it.

We began with a simple prompt:

When you hear ‘Community of Practice”, what comes to mind?

Participants named collaboration, learning, growth, shared purpose, empathy, and brave space. These were not technical definitions. They were relational commitments.

Participants then reflected together on what mattered most, what felt central to practice, what surprised them, and what felt missing. This opportunity created space for shared expectations to begin to take shape in their own language.

Finally, participants responded individually to this question:

What is important for me to remember as a member of this community

Their responses were consistent and clear.

Everyone brings value
People learn at different paces
Openness and listening matter
This work is a journey

Before defining the work itself, participants outlined how they wanted to show up as members of this Community of Practice.

Why the Community Must Come First

Grading redesign requires leaders and teams to question long-held assumptions, acknowledge uncertainty, and publicly surface missteps. That kind of work demands trust, not as a feel-good concept, but as a structural necessity.

By co-creating the community before diving into research questions or implementation plans, leaders intentionally established the conditions for honest learning.

Trust does not come later. It makes the work possible.

Why This Matters for Grading Redesign

Grading redesign can not be packaged as a checklist of strategies. It is an adaptive system shift that requires leadership teams that work alongside individual champions.

Educators and leaders consistently tell us how important it is to do this work with others.

“I am a solo teacher in my subject, so I do not have a department to lean on.”

“I am glad to have company in this work.”

When leaders intentionally bring teams together, and those teams are supported through a true community of practice, experimentation becomes safer. Questions become shared rather than internalized. Learning becomes collective rather than siloed.

The Work Ahead

This approach does not promise quick fixes or linear progress. It resists the urge to declare impact too early. Instead, it focuses on building the conditions leadership teams need to sustain complex change over time.

Grading redesign does not fail because educators lack commitment.
It falters when leaders and teams are asked to navigate complex change alone.

When community of practice meets action research, learning is no longer isolated, and the conditions for lasting, equitable grading begin to take shape.

Discover the Transformative Power of Grading for Equity in Classrooms

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