Grading for Equity Blog

When the Grade Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story

Grading for Equity Through a Special Educator’s Lens

An English teacher’s perspective on grading for equity in a co-taught 8th grade ELA classroom

“She knows this! What happened?” I have said those words in frustration more times than I can count after a student has struggled through a written assignment or after a student’s test that doesn’t seem to match what we heard during class discussions or small group time. In my 8 th grade co-taught ELA classroom, my co-teacher and I examine student work and try to figure out what’s happening or what went awry. First, we think back to the lesson and talk about what the student said during class discussions and in our small groups and we consider the accommodations on the student’s IEP. We look at what the student was able to do independently and where the student needed support and then we try to figure out what the evidence is really telling us. That is one reason Joe Feldman’s work in Grading for Equity has resonated with me as an ELA teacher in a co-taught classroom for more than a decade. Feldman identifies three pillars of equitable grading: accuracy, bias-resistance, and intrinsic motivation. His framework asks educators to take a closer look at what grades actually
communicate to students, families, and teachers, what factors may be influencing grades, and whether our grading practices encourage students to fully engage in learning. Feldman’s book describes equitable grading around those three principles (grades should be accurate, bias-resistant, and motivating) which makes me wonder: What happens when the way a student accesses learning gets mistaken for the learning itself? That’s not a question I need to answer on my own; it’s one my co-teacher and I work through together.

I. Accuracy: Is the Grade Really Telling Us What the Student Knows?

Picture a typical day in our 8th grade ELA classroom. We have just finished a lesson on character development from our first unit, using The Tell-Tale Heart (Edgar Allen Poe). Students are working independently on a written response that asks them to make a claim about a character and support that claim with evidence from the text. My co-teacher and I circulate around the room and pull up chairs to student tables. One student is staring at the paper—I mean the pencil isn’t moving. We both notice and she moves toward that student. It would be easy to assume our kiddo doesn’t understand the assignment, even though we had just
listened to this same student participate in the class discussion right before independent work where she had a thoughtful interpretation of the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart and was able to explain why he was unreliable. My co-teacher goes back to the writing prompt with her and identifies the first step, reminds her to look at the annotations she made during the lesson, and with a sentence starter (in her list of accommodations), the student starts writing. She identifies a piece of textual evidence with a highlighter and verbally explains how it connects to the character. A few minutes later, she is working independently. This educational moment changes the conversation because the issue wasn’t necessarily that the student didn’t understand the ELA concept—in fact, she did. The obstacle was to move from no response, to a verbal response, to finally, a written one.

This is an important distinction when we think about our grading because Feldman’s first pillar,
accuracy, asks educators to consider whether a grade provides a “meaningful representation of academic learning” rather than reflecting unrelated factors. For a co-teaching team like us, that means looking carefully at what a student’s measurable performance is demonstrating. A student who doesn’t begin a writing assignment may need help with task initiation, or a student who leaves questions unanswered may need more processing time or some guiding questions to get moving. A student who produces a short written response instead of one with strong details may have considerably more understanding of the text than the response initially suggests, but they just haven’t written it down—maybe they need a graphic organizer. As co-teachers, we should gather better and different evidence to ensure we all understand what the grade communicates, and sometimes the accommodation, the conversation, or simply a little more time gives us that understanding.

An “Aha!”; Moment: A Grade Can Be Mathematically Correct and Still Miss the Point

This is one of the biggest ideas that has changed the way I personally think about grades. A gradebook can be completely accurate mathematically and still give us an incomplete picture of a student’s learning. Consider a student with these grades: 90% on a literary analysis, 85% on a reading assessment, 70% on a constructed response, a 0% on a missing writing assignment, and another 0% on a different missing assignment. My gradebook has no problem calculating the average, but when my co-teacher and I look at a scenario like this, we have questions that ask what those zeros are really telling us. We know two assignments weren’t submitted, but this doesn’t confirm that the student doesn't understand the ELA standards. Those missing
assignments may point to a real need: Perhaps the student needs help with organization, planning, task initiation, or completing longer assignments. Those skills are important, and they may need to be taught directly before the academic goal can be accomplished. If the academic grade in our ELA class is supposed to communicate what the student understands about reading and writing, I need to be thoughtful and intentional about what I allow that grade to represent. This is where I find it helpful to separate teaching a skill from grading an academic standard. A student may need to learn how to manage the actual assignment before they
can show they can make a claim and back it up with textual evidence.

Access Is Not Achievement

This is one of the places where co-teaching can make a real difference. In our classroom,
accommodations are not something that happen quietly in the background while one teacher handles the lesson and the other teacher works with students who have IEPs. Their implementation is something we do together. We both know which students need extended time, we both know who benefits from text-to-speech or audiobooks, we both know who may need directions broken into smaller pieces, and we know which students use graphic organizers or structured writing supports. More importantly, we understand why those supports are there and how we need to use them in our curriculum.
The purpose of a student’s accommodation is not to make the ELA standard easier, but to remove a barrier that prevents the student from demonstrating what they know. Consider the writing assignment mentioned above (The Tell-Tale Heart), in which students are asked to analyze a complex text using textual evidence. A student understands the text (i.e. the story itself) and can verbally discuss the character’s actions, but getting those ideas onto paper is a significant challenge and often feels overwhelming. Suppose that a student’s IEP includes a writing accommodation that allows the use of speech-to-text which we use for this assignment. When the student begins talking through the response, the ideas come easier. Even though they
might be a bit messy, the student identifies appropriate evidence and explains the connection between the evidence and the claim. The point here is the expectation didn’t change, nor did the 8th grade ELA standard. What changed was the student’s access to the task. The accommodation didn’t lower the bar; it helped the student reach it. That distinction is important because it reminds me why accommodations work best when they’re part of the classroom culture rather than something added after a student is struggling.

II. Bias-Resistance: What Else Has Found Its Way into the Grade?

There is another part of Feldman’s framework that makes me stop and think: bias-resistance. Consider a student who has struggled with independent writing all year. My co-teacher and I know this student well. And while we know that getting started writing can be difficult for students, assignments have to be completed for us to be able to give appropriate feedback. We’ve had plenty of these types of conversations with students, and then the student turns in yet another partially completed literary analysis. Our first reaction could easily be, Here we go again, but we can also stop and look at the actual work. What if, for example, their thesis is strong and the first piece of textual evidence is appropriate, but the student has only just started making the connection between the evidence and the claim? What if they just stopped too soon to really develop their ideas? Here, we can ask a different question: What does this piece of work actually show us? It shows evidence of some understanding and it shows that the student didn’t finish the assignment. But “didn’t finish” doesn’t automatically mean “doesn’t understand” and that’s where having two educators working together in the co-taught setting can be so valuable. We can remind each other to look at the evidence rather than allowing a student’s history to become the interpretation of the current assignment. Feldman’s discussion of bias-resistant grading asks educators to examine the subjective judgments and nonacademic factors that can find their way into academic grades, and one question that’s particularly useful (but sometimes uncomfortable) is: Are we responding to the work in front of us, or are we responding to what we already “expect” from this student?

When Behavior and Learning Get Mixed Together

Co-teaching gives us another advantage: we aren’t always watching the same thing at the same time. One of us might be leading the ELA lesson while the other is circulating, checking for understanding, noticing who needs an accommodation in real time, or who needs to get their head off the desk. My co-teacher and I often ask each other if the student is struggling with the actual ELA content, or has the writing task become difficult to manage, and if so, why? Maybe the student needs a short movement break. Maybe the assignment needs to be broken into smaller pieces. Maybe a graphic organizer would help the student organize the analysis.
Maybe the student simply needs a quick check-in before continuing and we discover they broke up with their boyfriend at lunch—in middle school you just never know! Whatever we decide to do to help the student continue is one thing; we can address the need without turning the student’s behavior into evidence of academic performance. This doesn’t mean to say that behavior doesn’t matter, because we all know it does. Students need to learn how to manage themselves, participate appropriately, complete work, and develop the skills they will
need beyond our classroom, but those are not necessarily the same things as demonstrating mastery of an ELA standard. We can do both by supporting the student with the behavior or executive-function need while still making sure the academic grade reflects the student’s academic level of achievement.

Motivation: What Are We Teaching Students About Learning?

Think about a student you have taught who has become accustomed to seeing low grades. They know what a 50% looks like, and they know what a missing assignment does to their grade point average. They may have even stopped being surprised by it because “that’s the way it was always been.” Now imagine a different experience where the student struggles with a literary analysis, but instead of simply receiving a low grade and moving on, the student sits down with their teacher in a small group setting. They reread the prompt together, they return to the text, and they receive feedback. They use accommodations which are already part of their
learning plan and then the teacher helps the student revise. The attempt is substantially stronger. What has the student learned in this small-group scenario? Not just something about the text. The student has also learned that struggling with an assignment doesn’t necessarily mean the learning is over, and that’s an important message. Feldman’s third pillar, intrinsic motivation, asks educators to think about whether grading practices support learning or primarily serve as rewards and punishments. For students who have experienced repeated academic frustration, this can be a significant issue. A grade can communicate: “You didn’t do this correctly.” Or the larger grading process can communicate: “You haven’t demonstrated this yet. Let’s figure out what will help you get there.” Those are very different messages, and for a student who has already decided that they are “bad at English,” the second message can open a door to successful learning.

The Special Educator and General Educator: Two Perspectives, One Team

I want to be careful about how we talk about our grading for equity work. Equitable grading should not create or increase a divide between general education and special education. The general education teacher isn’t the person who “doesn’t understand the disability,” nor is the special educator the person who doesn’t understand the content. In a strong co-taught ELA classroom, two professionals bring different areas of expertise to the same students by working together. In our case, I bring deep knowledge of the ELA curriculum, grade-level expectations, texts, writing demands, and content. My co-teacher brings expertise in differentiated instruction, accommodations, accessibility, individualized needs, and the ways students may need to access and demonstrate their learning. Those perspectives are different, but they aren’t competing with each other; they complement one another. When our efforts are married together, we can ask a much more useful questions like What does this student know, what is getting in the way of demonstrating it, and what can we do together to remove that barrier without lowering the expectation?

That question helps us move forward because it moves the conversation away from “whose responsibility is this?” to “what does this student need from us?” That level of collaboration matters when we implement accommodations since an accommodation shouldn’t live only on an IEP document or be something we scramble to remember when an assessment arrives. Indeed, in a well-functioning co-taught classroom, accommodations become part of the regular instructional planning cycle. We anticipate them, provide them, watch to see whether they are helping or not and we reflect about what we notice. That turns a student’s accommodations from a compliance exercise into something much more powerful: a way of giving students genuine access to the learning and a bird’s eye view into what they can (or can’t yet) do.

What the Gradebook Doesn’t Show

A gradebook might show 62% for a given student (in my county that’s a D, considered not to be passing), but that’s not all we see as the teachers in our ELA classroom. We see a student who finally raised their hand and shared an interpretation of the text or one who independently used an accommodation for the first time. We see a student who needed additional processing time but eventually explained the character’s motivation clearly and is moving up from a 48%. We see a student who found the strongest piece of textual evidence or one who revised an analysis and finally made the connection between evidence and claim. We see the student who said, “I can’t write this,” and then, with the right support, wrote it. Those lightbulb moments matter—it’s why I teach, and it’s likely one of the reasons you teach, too. Conversations about these things with another teacher help us see progress that a single number just cannot capture, and they also help us make better decisions about what comes next. I have learned that a gradebook can give us information, but it just can’t give us the whole student story.

Equitable Grading Doesn’t Mean Lowering the Bar

This is probably one of the first concerns that comes up when I talk with educators who are talking about examining or changing their grading practices. “Are we lowering standards?” and I would suggest that the answer is no—not if we are doing the work thoughtfully or intentionally. Feldman specifically addresses the misconceptions that equitable grading means lowering rigor or simply giving students higher grades, in his book. From my perspective, consider the student who uses extended time on an ELA assessment, per their IEP. The standard is the same. The text is the same. The student is still expected to analyze, interpret, and support ideas with evidence at grade level. This student simply has the appropriate time needed to process the material and demonstrate that learning. The bar didn’t move, the standard was not changed or shortened. The pathway became accessible, and that’s an important distinction. There is a difference between changing what a student is expected to learn and changing how a student is supported in demonstrating that learning. Special educators know that distinction well.

An Educator’s Three-Pillar Grading Check

1. Accuracy: Does the grade represent what the student understands about the ELA standard?

A few questions can help:

Are we grading practice or mastery?
Are missing assignments disproportionately affecting the grade?
What does the student’s most recent work tell us?
Have we considered all of the evidence that is available?
Are accommodations allowing the student to demonstrate the intended learning?

2. Bias-Resistance: Are we allowing factors other than academic learning to influence the grade?

We might ask:

Is behavior affecting the academic grade?
Are we interpreting disability-related behaviors as a lack of motivation?
Are executive-function difficulties being confused with academic achievement?
Are we responding to the evidence in front of us, or to what we already expect from this student?
Would another form of evidence give us a different picture of the student’s ELA learning?

3. Motivation: What is the grading process teaching the student about learning?

Consider:

Can students use feedback to improve?
Are they given meaningful opportunities to revise or reassess?
Does the grading process keep the focus on learning rather than collecting points?
Can students see their growth as readers, writers, and thinkers?
Does the process leave room for the idea that a student’s current performance can change?

And there is one more question I would add: What can we do together to help this student demonstrate what they know? For me, that may be the most important question of all. It turns grading into a collaborative process rather than a judgment handed down after the learning is finished.

By: Dr. Nanci Brillant, Crescendo Education Group Coach

About the Author:

Dr. Nanci Brillant has provided Professional Learning (PL) at the school, district, and state levels in Florida and Maryland, covering topics such as Creative Classrooms, Student Engagement, Teacher Leadership, Arts Integration, Grading for Equity, and PL for new teachers entering the workforce. As an NBCT, she is continually honing her practice and sharing ideas with others. Recognized as a Florida high-impact teacher (top 1%) and as a finalist for TOY for the state of Florida, and having received Official Citations from the Maryland General Assembly for excellence in education, she is on a one-woman mission to turn apathetic students into creative and critical thinkers, one classroom at a time. She has been teaching since 2003 and has been with CEG since 2021.

What Grading Policy Consulting Actually Looks Like

Key Takeaways: Grading Policy Consulting in 2026

Grading policy consulting helps districts create consistent, accurate grading systems that reflect actual student learning rather than compliance or demographics.
Standards-based grading shifts the focus from accumulating scores to demonstrating mastery of specific learning standards across courses.
Common assessments administered district-wide give leaders visibility into curriculum implementation gaps and systemic learning patterns.
Crescendo Education Group offers System Change Partnerships that include grading audits, teacher coaching, and leadership support for lasting reform.
Successful grading reform requires multi-year commitment, teacher buy-in, and ongoing communication with families and community stakeholders.

Most district leaders figure this out the hard way: a coherent grading policy on paper doesn’t mean consistent grades across schools. Same student, same content knowledge, different teachers — one gets an A, one gets a C. It’s not a teacher competence problem. It’s structural, and most districts don’t have the bandwidth to untangle it alone.

The Gap Nobody Wants to Talk About

Districts are often surprised when they first look at grade distributions alongside state assessment data. Students earning D’s who are meeting proficiency on external tests. Students with A averages who struggle on AP coursework. San Leandro Unified in California found exactly this, and it wasn’t an anomaly. It’s what happens when grades blend content knowledge, participation, extra credit, and behavioral compliance into a single letter.

One exercise that tends to surface this fast: ask teachers to calculate a final grade for a hypothetical student with ten grades — some missing assignments, a few C’s, a B, an A. Answers range from F to A. Same data, different teachers. That conversation usually goes somewhere a presentation on grading theory never does.

What Standards-Based Grading Is Actually Trying to Do

The mischaracterization is that it lowers the bar. The actual goal is narrower: grades should reflect what a student knows, not how well they navigated the system.

In practice, that means specificity. Instead of one letter representing an averaged pile of homework, quizzes, and participation, grades map to particular skills. A student who struggles early but demonstrates mastery by December gets credit for what they learned. Traditional averaging doesn’t allow for that the early grades are already baked in regardless of what came after.

Common Assessments: Why They Matter More Than People Expect

When every classroom uses different assessments on different timelines, district leaders can see classroom-level data but can’t distinguish local problems from systemic ones. Low scores in one class could mean anything. The same pattern across eight schools points to something in the curriculum or its implementation that needs a coordinated response.

Common assessments, same content, same rubric, same window, make that diagnosis possible. Most districts run two to four per year per subject, enough to track trends without turning every unit into a high-stakes event.

What a Real Implementation Timeline Looks Like

San Leandro Unified spent six years in pilot mode before formally changing policy in 2021, and that pacing was intentional. The districts that try to compress this into a year or two tend to get compliance on paper and not much else.

Year one is mostly diagnostic: a grading audit, stakeholder surveys, grade distribution analysis across schools and demographics. A small pilot group of volunteer teachers tries new practices in their own classrooms, gathering real data before anything scales. Those teachers matter beyond the data they generate. They become credible internal voices when the work expands.

Year two brings more teachers into the process, more structured time for calibration, and PLCs that shift from status updates to examining student work against shared standards.

By years three through five, policy changes are formalizing what teachers have already been doing for a while. The sequence matters. Reform that moves policy first and practice second tends to produce inconsistent execution and resistance that compounds over time.

What Teacher Buy-In Actually Requires

Teachers need to encounter the problem before they’ll want to solve it. Sharing grade distribution data, walking through the hypothetical-grade exercise, having teachers look at their own gradebooks next to state assessment results. These create the kind of urgency that a rollout presentation doesn’t.

The other piece is genuine involvement in building the system. When teachers develop standards and scoring criteria alongside consultants rather than receive them from above, that distinction in process tends to show up later in how consistently people implement.

Talking to Families

The timing matters as much as the message. Families who first hear about grading changes when something looks different on their kid’s report card are already behind, and they’re often already frustrated.

San Leandro Unified put a FAQ on their website early, before questions started coming in. The content isn’t complicated, families mostly want to know what grades mean now and whether their kids are still on track for college. Getting those answers in front of people before they have to ask makes a real difference.

Counselors are often the most important communicators in this process and the most underused. They’re already having conversations with families about course placements, graduation, and college applications. When they can answer grading questions confidently and consistently, it carries weight that a letter from the district office doesn’t.

One thing that comes up repeatedly: families often need letter grade equivalents to make sense of proficiency levels. Finding a middle ground, one that preserves the standards-based information while making it readable, tends to build more trust than holding firm on notation that parents find confusing.

The Common Mistakes

Moving too fast creates the appearance of implementation without the substance. Teachers who don’t understand the rationale find workarounds, apply policies inconsistently, and the reform ends up meaning different things in different rooms. Which is the original problem.

Changing policy without supporting practice is the other one. A policy document requiring standards-based grading is five pages. Actually building the capacity to do it well – developing standards, creating proficiency scales, designing assessments, calibrating expectations across teachers – takes years of coaching and collaboration. Districts that underinvest in that side tend to end up with the policy and not much else.

What You Actually Get

The districts that see the most sustained change are the ones that treat implementation as ongoing inquiry rather than a one-time rollout. That’s the core of how Crescendo Education Group structures its System Change Partnerships built around action research cycles where teachers are collecting evidence, reflecting on what’s shifting, and adjusting practice in real time.

In practice that looks like teachers bringing student work to collaborative sessions and asking hard questions about what the data actually shows. Are grades moving closer to what assessments reveal? What needs to change next? That kind of structured reflection is what separates districts that get policy adoption from ones that get genuine culture change.

The outcomes often extend far beyond more accurate grades. They include grades that better reflect what students know and can do, shifts in demographic patterns within grading data, and teachers who feel their instructional and grading practices finally align with their values.

These are the results of teachers engaging in cycles of inquiry, supported by intentional implementation, and sustained support over time.

If that’s the work your district is ready for, that’s exactly what we do.

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:

Redos & Retakes Mini Course

Sign up for this courses during Teacher Appreciation month (May 1-31, 2026) 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.

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