‘The Future of Grading is Antiracist’
By: Albert Arnesto
Tags: Anti Racism, Education, Grading System, Distance Learning, Grading

As hard as it is to achieve equality of opportunity, Johnson said, working to achieve equality of outcome in a high school has been significantly more challenging.

He told me how, when he was still a classroom teacher over a decade ago, he would field students’ complaints about grading by delivering an adage: “I don’t give grades. I just keep score.”

“I looked at myself like a judge or an umpire, calling balls and strikes. It was a Platonic ideal — the ‘harsh but fair judge’ who presides over the classroom with gavel in hand. I was naive, and kids were scared of me then. I probably intimidated them, the way I looked and acted.

“The hard truth is,” Johnson continued, “when Dr. King referred to us being ‘colorblind,’ he wasn’t talking about a ‘race-neutral’ or ‘race-blind’ society. Rawls didn’t believe that either; the whole point of Rawls was that there was difference, so how do we best make an equitable society that accounts for that difference, no matter who you are? I think I really didn’t understand these ideas until I read Kendi.”

Johnson, with all the fervor and energy of the newly converted, pointed to a passage from the bestselling book How to Be an Antiracist, celebrated historian Ibram X. Kendi’s most influential work to date. Kendi has become one of the foremost public intellectuals of our time. “The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity,” Kendi writes. “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.”

“Look at how Kendi talks about ‘discrimination’ — as a tool or a means to an end, which is equity,” added Johnson. “To me, that’s where we need to get as a school, and we have to use all tools at our disposal in order to achieve that.”

So was Johnson suggesting that there should be purposeful discrimination when teachers grade students?

“Look, there is already ‘discrimination’ in how we grade kids now,” he said, nodding in agreement. “These are the unwritten rules of grading. Look at how we excuse assignments for students who have been sick, or absent, or have just joined our class. Or how we modify tests for one reason or another, for some groups of kids but not for others. These are adjustments we make on the fly in how we assess students, rather than treating every student in the same way, so we are already purposely not grading students as one-size-fits-all, right?

“Teachers might not want to admit this, but there are unconscious biases in how they grade right now, despite them trying to be impartial and objective. Some of these are positive biases, like if a student is well-behaved, they are graded easier or given the benefit of the doubt whereas a disruptive student might not be. If a student’s handwriting is nice and neat, a teacher might grade that student in a more forgiving way because the student’s work appeals to their aesthetic sense. More troubling are studies that have shown that physically attractive students get better grades than similarly qualified students.

“But there are also unconscious negative biases at play. Look at stereotype threat. You see Black students and female students and other subgroups performing badly because of negative group stereotypes.”

Psychologist Claude Steele and others have documented the deleterious effects of stereotype threat, finding evidence that even subtle reminders of group identification can inhibit academic performance. In a controlled experiment which had students sit for a subset of the GRE (the Graduate Record Examinations), a stereotype-threat condition was informed that the test “diagnosed intellectual ability,” while a no-stereotype-threat condition (the control group) was simply told that the “test was a problem-solving lab task that said nothing about ability.” When the results were examined, Whites scored higher than Blacks (matched by SAT scores) in the stereotype-threat condition, but in the no-stereotype-threat condition, Blacks and Whites (again matched by SAT scores) performed effectively the same.

Johnson took a deep breath and continued. “Yes, teachers at our school need more implicit bias training, [and need to] recognize their biases, especially when dealing with young people. But at the same time we need to ask ourselves, Why is it that our Black students have higher failure rates in our classes than our White or Asian students? Why do we see our Black students, especially our male Black students, being suspended more, having disproportionately more disciplinary actions taken against them, than our other kids? This is the major failing of our time as educators. There is a level of discrimination and negative bias that needs to be addressed,” Johnson said, “because you’re either racist or antiracist, there is no in between.”

In his book, Kendi dismisses the idea of a “safe space” between being racist (which he treats as an action verb, rather than as a noun) and antiracist (again, an action verb). “[T]here is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist.’” A person can shift between racism and antiracism at a moment’s notice, simply by actions taken. Both racism and antiracism are performative in nature, rather than being something innate or personality-defining. Johnson calls this a “hopeful, optimistic outlook,” because even “someone branded as a racist can grow, can change.”

Moreover, Kendi argues that “[t]here are ideas that express hierarchy and inequality. There are policies that create equity and inequity.” When taking antiracist action, he says, everything comes down to addressing power and policies.

This is where Johnson sees value in the prescriptions Kendi offers: those of action, of changing policy to remedy racist discrimination. According to Johnson, “People didn’t realize how bad the achievement gap in this country was until there was national, standardized testing with NCLB [No Child Left Behind]. Now I know that law was criticized a lot — teachers were complaining, ‘Why do we have to do all this testing all the time now?’ — but it brought to everyone’s attention the historical injustices we were dealing with. They couldn’t be hidden or swept under the rug anymore.

“So how do we correct these injustices to achieve equity, rather than just talking about it? Obviously we need to hire more diverse faculty that can take into account a wider range of student experiences, and that students of color can better relate to. But my larger thinking is that one thing we really need to do now is change our grading policies. San Diego just did something like that.”