Bring Equity to your Classroom with Contracts
Contracts are not just for mortgages and business deals: they are also useful tools in the fight for fairness in the classroom.
Introduction: The Problem with Averages
Traditional grading is one of those things so fundamental to our understanding of school that we think it’s somehow obvious, necessary, or even objectively correct. Yet, traditional grading systems, and the type of classroom culture they tend to foster, are full of problems. These problems, as obvious as they’ll soon seem, have been staring us in the face our whole lives, but have mostly gone ignored.
But before I dive into the problems of traditional grading, let me start by defining my terms. A traditional grading system, given the name “omnibus grading” by Joe Feldman in his Grading for Equity, is one in which students receive a letter grade at the end of the year. This letter grade (A, B, C, D, F) is usually derived by grouping course assignments into different buckets, assigning each bucket a weight, then averaging everything together. Of course small details will vary from course to course, grade to grade, and school to school, but, generally, the main idea is the same: your end-of-year grade, in a traditional system, is an average of your grades on various assignments.
A system like this is full of problems. And while many of the problems are in the execution (which we’ll address later), many more are baked right into the theory. The first problem is the problem of averages. On the surface, it seems to make some sense that your grade in a course should be reflective of, on average, how you did over the course of the year. If you put in just a tiny bit of effort, studied minimally, and earned 75s on every test, well, the grade you deserve is a C. The same is true for somebody who studies hard, puts in maximum effort and earns a 95 on every assignment. They deserve an A. But the problem is that this type of logic is often antithetical to the very concept of teaching.
The first challenge averages present to educators has to do with measurement. A big part of a teacher’s responsibility is figuring out which skills a student has that they can leverage and which skills they lack so we can fill the gaps. An average is simply too vague to assist with this goal.
Let’s make up some examples. Take the kid from the above paragraph, the one who got 75s on every assessment. You might argue, perhaps rightfully, that a 75 is the grade they deserve on their report card. Fair enough. But let’s also think about another kind of C student — the one whose grades vary wildly from assessment to assessment. Maybe the narrative essay, which is creative, was a nightmare for them, and they got a 50. But this person is quite good at Shakespeare and wrote a profound analysis of Macbeth which earned them a 100. Repeat this pattern across a year and you can see where this is going. Even though the first student wrote nothing high quality and never improved their writing throughout the year, they got the same grade as the second student who, while they did try, was very successful half the time and unsuccessful the other half. In this example, the letter C represents two completely different course experiences, and, importantly, student abilities.
Of course, as teachers, our job isn’t to simply look at the numbers on a report card and figure out how a student is doing. But these numbers do carry weight mostly because, aside from a diploma, the only thing you carry with you from high school is a list of letters next to subjects. But this is irresponsible on behalf of the school. Imagine if the two students above were siblings and you were their parent. You might reasonably think that both of your children are (1) not very good at English and (2) not very good in similar ways. But this is actually untrue. Student 1 put in little effort so we have no idea what they are capable of beyond the bare minimum, and Student 2 demonstrated only that they gravitate towards analytical assignments rather than creative ones. Yet a single letter, C, is what they both leave class with.
But measurement isn’t the only problem — there’s a worse one. Averages don’t account for growth. Averages never forget. This, unequivocally, is bad for teaching. Let’s make up another student. Student 3 just started a unit on poetry and is off to a rough start. They were told to analyze imagery and theme in a Wordsworth poem and their analysis earned them a 60. They just didn’t get it. But this didn’t deter them. They kept up with their practicing, and, throughout the poetry unit steadily improved their ability to connect imagery to theme. With Tennyson they got a 70, with Eliot they got an 85. By the time the unit ended they were able to analyze imagery quite well. Maybe their grades, in chronological order, looked something like this:
60, 70, 75, 70, 85, 90, 70, 85, 90, 95, 100
When I look at this, and I suspect when most teachers look at this, what you see is significant growth. Growth is a good thing — especially if each of these assessments tests the same thing. But what does a gradebook see when it looks at this? An 81. Or, if you drop the lowest grade, an 83. This isn’t terrible (the student still passes), but here’s the fundamental problem: it is not indicative of skill. Let’s imagine that Student 3 is now an expert on imagery. If you throw any poem at them they can dissect its images and tell you what each means and they’ll get it 100 percent of the time. In other words, they learned the skill, but their grade is still a low B. Why should this be? Isn’t the knowledge they end the course with more important than the path they took to get there?
But the problems with using averages don’t stop there. Averages also have the tendency to reward what educators often call “soft skills” or “executive functioning.” This is another problem so deeply ingrained into the systems we use that you might not even realize it’s a problem. It all comes down to what you believe a grade ought to represent. I think most of us, at least in an ideal world, want grades to reflect the extent to which a student has learned a topic or idea — full stop. The problem is we tend to fuzzy this metric by lumping discipline-or privilege-based outliers to a student’s overall grade. These usually come in the form of participation credit, extra credit, and homework. Of course, these things can be done in an equitable way, but they often aren’t. The result is that it allows students with high executive functioning or with the necessary supports at home to game the system and artificially increase their grades. I’ve personally taught courses in which it was possible to boost your grade half a letter just by showing up.
To see the problem here, think about two theoretical students who have the exact same academic ability but one has a sound, safe, and healthy home life, while the other does not. In general the student with a safe home life will almost certainly earn a higher grade than the one without if the course rewards things like effort and participation in the overall grade. This doesn’t require any massive leap of logic to understand, either. If you go home to a house without college-educated adults in it, or if you go home to an unsafe house, or a loud house without a place to work, of if your family needs you to work a job rather after school, you are simply at an inherent disadvantage when it comes to things like homework, studying outside of school, and completing extra credit.
The end result of all this is that at the end of the year all students have grades in all their courses that are generally inaccurate, generally favor richer students, tend to measure effort rather than ability, and don’t properly reward growth.
Grade Contracting
Here’s a potential fix, and what I’ve been experimenting with in my senior English course. Contract Grading, at least in the way I use it, tries to tackle a lot of these problems.
First, there’s the contract itself. There are 10 mandatory assignments all students must complete in order to pass my course. These assignments are mostly traditional essays. I purposefully designed these assignments to assess particular CCSS skills that I feel are 100% necessary to pass my course. In other words, if a student only does the mandatory assignments (and earns a 70), I will feel comfortable that they at least demonstrated mastery on the most important skills.
Besides the mandatory assignments, there are also optional assignments, sometimes called “unessays.” These are more fun — book reviews, blog posts, lesson plans, presentations, creative writing, and scrapbooks — and, while still tied to CCSS standards, they often address the less essential standards, or give students another way to prove mastery on the more rigid standards.
At the beginning of the year, students get to choose. They can do all the optional assignments and earn an A+, or they can do only what’s required of them and earn a C-. They can, of course, adjust their contracts throughout the year.
You might be wondering how a system like this addresses the problem of equity. Well, first it should be made clear that the only things that count towards a student’s grade are the contracted assignments. This means that a student’s grade is unaffected by things like homework, classwork, class participation, and attendance. It is perfectly possible, though very unlikely, that a student could miss every single in-class assignment and still earn an A+. And why shouldn’t this be the case? If a student can analyze literature beyond the level required for my course, and proves it through rigorous assessments, it does not matter to me that they did not complete every exit ticket or practice assignment. The only caveat is that, in order for a system such as this to remain truly equitable, the teacher must hold rigid and fair grading practices. But, by decoupling practice from assessment, I’ve removed tons of opportunities for students’ home lives to impact (for better or worse) their grades. It’s also important to note that just because I don’t grade something doesn’t mean I don’t track it. I can tell you which students are doing which assignments and which ones aren’t. I am not suggesting that practice isn’t important, or that practice is unnecessary. There is still, for most of my students, a correlation between willingness to practice skills in class and performance on assessments.
The second way this system responds to grading inequity is through its robust and built-in revision policy. Students do not earn a letter grade on their contracted assignments. Instead, they either get a “complete” or “incomplete.” These two “scores” are based on a set of minimum requirements that are provided to the students ahead of time, as well as a rubric. If they meet all the requirements, and score at least a 3/4 on each relevant rubric category, the assignment is complete. If not, they must revise until it does. I have no revision window, no grade penalty, no strict time frame (except of course the end of the year), and, most importantly, I build in class time for revisions: after an essay is graded, I set aside one or two class periods for students to work on revising their papers. During these lessons they get one-on-one time with me.
This is, in my opinion, the biggest culture shift I’ve seen since implementing this system. Most students are simply not used to having to write and edit over and over. So far this year, 90% of my students needed to revise all of the major essays from the first semester. That means almost every student “failed” the essay on the first attempt (largely a result of me grading their papers diligently, honestly, and, on occasion, ruthlessly) and had to revise. This is a good thing. For one, it takes some stress of students who are afraid they have to do their essay right the first time. Second, and this is important to me, it conveys the subtle message that writing is a process of revision, editing, paring down, and rethinking. And all of this happens without ever pushing a student’s grade because they need to go through multiple revisions in order to succeed.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of my particular brand of contract grading has to do with due dates. I’ve never cared for due dates in school, though I do understand the arguments for them. Either way, my system does not eliminate due dates — far from it. In fact, students know their due dates for nearly every assignment (give or take two days) right at the start of the year. The difference with the contract system is that students never get to not do an assignment. Plenty of students will (and do) miss their due dates. Most of these students expect that to just mean they get a 0 on the assignment. This is not the case in my English course. If a graded assignment exists, it’s because it’s important and students must do it. I think the best way to phrase this is in Feldman’s book again: “The punishment for not doing the work is doing the work.” This is actually more of a profound statement than it sounds at first.
Generally, in a traditional type of course, if a student doesn’t submit a test or an essay they get a 0 and move on. This is not a good system for math reasons, but it also perpetuates the wrong idea about what coursework is in the first place. If I label an assignment as “Mandatory,” then that assignment is not simply some work I really really want a student to do. No, a mandatory assignment means that it does the most important thing in education: it tells me what you’re learning so I know how you and I are doing. Thus, every single student who passes my senior English course will do, at the very minimum, the ten mandatory essays listed in the contract. I do not give out zeroes. If a student doesn’t hand in a mandatory assignment, they are not eligible to pass my course.
The Results
The truth is that this system of contracts is only designed to attack very narrow slices of the never-ending battle for equity in American education. Like any grading system, unfortunately, having students sign contracts instead of just telling them what to do does not— maybe even cannot— greatly impact student motivation. Motivation is a complex topic, and a grading system, no matter the system, only works to motivate certain students.
Instead of motivation, though, this system does attack a lot of the inequalities present in modern American education: it focuses on hard, measurable skills, it does not reward or punish (to the extent that this can even be avoided) socio-economic status, and it encourages, supports, and rewards growth.
All that said, even if work completion hasn’t increased significantly from contract grading, what has increased significantly is work quality. It feels good looking at a gradebook and knowing that a passing grade is actually meaningful, that students are growing, that there are no students who are just skating by with mediocre work. All the work that gets marked as complete in my gradebook is high quality— even if it took students multiple tries to get there.
Beyond anything measurable, though, the thing I hope students learn from this whole thing has to do with writing and reading in and of itself. Writing is a process; reading is complex. The message a lot of (especially AP) classes send is that we should be able to write really well about complex topics on demand and in a short period of time. I reject this, and I hope my system of grading in English class reflects this mentality and, ideally, passes it on to my students.
