Rochester Public Schools abolishes pandemic-era ‘equitable’ grading

(The Center Square) – A Minnesota school district is finally giving its students back the freedom to fail.

Rochester Public Schools implemented a “no credit” grading policy in 2020, in hopes of helping failing students who were struggling with virtual learning. Now, four years later, the district has overturned their policy to increase student accountability.

“Deciding that basic levels of effort were not necessary – because it wasn’t going to show up in their GPA and they never got the very recognizable symbol of an ‘F’ – there was a subset of kids who were seeing that possibility as a reason not to meet some level of basic requirements,” Superintendent Kent Pekel said Monday.

Pekel, superintendent since 2021, said the old policy didn’t provide a clear picture to parents of how their students were doing, and did not count toward their grade point average. With a return to giving F’s, the district hopes to raise student standards.

This is not the first policy Pekel has repealed, seeking to reverse the course of former Superintendent Michael Muñoz.

The previous administration implemented the now-overturned “Grading for Learning,” which allowed for unlimited quiz retakes and did not count participation or homework as a part of grading. For the 2023-24 school year, teachers can now base up to 30% of their grade on in-class and at-home participation.

“If you give kids no credit for being ready for a test, and instead they take a test and then study it because they can take any number of retakes; or you never give points for class participation or homework – especially in a pandemic when kids were disconnected from school and a lot of social norms broke down – you had a disincentive to engage in the practice side of learning,” Pekel said.

The school district is looking to improve learning rates by bringing back a higher-stakes approach. The district averages a 49% reading proficiency and 40% math proficiency rate, similar to the concerning state averages of 49.9% and 45.5% respectively, in 2023.

Rochester educators took a survey on the policy change, expressing a 65% and 70% approval rate among secondary teachers and administrators.