Seattle presses pause on gatekeeping by giving every student an 'A'
/By Matt Halvorson
Crisis has a way of illuminating what’s important. The scene before us becomes suddenly clearer — more chaotic on the surface, perhaps, but starker, easier to understand.
When only the most essential services stay open, for instance, we learn quickly what we can and cannot do without.
When someone close to us is unexpectedly fighting for their life, petty differences disintegrate under the strength of our love and the depth of our fear.
When schools everywhere close their doors and send everyone home, we long immediately for the freedom to congregate that we had once taken for granted, and we yearn for things that just days earlier had seemed like a burden.
We revel furtively in finding that an unjust machine has been switched off even as we mourn, to some extent, our lost normalcy. We uncover an unexpected peace in the relative freedom of a slower pace even as we find ourselves more confined, restless and overwhelmed than ever.
We miss knowing that our kids are learning with supervision, but all the strings we voluntarily attached to that learning have slipped loose. As we find ourselves at home with our kids, pleasantly surprised by their innate ability to learn by doing what interests them — without traditional schooling — the need to sort and track our kids, comparing one to the next, becomes a faint memory. We value our children’s intellectual pursuits more than ever, but in wistfully appreciating all that has temporarily been suspended, the compulsion to assign grades to our beloved children has vanished.
Grades. Remember when we were worried about grades? When we put stock in the gold stars and demerits handed out by a biased system? It seems almost barbaric now.
Along those lines, Washington State superintendent Chris Reykdal forbade the state’s high schools yesterday from issuing failing grades to students this spring, and Seattle Public Schools announced days earlier that all high school students will receive an “A” in every class — or at worst an “incomplete.”
Seattle school board president Zachary DeWolf told the Seattle Times that the “A-or-Incomplete” policy is an equity move, and is meant to guarantee that “no students are penalized because they might not have the same advantages at home that other students have.”
The Times noted that although other districts had adopted “a simple pass/no pass policy, SPS officials said they worried not all colleges would be understanding. An ‘A,’ for best effort, they argued, would be a safer option.”
At first, this seemed a little silly to me, like a strange attempt to gloss over reality. Handing out flying colors, as some have noted, would be an empty (and transparent) way to muddle the statistics and mask gaps based on race and family income.
But this is much bigger than that. Seattle Public Schools did more than just hand out 4.0 GPAs for one semester. In doing so, they admitted in word and in deed that grades are arbitrary and usually unfair.
For that reason, I officially connote this decision the grade of 16 silver stars, three sideways thumbs, and the letter W. (Note: this will be part of the district’s permanent transcript.)
This longstanding practice of grading kids in school is a sorting mechanism. Within an unjust system like ours, that means it is an instrument that denies opportunity to some while opening doors for others, and that it does so systematically and with bias.
We’ve rationalized it as reasonable, as a method of rewarding intelligence or hard work or something, but this system has produced inequitable outcomes from the very beginning. As a cornerstone practice of a system of schools that together make up a pipeline to prison for Black boys, grading is just a form of gatekeeping.
Seattle Public Schools decided to give everybody an “A” for everything because they correctly realized that these letter grades might continue to be important to some colleges. So, rather than launching a perverse bid to sort and track and grade our kids even in the midst of a pandemic, SPS did the right thing: they gave every kid in the district the greatest possible access to future opportunity that they could provide in this situation.
Thankfully, it seems the system overlooked gatekeeping as an essential service, and the doors are sitting wide open, even if only for one semester.
When school buildings next open to students, the figurative gates will try to close up tight, once again seeking to systemically provide different opportunities to different kids based on race and socioeconomic status.
We will have to make sure that doesn’t happen. When school starts again, we will have to prove that we’ve learned too much to just go back to the way things used to be — especially since Seattle Public Schools unwittingly created the grading scale for school districts as they pursue equity for their students: A or Incomplete.
As it stands, that pursuit remains incomplete. Failure isn’t just forbidden, it’s not even part of the scale. So, we press on, knowing that we will not stop until all of our kids are educated without being schooled, valued without being graded, and loved without being conditioned.
Matt Halvorson is a musician and writer living in Seattle with his partner, Lindsay, and their four kids. He is the founder of Rise Up for Students, a blog advocating for equity in education in Seattle and beyond, and of the Rise Up Music Project, a collectively owned record label and socially conscious music platform. Matt’s most recent album, “Sermons,” is available everywhere except Amazon.
