Fort Worth schools will give students with failing grades do-overs on tests, homework
The Fort Worth school district will allow students with Fs to redo certain assignments and re-take tests as part of a plan to address a dramatic increase in the number of students who are failing classes.
The policy change allows students who have an average of 70 or below in a class to redo any test or assignment on which they earned less than a 70, according to a memo sent to teachers in the district. In the memo, district leaders say the policy change has “the intended effect of removing barriers for students and increasing flexibility for campuses to support individual students.”
The new policy gives students until the end of the school year to redo tests or assignments going back to the beginning of the school year.
Teachers in the district are split on the issue. Some say it gives important flexibility to students whose lives have been upended by the pandemic. Others worry it places the focus more on grades than learning, does not account for problems inherent with online learning and creates more work for teachers who are already stretched thin.
More Fort Worth students are failing
The Fort Worth school district saw a spike in the number of middle and high school students failing at least one class during the first two grading cycles of the school year, according to district figures released at the request of the Star-Telegram. During the first grading cycle, the number of students failing one or more classes was up 57% over the same period the prior year, district records show. The number of students failing a class during the second grading cycle was up 30% over the prior year, records show.
The raw number of students failing a class climbed from the first grading period of this school year to the second, from 18,022 to 18,539. There were 75,772 students enrolled in the district in mid-January.
In late December, two district officials said starting the school year with all students in virtual instruction and then following with teachers and students working both virtually and in person created an environment that neither teachers nor students had ever experienced. Cherie Washington and Raul Pena, the district’s chiefs of schools and student support, said in a statement in December that the district would make a plan for the spring semester that would give students better opportunities to succeed. On Jan. 21, a district spokesman said the change in the credit recovery policy changes is that plan.
Teachers attribute the problem to the remote learning model the district adopted at the beginning of the school year. The model allows students to choose between synchronous learning, in which students participate in class online in real time, and asynchronous learning, in which students read and watch class materials, do their work in their own time and turn it in online outside of regular school hours.
Several teachers told the Star-Telegram last month that the asynchronous model makes it more difficult for them to hold students accountable when they don’t participate in class or turn in work. The model requires teachers to count students present if they have any contact with them during the day. So if a student doesn’t attend class online, engage with class materials or turn in assignments but does send an email or text message to a teacher, that student would be counted present.
Pena said the district’s plan doesn’t address that issue. District leaders are struggling to find a balance between holding students accountable when they don’t do work and giving them flexibility to do that work during a difficult time. That latitude is especially important for disadvantaged students, who may feel the effects of the pandemic more profoundly, he said.
“This is where the word ‘grace’ really comes in,” he said.
The memo sent to teachers about the new policy states, “When the everyday lives of students are fundamentally disrupted over an extended period of time and due to circumstances out of their control, it’s necessary that the district review and make temporary adjustments to existing local policy and guidance to ensure all students are positioned for success.”
Washington acknowledged the asynchronous learning model isn’t ideal. But it’s the only way some students can engage with school at all this year, she said. Many students’ families have suffered financial hardship during the pandemic, she said, and some have taken jobs to help support their families. Giving those students an option that doesn’t require them to be in front of a computer during the day means they don’t have to choose between work and school, she said.
Although the district needs to keep students and their needs at the top of its list of priorities, Washington said, officials understand that policy decisions made at the district level will affect the way teachers do their jobs.
“We don’t make decisions without really thinking about how it’s going to impact our teachers,” she said.
Plan creates more work for teachers
Steven Poole, executive director of the United Educators Association in Fort Worth, said it made sense for the district to try to show extra grace with students during a difficult school year. But most teachers are already doing that, he said. Many teachers give students opportunities to make up failing or missed work, he said.
Other districts in the area have revised their grading plans to allow for more flexibility, but Poole said he hadn’t heard of any other that had allowed students to make up work anytime before the end of the school year. Fort Worth’s policy gives teachers one more responsibility during a year when they’re already stretched thin, he said.
A Fort Worth high school English teacher who spoke on condition of anonymity said the plan leaves students with the impression that there are no hard deadlines to turn in work and no standards teachers can enforce. It was a lesson they learned when the district shut down schools last spring and moved classes online, to a platform called Edgenuity. The platform allowed students to work at their own pace as long as they finished every lesson by the end of the school year.
“It did not matter when they finished as long as they finished on the last day,” she said. “So kids could do nothing for five weeks and suddenly do everything at the last minute and call it a day, and still pass.”
The teacher said she has students whose lives have been upended by the pandemic. But she has more who are taking advantage of a situation that allows them to check out from school. She said the district’s plan rewards those students by giving them extra chances to make up work that they could have turned in when it was due.
The plan also places greater emphasis on allowing students to pass rather than ensuring they actually master the knowledge and skills they’ll need to succeed in future grades, the teacher said. She predicted the district will see a noticeable gap between the skills and knowledge students should have at the beginning of the next school year and those they actually gained this year.
“It is a whitewash over failure,” she said.
Is it about grades or learning?
Celia Lehman, an English teacher at Riverside Middle School, said she thought the plan was “ridiculous.” She thinks the plan has less to do with ensuring students understand the material covered in class than it does with making it appear, on paper, as if fewer students are failing.
“It doesn’t benefit the kids, and it makes more work for teachers,” she said.
The district has encouraged teachers to find ways to engage with their students, including those who work remotely, she said. When students go back and redo work they missed earlier in the year, there will be none of that engagement, she said. She also worries about what happens when the district asks students who already aren’t doing their work to go back and redo previous tests and assignments and keep up with their current assignments at the same time. Those students could get easily overwhelmed, she said, and when students get overwhelmed, they tend to shut down.
In the past, when students failed a class, they could make up credit during special sessions in May or during summer school. That’s a better option than letting students redo work, she said, because those students cover class material through live interactions with teachers, the same way they would in a regular classroom. Lehman thinks that would be a more effective solution this year than the plan the district has implemented.
Kathryn Krodell, a U.S. history teacher at Paschal High School, said she thinks the flexibility the plan gives is important this year. Krodell said the pandemic has directly affected the lives of about half of her students. Some have lost parents or other caregivers, she said, leaving them more or less on their own. Others have missed several days of school for medical reasons. Still others have had trouble getting online because of circumstances at home. Like many other teachers, Krodell has worked extra hours trying to make sure those students have the chance to recover credit and make up days they missed.
Krodell acknowledged there’s a danger of students waiting until the last minute to complete months of work. But she’s glad the district is trying to give flexibility to students who have fallen behind because of circumstances beyond their control.
“Of course, in a typical year, I would not necessarily support the idea of accepting work as late as we are,” Krodell said. “But I think you throw all the norms out the window during a pandemic and do what you can to help.”
A middle school science teacher who spoke on condition of anonymity said she was ambivalent about the plan. Everyone in the district wants students to succeed, she said, and the new policy could be a step toward that. But she worries that students who haven’t interacted with their teachers won’t be able to recover, even if they’re given the chance to make up work.
The teacher said she also worried about how students would do if they took lessons out of order. In some subject areas like math, each new lesson a class covers builds on prerequisite skills students learned earlier. If students miss those earlier lessons, it could throw them off track, even if they go back and redo them later, she said.
The teacher said she has students who missed dozens of days in the first half of the school year. Some of those students didn’t show up to class because they just didn’t want to, she said, but many of them had real problems. Those students need and deserve accommodations, she said. If the plan can help give those students greater flexibility, she said, then it may be good at least for some students.
“Ultimately, our goal is for all students to succeed,” she said.
Asynchronous model can be done well
Shawn Rubin, chief education officer at the Rhode Island-based advocacy group Highlander Institute, said many school districts and teachers expect students to be able to do the same amount of work in the context of a pandemic as they would in a normal school year. That expectation is unreasonable, Rubin said, because it doesn’t account for the fact that the pandemic has shifted the underpinnings of many students’ lives.
Many students may simply choose not to participate in online classes, but others and their families have realized they can’t meet the demands of virtual learning, he said. Some students may have to opt for asynchronous learning because they take care of younger siblings while their parents are at work during the day, or because their Wi-Fi connection can’t support them and their siblings doing real-time school work all at once, he said. Teachers can’t hold those students completely responsible if they fall behind, he said.
It’s also nearly impossible for teachers to replicate classroom learning in an asynchronous setting, Rubin said. Learning is a social activity, he said. For most students to learn best, they need to discuss the topics and concepts they cover in class with teachers and other students. Those discussions lead to deeper understanding of class material, he said. Even if teachers do a good job of designing asynchronous lessons and students participate, there’s no opportunity for those kinds of discussions, he said, so only students with the highest levels of independent learning skills will be able to succeed.
But there are good reasons for school districts to adopt asynchronous learning models as one of several options during the pandemic, said Elaine Allensworth, director of the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research. For some students, parents’ work schedules or bandwidth limitations might make asynchronous learning the only feasible option for online classes, Allensworth said. Other students simply learn best using that model, she said. So it might not be advisable, or even possible, to do away with that model entirely, she said.
But there are ways districts could improve that model to keep students engaged, she said. Districts could institute rules that require asynchronous students to have meaningful interactions — not just a single email or text message — with their teachers to be counted present. Schools could also set up small groups of asynchronous students who record themselves working on group projects outside of normal school hours, she said.
Especially during distance learning, districts need to do a better job of checking in with students who are in danger of falling behind before the problems become too big, Allensworth said. When students fall behind, it can create a situation that compounds itself, she said. Those students might start to feel embarrassed or frustrated and withdraw further from their classes, making the problem even worse, she said.
“It’s much easier to prevent failure than it is to recover from failure,” she said.
This story was originally published January 26, 2021 at 4:30 AM.
