Standards-based grading is often debated philosophically, but most of the tension misses a deeper issue. The primary challenge with standards-based grading is not philosophical. It is structural — and communicative. The Label Problem Many schools shift to proficiency labels such as: Beginning Developing Meeting Advanced On paper, this appears more precise than traditional percentage grades. In practice, these labels can become less clear and more subjective. Without clearly u

Rethinking specificity, alignment, and decision architecture in school improvement Schools collect enormous amounts of data. Benchmark assessments. Unit tests. Progress monitoring. Standards trackers. District dashboards. Yet instructional change remains inconsistent. The issue is not a lack of effort. In many schools, the problem is the opposite. We collect more data than ever before. The deeper challenge is structural: we often collect the wrong data, in inconsistent format

Article I Read: PNAS Article: An astonishing regularity in student learning rate I recently was pointed to this article and it reminded...