The Draw of Value Capture

I tend a gradebook that is deprived of the most important root word in the title: grades. I’ve been on this teaching path since 2020 after reading a bunch of very convincing books and articles about the power of “ungrading.”

I like this system. While it is idealistic, it’s the most realistic version of a proper classroom-style education that’s possible with all the things that come with the modern day education system. But in the end, the work of a student must be converted to a grade, but before this anxious activity happens, my students set goals, work, reflect in that uppercrust way called metacognition, and learn from their failures.

For most of my career, the goal for all students, officially, is pursue “mastery,” but mastery is only part of what school is about. And that can be a controversial thing because mastery has been made into the metric, testable on a standardized test. Though the word grants a certain highfalutin prestige, I’m not sure any standardized test can ever assess mastery. Take the art of writing a thesis statement, which is, most of the time, a single sentence. Can anyone truly master such a thing? Aren’t we all starting from a tiny pool of wisdom, a jumble of language experience, and mere semblances of how to communicate effectively to other humans, never one of us really ever reaching the foothills of the Platonic ideal of a thesis statement? I mean, that’s not to say we can’t practice in order to make the writing of thesis statements attainable, but each thesis statement is its own battle. So, really, the word “mastery” is quite problematic. We spend our lives to master things and realize a fundamental part of the journey of learning that is encapsulated in the Dunning-Kruger Effect: when we really get into something, we realize how complex it is and how much we didn’t know when started and how we will never stop learning more.

Let us not diminish learning outcomes. It is a wonder we even learn language, let alone grasp the technologies known as writing and reading. What I’m getting at here is something everyone knows: student processes and outcomes become quite complex in a grand educational system trying to quantify said complexities.

Take writing: in a learner’s setting, the stints of processes to complete a written piece–ideating our words to pruning them back–sometimes look like the harnessing of soft skills. The stick-with-it-ness of the once popular “grit” mantra or just the plain old use of “rest” to allow the mind some thought rehabilitation. To focus only on the end goal of things, of only “mastery,” is missing a ton of what a classroom needs to be.

I was so excited to explore a better way to combat the metrics of my field when I started reading C. Thi Nguyen’s new book, The Score, that I wrote an opening-salvo post about it without having read the whole thing. Just reading the first 70 pages was enough for me to want to get some thinking out there. I was ready for a solid revelation about metrics that would help propel me and my students more into the qualitative values I hold dear. This happened, I think, but TOTALLY not in the way I expected.

Metrics and School

If you were going to make a pie chart for how basic teaching and learning–basic like ye olde master craftsman and apprentice–use metrics versus qualitative measures, you’d find there is very little need of metrics. Metrics are not necessary for the root level education. It is only in our large system that we have made a need for them.

The gradebook is full of metrics–teachers agonize and debate over how the final equation is as close to objective as possible—brimming to a crescendo: that final one metric per class. We use this metric not only to communicate to students but the larger educational world and ourselves. It’s a weird thing that teachers usually have two versions of a student’s progress–the one that’s in the gradebook and the one that we observe every school day.

A grade is a stand-in to communicate success, for not everyone understands what that looks like. In a traditional classroom setting, only one party in the whole grade communication tree understands what’s behind the grade. The rest do not have the professionalism to make that determination, otherwise, why would we need grades? We have adopted the current grading system to, as Nguyen says, “outsource” expertise:

We’re constantly outsourcing to cope with the oversize[d] world. We’re outsourcing our memory to notebooks and document files. We’re outsourcing our math to calculators and spreadsheets. We’re outsourcing our medical knowledge to doctors, our car knowledge to mechanics. And each of the people and things we’re outsourcing to is in turn outsourcing to other people and things. Our trust is fractal and expands, rootlike, into incomprehensibly diverse sources. It turns out it’s not just that we’re too small to know everything about the world, so we have to outsource. It’s that we’re too small to even keep track of everything we’re outsourcing to. (Nguyen 254)

No matter the comical heinousness I have ascribed to grades, I have to admire the system of trust it represents. Parents want a grade that helps them see how their child is doing. They have outsourced their understanding of all of the learning standards to a school. The high school outsources their understanding of a students progress to the teacher, and the state outsources to the school. Both parties worry about graduation rates and the outcomes of state tests. Even state and national tests are outsourcing to a testing company. Further down the line, colleges and future jobs must have their metrics. They must outsource too. And then students in some measure outsource their understanding of learning so that they may receive a metric that does all of the above.

A grade is a metric anyone can read and understand whereas teaching and seeing where a student is requires skill that most parties who look at a grade do not have. But we don’t often look at the grades as the compromise they are. They have become something else through our shared culture and our species’s fascination with rite of passage. Grades seem like they have always been there yet they have only been there for 100 years. That’s thousands and thousands of years of human learning without a simple five-point system. But that doesn’t mean much in today’s land of innovation. Who wants to trust a world with no grades and no internet and no commercial airlines and penicillin?

We all know that school is a solid ideal, but we are past a simple idea of school in our society.

The game of the education system has a simplified point system to help determine the score of an individual along to wisdom, lifelong learning, future-oriented skills, a job, a life of upstandingness as a member of our society. But the scoring system obfuscates the actual game. In a real learning scenario, the grade doesn’t matter. In a true teacher and student situation, no one would ever tell a student, “I’m not sure I should give you a second chance because that was a summative assessment, and we had a limited time frame in order to learn it in.” Instead, teachers would just adjust and adapt. Whether that means backing up or adjusting the present teaching tact. In an educational system, it would be impossible to do this for every student, and that’s where the dissonance comes in. Our strong values of creating lifelong learners have been handedly replaced by the simple metrics of the education system.

Metrics are for big systems, for when we need to trust the expertise of professionals. There are good reasons we should trust such a system and good reasons not to. Nguyen is not against metrics totally, but against ones that co-opt our values for something simple, ethically dubious, soulless. I’m with him there.

Value Capture Perspective

All of this is why I picked up Nguyen’s book. There is something wrong going on in education, and it becomes more wrong the more I get into the profession. Does that sound familiar? This road to understanding?

But perhaps a good analogy comes with the purchase of a house. When you are touring it for the first time with your realtor, you are beginning your relationship with it. After 10 years of “touring” that house, you are more than familiar with the cracks in walls, remember the particular patterns in the grain of wood on a door, and worry about a particular shower drain’s ability to actually drain water.

The question you have to ask yourself is this: “Are those cracks just a natural part of it all–the product of naturally settling–or is this something we can fix, make better?”

When I chose this professor, the answer was resoundingly, “OF COURSE!” And I think I was right, even if I was way too idealistic in the beginning. But I’ve found that the question is too simplistic. The real question should be this: What aspects of my classroom could conceivably get better with my limited power over the system and my limited resources while also ensuring I don’t make aspects of my classroom worse while also maintaining an energized mental space? We all juggle a limited plate of actions; a house can never be without flaws.

The other factor of gaining experience in education is knowing what newfangled fixes sound great but are more placebo than anything. Here, I’m looking at much of EdTech. And perhaps some educational research. There is a famous educational researcher that has had a huge impact on education in America and around the world. One of the studies he produced maintains that reducing class size has an effect, but very minimally. The conclusion is based on the sorts of metrics that only works in the land of metrics. In fact, it’s one of those results that seems incredulous, even after you understand its rationale. Experience pushes back because we all know that it is undoubtedly true that if you give a human more attention, they will get more out of it, especially if its concerning learning. But in a land of controlled environments and metrical outcomes, yeah, sure. That might be true, especially if your coveted outcome is a multiple choice test and standardized writing assessment. This is a prime example of educational value capture, a metric that defines the entire educational experience that we all trust but makes us forget that it also represents everything else that goes with education.

Grades are an easy thing to nitpick on. As Nguyen points out early in his book, Goodhart’s Law (and ideas like it) have been around for more than 50 years: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” (Nguyen 102). It is known canon that grades have become a target for students at least when they get to high school. And why wouldn’t they? Grades are a very powerful part of the high school experience. They are in our history and culture–both in the wider sense and in the stories of our immediate family. Goodhart’s Law is with it though, as it is with the following questions that I and many teachers hear every year, even if you have a “gradeless” classroom: “How can I get my grade up in this class?”

The effect of grades as the sole metric of educational worth is insidious. Because, as Nguyen points out, each of the people in the educational system can see the metric of a grade in different ways. Some are “rules dogmatists” who can’t see anything but the rules: The grade gets them their future. What else matters? It is a part of their identity to be this kind of graded student. In other words, “[t]he rules dogmatist doesn’t explore, because they believe too deeply in their one true world” (Nguyen 240).

This is because metrics are powerful:

Metrics make you an offer: If you accept this prefabricated, public value system into your heart, you will become instantly comprehensible. You will gain access to a whole world of ready-made justifications. Your success will become clear and inarguable. Metrics make values mechanically clear. (Nguyen 187)

Or there are “rules skeptics”: those who are “unwilling to try something new” because, why would you (Nguyen 240)? Life is the way that it is and it seems to be working fine. Why change it? Why go to a movie theater when you can watch things at home? Why buy vinyl when it’s cheaper to stream?

And I agree with Nguyen, that what we need is people, both in the educational world and in the real world, who are playful:

In between the rules dogmatist and the rules skeptic is the playful person. To be playful with the rules is to try them on, but lightly–to slip in and out of worlds. A playful person is willing to try on different rules for a while and see how it goes. But they’re not stuck there. A playful person is exploratory. And part of that is trying on new goals and values. The playful person, as Lugones puts it, occupies a world creatively. They are willing to rewrite the rules if they need to. (241 Nguyen)

Because the outcome is important, but what the classroom is really good at it is dealing with process, which Nguyen calls “meaningful activity”:

The meaning of life is in the process and not the outcome. Meaning lies in doing: in thinking interesting thoughts, having interesting conversations, playing fascinating games. Meaning lies in the process of making things, in moving your body in thrilling and elegant ways, in loving people. (Nguyen 298)

What we want are people that look at the world like this, much like a very charming pizza dude that Nguyen highlights in his book. You don’t think of pizza as something that can be an art form. If you cook, it’s very easy to see the making of food as following mechanical recipes–quantities, measurements, and exact temperatures to produce a palatable meal. But such strict adherence to metrics squeezes out play and assumes that we live in a vacuum where life is so simple that everything can be an algorithm.

Breaking the flow a bit here, I have to say that I love this following bit. Little tidbits of Nguyen’s life are throughout the book, and really show his ability to reflect and examine his life–his sense of joy in the concepts he explores and how they fit into the great world and the more intimate world is just awesome.

And so here we have Nguyen asking a pizza chef his process:

I asked him how he made pizza so good–God-pizza, pizza that sang with the most delicate balance of crispy to chewy, that gave me the most angelic hit of pure beauty, while smacking me with pure animal gut-joy. He pointed out the enormous wood-fired copper pizza oven at the back of the shop. “See that,” he said. “That’s the temperature gauge. I painted it over, with black paint, so I couldn’t look at it. It’s a distraction. You have to put your hand here”–he placed his hand directly at the open mouth of the pizza oven–”and feel how it’s breathing. It will tell you how the pizza wants to be cooked that day. You can’t trust the temperature gauge to tell you the truth” (Nguyen 141).

That sort of expertise–the type that really shows the root of “experior,” also in “exper-ience”–is filled with abject professionalism.

Ungrading

And so when I got to the bit where Nguyen discusses how he tried the “ungrading” thing and decided to go back to grades, I was a bit miffed.

I have to be honest and a bit critical to say that I’m not sure his understanding of “ungrading” was a good one. The philosophy, yes, but the procedure, well, it’s one I’m not sure works no matter what philosophy is behind it. It is too idealistic.

Nguyen’s version of ungrading was to give students an “A” at the outset of the class so that they wouldn’t feel the clutch of judgment and be free to play. This was fine in his philosophy of games classes. There, students are intrinsically motivated and grades largely don’t matter. But in the general introductory to philosophy classes, a class without a tangible arc of an end-goal, and filled with students who may be there for a way to fulfill credits on their larger journey to a degree entirely unrelated to philosophy, the results weren’t as great:

My students have told me directly that without the grading incentive, they won’t come. Some have even told me that they found my class fascinating and exciting, but they can’t justify spending the time on coming to class if they’re already guaranteed an A, because their grade in their engineering class still hangs in the balance. (Nguyen 319)

These students did some triaging with their time in light of their other responsibilities. And perhaps that’s why I have been dallying with going back to grades after five years of “ungrading.” This is why it was totally weird and almost prophetic encountering this section at the end Nguyen’s book about how little old him can’t combat the prevailing systematic thereness that is the educational grading system.

With the educational system as it is now, metrics and all, a lot of incentive in classes can be ascribed to the weight of the end goal, the grade. And for Nguyen, a college philosophy professor, he has it easier than I do. Students choose to take his course and are a bit more mature in terms of their frontal lobe maturation–they can make better long term decisions. The system we are trying to fix, this small educational rating system, is too powerful to sway students to be what Nguyen and the rest of us teachers want it to be: reflective individuals.

In a high school English class, I don’t have students who are necessarily choosing to take English classes. They have to take at least four major English classes during their high school careers. So, already, us high school English teachers are on the ELA advocacy train. We know honing ELA skills are eminently good for you, and we must take our time to prove it. Though, all subjects go through this in high school. This most recent “ungrading” phenomenon is a part of that. We want students to choose to do well. And I still believe that, but I’ve gotten pretty jaded with the “ungrading” system.

Every year, I need to remind all the parties involved why we do what we do while also teaching all of the things that go into an English Language Arts class. It’s a lot. Especially when I feel like ELA already spends a lot of time giving feedback on student work.

And so, I’m left with another fork in the road of my teaching career. I know that reflection is important. I know that if students set their own goals, they will get more from it than if it’s a grade. This is the heart of Nguyen’s book: renegotiating metrics so they work for you. But I also know that I will never be able to change the overarching grading system through the efforts of little old me. The system is too embedded; it is too strong.

So I must ask myself whether it is worth it. With all that is on the plate of educators–and there is so much that is also IMPORTANT–I’m not so sure anymore.

During such times of professional indecision, I wish there was a classroom I could go to to work out my difficulties with a quaint but weird professor and fellow students of education, a place where we could test theories and issues and the like.

I shall never forget this one class in college, in the most introductory of philosophy classes, something like “Classical Western Philosophy,” our wily professor gave us a live demonstration. After reading Socrates’s metaphysical theory on reality, our professor asked us to refute it right then and there. Our professor served as Socrates. We couldn’t poke a single hole into the theory. It was exhilarating. Debating things in earnest, with evidence, is and always will be my favorite thing. And that’s probably why I love the classroom the most. And it’s also why I want it to be about that only. But in this current system, can it?

What’s Important

The real thing is that the further you get into teaching (and into life in general), the more you learn and the more you realize you don’t know, and the more you overwhelm yourself with the things you learn–all those small decisions filled with progress and learning, they stack up. All these great things become, tragically, burdensome.

Let’s face it, the most important things we can do for our students is to be THERE–be present. Anything else is of a lesser value. Planning is being there; giving feedback is being there. We are present when we listen and ask good questions or when we get students to ask good questions. When we troubleshoot and affirm, we are there.

Although I have found our current grading conditions in America to be problematic, I grow weary of spending energy on it. It’s more important for me to get students to reflect on the process than for me to wage a campaign on the grading system.

And really, whatever makes teachers less exhausted is probably a very solid thing.

In other words, education in America has accrued a lot of bandaids for some serious wounds that need far more invasive medical treatments. And it is my job to do what I can but not everything I can. I am just a lowly English teacher after all, inhabiting one cinderblocked classroom. I am filled with the wisdom of books, colleagues, my students, and my general experience. I never will stop learning and will be ever curious on how to do better. It is the main root tendril for me being in this profession in the first place. And sometimes you got to make room for the thing that is most important. A writing teacher can surely understand this–students always mistake “more” writing for “better,” when we know the delete key can even more powerful.

Well, it’s hard for teachers to apply that to the profession because live human beings get all the consequences.