District 65 is currently in what many would call “a pickle”. A fog of confusion, panic, and frustration surrounds Bessie Rhodes. Projections predict the district will be $13 million in debt by the end of the school year. The state of Illinois stands poised to take over for potential fiscal insolvency. And what on earth is going on with the $48 million Foster School? It has never been more evident that District 65 has bitten off more than it can chew. However, the district seems as though it is hungry for more.
With the start of the 2024-25 school year, District 65 has implemented Standards Based Grading, or SBG. For those who are unfamiliar, SBG diverges from the standard A-F, 100-0 grading scale, forgoing assigning numbers to students in a vain attempt to provide a more “meaningful, accurate and actionable” report card. The district has 4 standards: beginning, progressing, meeting and extending. Parents and students will see every subject, along with various domains (specific skills within a subject). Where things start to take a turn for the worse is the actual “grade” — or lack thereof. Instead of one overarching letter/number grade, the report card is filled with BEs, PRs, MEs, and EXs next to every single domain under each subject for each trimester. If it sounds overwhelming, it is. As someone viewing one of these report cards for the first time while doing research for this article, I was appalled by the sheer amount of text on the document. In no way, shape, or form was the report card easy to understand or interpret.
Spencer Stern, an Evanston resident and parent of a Haven Middle School student, claimed at an October board meeting, “My eighth grader came home and was super confused on how to interpret this…he also said that his friends, who are more academically inclined than my son, still struggled with it.”
The structure seems counterintuitive, considering one of the district’s goals was to make receiving feedback through the report card easier to access, therefore leading to growth in various domains. This format inherently inhibits that process — students who were uninvested before will certainly be further repelled by the increased effort needed to truly access their comments.
As Aaini Bumi, a 7th grader at Haven, put it, “It doesn’t give an in-depth breakdown. I don’t know why they did it.” In its attempt to reach out to students through detailed dissections of each subject, the SBG report card unintentionally pushes them away through a combination of undefined standards and verbiage.
But let’s be real — report card formatting is not the primary issue with Standards Based Grading. The true concern is what SBG attempts to mask. As French philosopher, political activist, and teacher Michael Foucault stated, “Reformism, in the end, is the therapy for symptoms: erasing the consequences while showing to advantage the system one belongs to, even if it means concealing it.”
As someone on the outside looking in, this quote perfectly represents what I, and many other parents, students, and teachers see in District 65’s iteration of SBG. With just 4 obscure benchmarks, it has never been easier to mask the shortcomings of students academically. And the shortcomings are definitely there: as Larry Gavin in the Evanston Roundtable reports, “…Only 54% of District 65 students are prepared for the next grade level and likely on track to college and career readiness in ELA. The percentage is 43% for math.” This doesn’t even consider the prevalent achievement gaps still persisting in Evanston today (72% of white students met expectations on the 2024 IAR for ELA, while only 27% of black students did).
Through SBG, there is an erasure of any form of accountability on the student’s end, with ambiguous standards in place of what once clearly signified a need for improvement or a definite show of comprehension. Simply lump students into 4 vague groups and repeat for every domain (and repeat again for every subject), and you’ve got the recipe for an overtly complex yet imprecise grading system that does its job of hiding gaps in knowledge behind phrases such as “beginning in learning” and “progressing in learning”. Not to mention the fact that the argument claiming SBG and these gentle phrases foster a greater desire for growth and relearning in students is completely naive — as school administrator Arthur Chiaravalli writes on his blog, “…the conversation veers predictably toward resentment, discouragement, or complacency around the grade.” Standards Based Grading, as currently implemented by the district, is but a “therapy for the symptoms”, while doing nothing to address the underlying issues perpetuating said symptoms.
And this is yet to touch on the implications of SBG on student preparedness for high school and beyond. While I am completely for a system where students can learn and foster a growth mindset without being evaluated as a number on a grading scale, the harsh truth is that the United States education system is not built on these principles. As I have written before in my article “Trained to Test”, “The goal of ‘education’ in school is to uphold the capitalist nature of our society, which is evident in the way that institutions relegate students to numbers and stats, such as GPA and test scores, and pit them against each other to see who comes out on top.” Unfortunately, it is nothing but irresponsible to grade middle school students with SBG and expect them to succeed in the realistic, A-F, 100-0 based environment that both ETHS and essentially every higher education institution uses. Colleges are not looking to interpret a transcript full of abbreviations based on a fuzzy standard determined by a school district looking to cover their academic deficiencies. The thought of this is nothing but idealistic.
There is no doubt that District 65 has enough on its plate already without factoring in the introduction of Standards Based Grading. However, one thing is certain: SBG is not a bright spot in the darkness; rather, another piece of litter in the dumpster fire currently engulfing the district.
