More than a Grade Point Average: Inside the movement to end letter grades in Jewish education

At least three times each school year, middle school pupils at the Oakland Hebrew Day School write divrei Torah, or essays on a Torah passage. They read a section of the Torah, come up with a series of questions and answers about the passage, and explain its modern-day relevance.

Students can expect significant feedback when they turn in their essays. Their teachers will provide detailed notes on how well they meet certain benchmarks, such as whether their commentary is explained well and clearly communicates their ideas.

One thing the students won’t receive: a traditional letter or number grade.

Get The Jewish News Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

Instead, assessments at Oakland Hebrew Day School (OHDS) are designed to provide feedback so the students can improve their essays as well as their understanding of the Torah. “We’re not ranking them in comparison to anyone else,” said head of school Tania Schweig. “We’re most interested in students’ growth in relation to their learning.”

Oakland Hebrew Day school is part of a small but growing educational movement to abandon traditional letter or number grades, switching instead to assessments of student proficiency and progress. There are numerous reasons why schools are making this shift: According to a piece published last year in The Washington Post, “Decades of research, at all levels of education, has demonstrated that grades can promote short-term performance rather than long-term understanding, encourage both superficial studying and outright cheating, and can undermine a student’s intrinsic interest in the material.”

When it comes to Jewish schools, the stakes can be even higher. “Grades in Judaic studies make kids feel judged as Jews, diminishing their Jewish identity,” said Manette Mayberg, founder of the Jewish Education Innovation Challenge (JEIC), an organisation focused on improving Jewish day school education through innovation, experimentation and collaboration. “They internalize those grades as a judgement of their Jewish learning capability, which is the exact opposite of what Torah is meant to be: for everyone according to their ability.”

Instead, she and others say, students should be encouraged to learn about Judaism without the pressure of studying to get an A.

A lot of kids “are just working for the grade,” said Sharon Freundel, managing director of JEIC. “And that’s a terrible way to internalize Jewish values and wisdom.”

One of JEIC’s goals is for schools to help students become motivated to study for the sake of learning, rather than for the sake of getting a good grade — and, eventually, getting into a good high school or college.

To that end, JEIC is promoting the idea that alternative assessment methods — and not grades — should be the goal of all Jewish day schools, particularly when it comes to Jewish studies classes. “Judaic Studies holds a unique and vital role, distinct from general studies, in shaping a strong Jewish identity and influencing students’ lives both now and in the future,” reads a page on its website dedicated to the topic. “To fully achieve these meaningful goals, it’s important to approach evaluation thoughtfully, as traditional grading can potentially hinder the deeper purpose of Judaic education.”

Traditional grading can have negative effects, including “creating pressure that may diminish their desire to engage with Judaism after graduation.” Instead, JEIC advocates for more experimental practices such as competency-based learning, in which students receive credit for mastering a subject at their own pace.

“If a kid never picks up a math book after graduating school, so be it. But if a kid graduates a Jewish day school and says, ‘I’m never picking up a chumash again,’ that’s heartbreaking,” said Freundel, referring to the Jewish Bible.

At Luria Academy in Brooklyn, a Montessori-based Jewish day school that serves kids from pre-K through 8th grade, teachers write narratives about students’ progress over the semester, including an analysis of their strengths and weaknesses. The goal is “to encourage children to be independent learners” and “to develop a love of learning and a strong desire to learn based on interests,” according to head of school Amanda Pogany.

Bat Sheva Miller, Luria’s upper school director, said teachers assess students’ work by describing it as “challenging,” meaning they need a lot of guidance in the subject; “practicing,” meaning they need a little hand-holding; “meeting,” meaning they reached expected standards or “exceeding,” meaning they surpassed expectations.

Miller calls this type of feedback qualitative, rather than the quantitative approach of conventional grades. “Once you see the number or the A, B, C, D, you stop being curious,” she said. “Grades tend to distance the students from the learning.”

Oakland’s Schweig agrees. “When you stamp a grade on an essay, you’re communicating that the learning is over,” she said. “We generally focus a lot on process, and we want our students to learn from feedback and see feedback as something that makes them grow.”

At OHDS, a teacher reviewing a student essay about a Torah passage will use a rubric to give feedback on the essay’s introduction, whether it provides evidence to support that introduction, and whether it uses good grammar, spelling and sentence structure. Students “get this rubric back multiple times” as they use it to improve their essays, Schweig said.

Those essays will become part of a “student portfolio conference where students share their growth and development with their parents,” said Tamara Beliak, dean of the school’s beit midrash, a middle school program offering mixed-age Judaic studies classes and independent study projects. “Articulating strengths, weaknesses and growth is an important part of the process.”

And yet, Freundel acknowledges that some Jewish day schools are reluctant to try a different approach. She ticks off several reasons why: parents got grades in school, so they want their kids to get grades, too, plus it’s more time-consuming for teachers to write narrative assessments. Some high school students and their parents are concerned that the lack of grades could hurt their GPAs, which are an essential element for college admissions.

Those GPA concerns shouldn’t be a worry for academically strong students, according to Stuart Nachbar, a Trenton, New Jersey-based college admissions adviser. Colleges typically recalculate applicants’ GPAs, he said, and many colleges, particularly large state schools, factor only core academic subjects like English, math, history and science in their calculations.

“Holistic admissions does consider the ‘dual load’ at religiously affiliated high schools, because the religion courses are required courses for the diploma that come in addition to traditional academic requirements,” he said. Nachbar emphasized that every college is different; whether admissions officers will take the time to review narrative transcripts will depend on the college, he said.

As for parents’ concerns, educators at Luria work “to make sure parents understand how we’re giving feedback,” Pogany said, explaining the school sets explicit goals for students and then tracks “how students are progressing toward those goals.”

Abandoning traditional letter or number grades helps inspire learning for the sake of learning, Pogany added. “We encourage intrinsic motivation,” she said, “for students to develop a love of learning and a strong desire to learn based on interests.”

Educator and author Starr Sackstein began to advocate nontraditional grading more than a decade ago after receiving her national board certification for teaching. “That process is a yearlong reflective process, and I learned so much about myself as a learner,” she said. That led her to bring the process to her own classroom, where she taught AP literature.

“Honors students are hyper-focused on their grades,” Sackstein said, noting she wanted to change that focus. She turned grading into an interactive process, giving students feedback, having them ask questions about that feedback and then revise their work.

“They were paying more attention to the things I needed them to pay attention to, and less attention on superficial kinds of subjective things like grades,” said Sackstein, whose books include “Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School.”

She said this paradigm can be particularly useful in Jewish day schools. Sackstein recalled that when she was growing up, her family rabbi “always used to say to us that to be a good Jew means to be a good person,” she said, adding that self-assessments can help in all aspects of life.

“We become more critical of the decisions we’re making — not just in our learning, but the way we treat people, the situations we’re in,” she said. “That reflective process, I think, then becomes embedded in the people we grow into.”