Communication 2.0: Are we ready for a transcript overhaul?

“Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers and me
Da-da-da-dee-da-da dum
Da-da-da-da-dee-da-da-doo.”
                                Kermit the Frog

When I imagine what schools could look like in twenty years (five when I’m feeling optimistic, a hundred when I’m not), I never imagine grades. I imagine learning happening outside of classrooms, students collaborating with professionals to address community needs, curriculum based on transferable skills, flexible schedules for students and teachers, and learning that grows out of interests and needs. I imagine conversations that drive choices, narrative feedback, students doing action research, curriculum centered on social justice and innovation, and rich, varied, and personalized learning experiences. And when I imagine how schools will communicate these learning experiences, it is never through a traditional transcript with simply letter grades and GPAs.


Though we long for substantive improvements in how we communicate learning, we understand that rebuilding systems without grades or GPAs is not as easy as willing it to happen. Transforming schools while maintaining ways to efficiently assess and communicate learning has its challenges. Guiding a community of stakeholders--from students to families to teachers to universities--away from the damaging legacy of grades and towards a more equitable, accurate, and vivid picture of learning is daunting at best, paralyzing at worst.

Over the past fifteen years, Stan and I have become a bit obsessed with school transformation. The work is important and inspiring, and though painfully slow at times, it really does seem like the ship of education is starting to move, as more and more classrooms, schools, districts, and states are seeing the importance of change. We see examples of this daily in our own district, as learning becomes more personalized, teachers create new, more relevant experiences for students, and structural changes are made to support the growth of all students. But despite all of these successes, all of the progress that we watch happen, it seems we keep getting stuck at the end point: the traditional transcript.

Bill Rich, educator and consultant (and Best Husband in the World) wrote recently about the need for schools to upgrade their operating systems (read his blog here). He argues that real change cannot occur in our schools if we continue to work within and build practices upon antiquated structures. Think of it like the operating systems on your computer. You get to a certain point when your computer (or phone) can no longer function without an upgrade--programs you once counted on no longer work, productivity slows down, and the most innovative apps are so incompatible with your current system that you can’t even download them. Bill writes that most educational systems are built on principles that contradict what we know about the brain, and therefore, when we try to implement new practices that are based on the science of learning, they often fail to work. Logically, the opposite would be true as well: if we upgrade our operating system but do not change all of our practices--in this case, how we communicate learning--it won’t be long before something breaks down. 

Changing from a conventional to a standards-based system of learning is (or should be) a complete overhaul of how and why we do school, a true upgrade of the operating system. Despite what we see in the media or read about in practice in many schools around the country, the SBL we’re talking about is not merely tagging what we currently do to standards, or changing what we teach to align with standards, or anything at all to do with standardization. It’s a completely new way of thinking about learning. It requires a significant shift in thinking about the purpose of education--from one that is teaching-centered, to one that is learning-centered. It requires new ways of thinking about time and schedules and curriculum and the role of every stakeholder. It requires us to clearly articulate our goals for education, understand how the brain works, and use what we know about how people learn to make decisions. And it requires us to grapple with what and how to communicate that learning to students, families, each other, and the world.

So many schools that we have worked with and read about, including our own, make significant changes in learning in an attempt to upgrade their operating systems. And as we shift the purpose of education and build transferable, flexible, standards-based foundations, we see the incredible possibilities that are now within reach--greater personalization, flexible use of time and space, opportunities for more authentic learning and demonstration, greater depth and efficiency of learning to name a few. But when it comes to how to communicate learning, we are stuck (or stick ourselves) with the same language and templates and paradigms that have been in place for a century, transcripts with grades and GPAs. These were built for the old operating system, to quickly be able to sort and rank students based on summarized achievement; but our new operating system requires a way to communicate the rich, varied, and personalized stories that our students are building, and grades and GPAs fall short.

Are grades and GPAs inherently bad? Do we need to get rid of them completely if we want to transform the purpose of school? That’s arguable, for sure. Many educational thinkers and leaders have strong and sometimes contradictory beliefs about this. Thomas Guskey, author of Practical Solutions for Serious Problems in Standards-Based Grading, On Your Mark, and What We Know about Grading, believes we shouldn’t spend our energy trying to get rid of grades and GPAs, but that we should work to bring greater integrity to this form of communication. In the article “Don’t Get Rid of Grades: Change their Meaning and Consequences,” he writes, “Although grades should never be the only information about learning that students and parents receive, they can be a meaningful part of that information. When combined with guidance to students and parents on how improvements can be made, grades can become a valuable tool in facilitating students’ learning success.” (Important note: Guskey does say that while he doesn’t think we need to get rid of grades, we should not be using them to sort or rank students!)

Ken O’Connor, author of A Repair Kit for Grading and How to Grade for Learning, has also spent decades helping teachers cull harmful grading practices and adopt more accurate ones. In A Repair Kit for Grading, he writes, “[Traditional grading practices] often not only result in ineffective communication about student achievement, but also may actually harm students and misrepresent their learning.” Rather than advocate for getting rid of grades due to this, O’Connor provides more practical, achievable ways to “fix” our grading practices and make grades more accurate and effective. Both of these authors were (and continue to be) instrumental in our own thinking about learning, grading, and reporting, and we frequently turn to them as sounding-boards as we try to figure out what’s next for schools (which may be annoying for them, but it’s so helpful to us!).

Alfie Kohn, one of the most well-known critics of grades, argues that grades are so unreliable, inequitable, and entrenched in the old purpose of school that keeping them as forms of communication is incompatible with progress. He calls for an overhaul that requires bravery and faith in our communities’ capacity for change. In his article “Getting Rid of Grades,” he writes, “The question, then, is how we can summon the courage to get rid of letter and number grades, replace them with reports of students’ progress that are more informative and less destructive, and help parents and students to recognize the value of doing so.” 

(Though not on par with the thinkers above, thought-leader Mick Jagger believes, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”)


So what are schools to do? Once we have committed to changing our underlying systems of learning from conventional to standards-based, how do we decide what to do about transcripts, about grades and GPAs? Is keeping these communicators compromising the ideal in order to avoid confrontation? If we change what they mean but keep the symbols or numbers the same, is that truly transforming our practice? Are we giving into the pressure of corporations and universities by giving them the transcripts they want, even if those transcripts no longer communicate what we care about or believe to be accurate indicators of achievement? And most importantly, perhaps, does maintaining the status quo with our transcripts limit the full upgrade to a new operating system, thus preventing the most innovative and brain-based changes from happening?


While it may seem like an easy decision philosophically for many of us, the practical implications of getting rid of course-level letter grades and a GPA cannot be ignored. So much great change can occur within our systems when we keep the end point the same. Colleges, communities, families, students, and even teachers may be much more willing to take risks and make changes in how we learn when they can be guaranteed that the end point will look the same as it always has. Grades and GPAs don’t have to prevent us from providing better and more varied experiences for students--just look at some of the amazing work coming out of almost any school in your area; it’s easy to find programs and courses and innovative educational experiences even in the most traditional of schools. And the risk is so great--we have all read about schools or districts that moved too fast for their communities, who got rid of grades or GPAs before fully shifting practices, who tried to do the “right” thing, and became cautionary tales because of it.

But.

If some schools don’t commit to the unknown; if some districts don’t take the risk; if some state agencies of education don’t say, yeah, we get that this is going to be tough, but our students are worth it--all of our students--then our operating systems will never fully change. Someone has to be willing to be the first in their district, their county, their state, to say it’s time to completely overhaul how we communicate learning, to say, we can and must do better for our students. (What could this look like? Check out Mastery Transcript Consortium).

Yeah, we know. Overhaul is not always possible, or advisable, or even the right thing to do. True change is hard and takes time. Compromises have to be made in order to build or maintain trust, honor community voice, and to keep inching forward towards a better way. Particularly in large, public schools, there aren’t enough resources or time to even consider the implications of such significant change in communication, so the only possibility for progress is often incremental. And yes, incremental change is better than status quo and will eventually get us where we want to go.

But hats off to the schools who are just going for it, who are going all in on something new, who are saying we are done providing colleges easy ways to sort and rank our learners, we are done compromising our beliefs about learning, we are done playing it safe. We’re rooting for you, learning from you, and counting on your continued bravery to show us how it’s done. (And if it doesn't work...well, as Kermit said for all us lovers and dreamers, Da-da-da-dee-da-da dum, Da-da-da-da-dee-da-da-doo.)

Works Cited

The Frog, Kermit. “Rainbow Connection.” My lost childhood, circa 1979.

Guskey, Thomas R. “Don't Get Rid of Grades: Change Their Meaning & Consequences.” Thomas R. Guskey & Associates, 26 Mar. 2019, tguskey.com/dont-get-rid-grades-change-meaning-consequences/.

Kohn, Alfie. “Getting Rid of Grades: Case Studies.” 1 Dec. 2014, www.alfiekohn.org/blogs/getting-rid-grades-case-studies/.

O'Connor, Ken. A Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades. Pearson, 2011.

Rich , Bill. “Https://Tiie.w3.Uvm.edu/Blog/Brain-Based-Learning/#.YGEmykhKjUq.” Innovative Education in VT, Tarrant Institute, 2020, tiie.w3.uvm.edu/blog/brain-based-learning/#.YGEmykhKjUq.

“Welcome to Mastery Transcript Consortium® (MTC).” Mastery Transcript Consortium® (MTC) | Join the Effort to Create a High School Transcript to Transform High School., 3 Feb. 2021, mastery.org/.