Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual. – Franz Kafka
Too often in education it feels like truth has been overrun by a menagerie of myth. Recently, one myth in particular has been prowling at the gates, namely the idea of ‘grade-level.’ There is worry about whether our children will be on grade-level, wondering if they ever were, and urgent calls for action to get them there. Motivated by genuine concern for the well-being of our children, these conversations have unfortunately embraced a myth that that undermines their good intention.
The grade-level leopards first encroached on our sacred work in the mid-1800s when reformers like Horace Mann introduced the idea of organizing school in yearlong divisions that roughly correspond with age. While perhaps logistically convenient, age-graded levels presume that growth and development are uniform, consistent, and one-dimensional – an assumption quickly contradicted by anyone who has met more than one child. Children grow in many ways and at different rates in each.1 There is no singular level a child is supposed to be at for any given age.
Grade-level, even in this simplest conception, does not reflect the reality of learning and development. Grade-level though persists because it has the makings of a perfect education myth: an ill-defined and shifting oversimplification of an important and complex question. In more recent decades, standardization and testing have added order and calculation to the already arbitrary notion of graded-level. And so, like the leopards, some have come to believe it to be meaningful. But standardization and testing have only removed the concept of grade-level further from the reality of growth and development.
Content standards, for instance, purport to indicate what knowledge and skills children should have at certain ages. Yet, decisions about what knowledge and skills to include and when hinge on multiple sets of values, goals, and ideologies. There is no one way to decide what matters and why and when. Researchers like Yong Zhao have concluded that content standards are subjective (Vangelova, 2015).
That 7th grade-level knowledge is indicated by the use of a comma to separate coordinate adjectives while 8th grade-level knowledge is indicated by the use commas to indicate a pause (National, 2010) is ultimately arbitrary. The order and formality of content standards certainly gives grade-level a veneer of validity despite being undergirded by an arbitrary and overprescribed conception of growth and development.
Moreover, to say a student is or is not ‘on grade-level’ has very little meaning within the standards themselves. Does writing at a 7th grade-level mean a student can apply or demonstrate knowledge of all 28 writing standards in the Common Core? Will only 20 do? And if so which ones? And to what depth and extent must a student demonstrate competency in them? The rebuttal that key or essential standards could be identified only confirms their subjectiveness. Determining whether a student is ‘on grade-level’ in accordance with standards is a shifting and subjective task built on an already subjectively defined document.
Testing also provides a calculation for grade-level that further adds to the ambiguity. The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), for instance, is often cited as evidence of ‘grade level’ performance. Yet, NAEP (2020) itself explicitly states that it’s “Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g. state or district assessments)”. State-level assessments however have regularly changing content and cut scores and of course never assess the full breadth of the content in the standards.
Similar divergences can be found in locally imposed testing regimes. NWEA (2016) offers correlations between their RTI scores and state proficiency levels but acknowledges that, for example, Kentucky’s K-PREP and the MAP test “are not parallel in content” (p. 19). Additionally confounding, MAP also offers grade level data is normative, or a relative measure (NWEA, 2020). In other words, a statistical construct that compares students to historical peer groups and scores. MAP’s conception of grade-level is circular: grade-level is what the grade-level calculates to be.
Reading levels also attempt to justify the leopards by labeling texts and children with a single number. Their single number connotes a sense of certainty and science behind it all. But texts do not have “discrete, accurately measurable” levels of difficulty (Schwanenflugel & Knapp, 2017). Nor does a child have a “discrete, accurately measurable” level of capacity (Schwanenflugel & Knapp, 2017). Our own experience informs us that our ability to persist and comprehend depends on a great number of factors: interest-level, content-knowledge, even time of day. Consider that Lexile levels place Wiesel’s “Night” and Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” at the 3rd and 4th grade-level (Ginsberg & Moye, 2019) while adults re-reading children’s books often notice deeper meaning, allegory, and social implications.
The standardization and testing conception of grade-level has a logic that leaps from place to place and eludes each attempt to grasp it. Grade-level is about content standards (or only some of them), then it is about a score from a test not based on that content (or only some it), and then a different test with a different score and content, and then back again. It is about a child’s individual progress on pre-determined path, then it is about the child in comparison to others. Yet such ambiguity is precisely what makes an education myth so strong. It lets us slip unwittingly from one conception of grade-level to the next and find a confirming certainty in the calculations of each without questioning whether they are connected to each other or to anything meaningful at all.
Believers in the leopards will sometimes seem to acknowledge the absurdity of a factor like grade-level. They will say something like, “I agree – there are many problems here. This factor certainly doesn’t mean everything, but it must mean something.” In my experience, this is not a genuine concession that would minimize the discussion of said factor in favor of other, more meaningful approaches. Instead, it is a head fake, only nodding in momentary agreement and then continuing to bear down with monomaniacal focus on the bunk measures and constructs.
We cannot let that happen with grade level. In Kafka’s parable, the leopards did not enter the temple without a cost. They drank the vessels dry! Using grade-level as factor in how we think about, discuss, or plan for teaching and learning syphons energy and attention from creating the types of experiences our children really deserve. While standards and testing provide inadequate and conflicting conceptions of reality, the damage they inflict on education differs only as much the mark of leopard’s fang differs from the mark of its claw.
First, the standardization and testing grade-level concoction ascribes a strict linearity to the learning process. The checklist of knowledge and the test score are tempting in their simplicity and in the seeming clarity of seeing a line of progress and knowing one’s exact place in it. They portray learning as a concretely ordered progression of facts and skills. But that is not how learning works. Learning happens in a mess of leaps, regressions, and stutters. There is no one place a child should be at any time.
Most importantly, grade-level standardization and testing drastically narrows our view of education. It constricts school to be only about academics. Usually an academics constricted to just English and math. And an English and math constricted to knowledge and skill that can be demonstrated in highly specific ways. Grade-level does not speak to a wide-range of creative and expressive capacities in English and math. It rarely mentions others in the vast array of disciplines. It has nothing to say about creativity, emotional development, social growth, becoming independent, knowing and challenging oneself, thinking critically, learning to be brave, seeking justice, becoming a passionate reader, writer, thinker, experimenter, and on and on…
Grade level persists because it provides easy answer to a complicated question: is my child where they need to be? This question resonates even more in times of massive, on-going school closures and in conversations around equity. But grade-level offers the wrong frame for addressing these important concerns.
For example, The Opportunity Myth(TNTP, 2018) uses grade-level as the frame for explaining inequity.2 The report asserts that students in general have little exposure to ‘grade-level’ work and instruction and that that opportunity is even less for students of color and students who are poor. The report rings with a cursory truth because it gives an explicit name and number that appear to capture the nature of a complex injustice: the school system’s complicity in marginalizing children of color. But, at a deeper level its use of grade-level confoundingly anchors The Opportunity Myth in the same ideologies that produce the inequities it proports to address.
As described above, grade-level plays with a loose logic that does not reflect the reality of learning, growth, or development. So, it is not surprising that the National Education Policy Center’s (NEPC) review of The Opportunity Myth found that “some of its particular claims are not fully supported by evidence, and there are questions about how key constructs are measured” (Datnow, 2019, p. 3). Later NEPC’s review asks, “Is grade level the best way to conceptualize what is challenging or appropriate for all students?” (p. 5).
The Opportunity Myth’s conception of grade level is also not surprisingly bound to the forces of standardization and testing. It narrowly defines learning as test scores. It assumes homogeneity in children and that their learning should be defined by external, subjective measures rather than their individual and unique gifts and needs. As NEPC’s review asks, “what is a ‘grade-appropriate’ assignment or assessment for a wide range of students in a particular classroom?” (p. 5).
Certainly, children of color and children who are poor are systemically denied opportunities vast in number and magnitude. How we define those opportunities determines whether we will maintain or dismantle systems of oppression and domination. When initiatives like The Opportunity Myth use grade-level as the measure of opportunity they inexorably link themselves to the testing movement that has been rooted in racism since its inception (Rosales, 2018). They promote what Ibram X Kendi (2016) refers to as “the racist hierarchy of difference” instead of the “antiracist equality of difference.” Grade-level, standardization, and testing asks us to rank, sort, and compare students on narrowly defined parameters rather than honoring their myriad of individual gifts and talents. It expects growth that is mechanistic rather than human.
The injustice of opportunity is not that we have failed to shape every child in the exact same way at the same time. It is not that we have failed in requiring children to conform to the same ways of thinking and demonstrating knowledge. It is that we have failed to shape our schools around the diverse humanity of the children they serve, that we have failed to fully make experiences and materials that truly reflect them, that honor and elevate their culture and context, that value all ways of knowing and being, that cultivate all brilliance and accept all paces of growth. Educational justice it too important to be tied to artificial constructs, especially ones that are also tools of white male hegemony, conformity, and domination.
Asking whether our children are where they should be is a question worthy of multi-faceted investigation — one that involves not just their minds (and especially not just academic part of their minds) but also their social growth, their self-actualization, their well-being and spirit, and their desire to make a difference. Any attempt to answer that question should honor their growth as unique people and the multitudes they contain.
There is big work to do. When we talk about what’s next, we will do better by our children if we leave the concept of grade-level behind, if we eschew efforts to center grade-level in our conversations about and plans for teaching and learning. As a community we will do better if we allow complicated questions to be complicated, to lead to more questions, and to honor the nobler aim of education – that we do best by children when we see them wholly, as fully human, each uniquely teeming with brilliance. It is time to stop entertaining the leopards at the cost of doing something meaningful for children.
Notes
1 Consider Sir Ken Robinson in his talk on Changing Education Paradigms (Robinson, 2008):
Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are? It’s like the most important thing about them is their date of manufacture. Well I know kids who are much better than other kids at the same age in different disciplines, or at different times of the day, or better in smaller groups than in larger groups, or sometimes they want to be on their own. If you’re interested in the model of learning you don’t start from this production line mentality. [emphasis added] (p. 3).
2 It is important to note that TNTP was founded by Michelle Rhee. Rhee has been a controversial face of the ‘reform’ movement who trafficked in the importance of test scores and advocated for testing-based pay, charters, and vouchers. TNTP has advocated for tying teacher tenure to test scores.
References
Datnow, A. (2019, January). NEPC review: the opportunity myth.
https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/reviews/TTR%20Datnow_1.pdf
Ginsberg, R., & Moye, K. (2019, October). What’s wrong with assigning books – and kids – reading levels. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/is-diary-of-a-wimpy-kid-more-difficult-than-the-grapes-of-wrath-the-flaw-in-reading-levels/2019/10/03/a3190604-9dba-11e9-b27f-ed2942f73d70_story.html
Kendi, I.X. (2016, October 20). Why the achievement gap is a racist idea.
https://www.aaihs.org/why-the-academic-achievement-gap-is-a-racist-idea/
National Assessment of Educational Progress. (2020, December 4). NAEP guides – scale scores and achievement levels. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/guides/scores_achv.aspx
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers.(2010). Common core state standards. Washington, DC: Authors.
NWEA. (2016, February). Linking the Kentucky K-PREP assessments to NWEA MAP growth tests
https://www.nwea.org/content/uploads/2017/01/KY-MAP-Growth-Linking-Study-FEB2016.pdf
NWEA (2020). 2020 NWEA MAP growth normative data overview.
https://teach.mapnwea.org/impl/MAPGrowthNormativeDataOverview.pdf
Robinson, K. (2008, June 16). Changing education paradigms [Address]. RSAnimate, London.
https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/blogs/rsa-lecture-ken-robinson-transcript.pdf
Rosales, J. (2018, April 24). The racist beginnings of standardized testing. NEA.
https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing
Schwanenflugel, P. J., & Knapp, N.F. (2017, February 28). Three myths about “reading levels” and why you shouldn’t fall for them. Psychology Today.
TNTP. (2018). The opportunity myth. https://tntp.org/assets/documents/TNTP_The-Opportunity-Myth_Web.pdf
Vangelova, L. (2015, March 9). Standards: why realizing the full promise of education requires a fresh approach. KQED MindShift.
https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/39612/standards-why-realizing-the-full-promise-of-education-requires-a-fresh-approach
