Exploring alternatives to grading often means experimenting within one’s own classroom, while translating the outcomes to comply with the larger institution’s reporting requirements. It is rarer to encounter explorations of alternative grading at the level of a program, school, or institution. However, thinking systemically is crucial for creating change that lives beyond the efforts of single heroic instructors.

Lisa Wennerth interviews Mike Flanagan, CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC), a growing group of high schools creating a digital high school transcript that opens up opportunity for each and every student—from all backgrounds, locations, and types of schools—to have their unique strengths, abilities, interests, and histories fostered, understood, and celebrated.

Grading systems are remarkably resistant to rethinking given the vast infrastructure built up around our commonly-accepted approaches to grading. Barry Fishman recounts some of his encounters with both the institutional infrastructure, explaining how systemic inertia makes it difficult to give up the current system.

Arthur Chiaravalli interviews Barry Fishman, professor of Learning Technologies in the University of Michigan School of Information and School of Education. Barry pens the new introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition of Wad-Ja-Get, one of the earliest critical examinations of the effects of grading on student attitudes toward learning.

Although most gradeless teachers engage in “subtraction,” removing traditional grading from our classrooms, we also need “addition” in the form of new infrastructure that connects our individual efforts to the larger systems students must navigate. 

Ben Rein of the Mastery Transcript Consortium explains how the Mastery Transcript has helped a growing network of schools break the endless focus on grades, instead centering students’ unique strengths, stories, and interests.