what would you do if you had a copy of Thomas Paine's COMMON SENSE in 1774 and you were on Linked In? Wouldn't you want to share it? That's what Scott Looney's presentation did to me. "This is a start of a revolution." I hope you will go to TINYURL.com/NoGradesSite and learn more

1. Colleagues.
I stumbled on a project (listed in HundrED.org) called the Mastery Transcript.
https://twitter.com/HundrEDorg/status/931774724811653121
See the full presentation by Scott Looney (head of Hawken school in Clevelend).
TINYURL.com/NoGradesScott
Here are highlights that got me started thinking. Please note especially the
following points:
- 1897 Mt Holyoke starts A to F grading
- Max Meyer's Science article blasts the lack of reliability in the grading
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/28/712/243
The skills that Looney describes are also described by Tony Wagner, Harvard at “seven survival skills
Tony Wagner” (his website).
Wagner advocates digital portfolios, and Looney’s presentation highlights how each microcredit is a dot
that is CLICKABLE to reveal the work that supports the credit.
https://pathbrite.com/blog/tony-wagner-the-single-most-important-thing-you-can-do-tomorrow-is-have-e
very-student-establish-a-digital-portfolio
"​The single most important thing you could do
tomorrow for little to no money is have every student
establish a digital portfolio where they collect their
best work as evidence of their skills. Where they’re
working with their teachers and other adults to
present their best work, to iterate their best work, so
that they actually have real progress they can show."
Tony Wagner Search "tony wagner seven survival skills" for 21st
Century Skills
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 1

2. Anyone who has read Dennis Littky’s book The Big Picture will see where Scott Looney is headed.
See Littky’s point about “grades don’t matter” (pages 155-158):
Grades are so meaningless. ​Say you’ve got a
kid with a ​C+ average. What does that mean?
Does it mean he’s a ​D+ in science but a ​B+ in
history? Does it mean he’s a really bad
mathematician but a great writer? Does it mean
he can’t read, but pays attention and doesn’t
disrupt the class? It’s wild to me. Then you
have schools that say, “Ooh, now we’ll get a
little more specific.” So they give a kid a 91
rather than an ​A. But it’s the same thing. You
take an English paper and you break it up
mathematically, with 80 points for content, 10
points for grammar, 10 points for thesis
statement . . . and that’s how you get the
number. It’s all false. Even a ​good grade
doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Seymour
Sarason puts it this way, “Now look, just
because a child has a normal body temperature
that doesn’t mean he’s not sick.”
Grades are totally subjective, too. ​If the
assignment was to build a ladder to the moon
and a kid got halfway there, would you give her
an ​F​ for lack of follow-through, or an ​A​ for
perseverance and building a 120,000-mile
ladder?
Alfie Kohn has done a great job demonstrating
how grades have been scientifically proven to
reduce students’ interest in the learning itself,
reduce students’ preference for challenging
tasks, and reduce the quality of students’
thinking.​2 ​Despite all of this evidence, schools
continue to emphasize the importance and
validity of grading.
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 2

3. I remember one day, during the first year of The
Met, when Lori stood up at her exhibition and
told the audience that she had read one book
that quarter. ​One book? Feeling a little
embarrassed, I put my head down, and while it
was down, I heard Lori say that it was the first
book she had ever finished in her life. She was
15 years old.
It blew me away, because this was a kid who
was getting ​As and ​Bs before she came to us.
But she had never finished an entire book
because she didn’t have to. She got good
grades regardless. If she needed to write a
book report, she saw the movie or read the first
and last chapters, and that was “enough.” Lori
put as much effort into the reading as her
teachers did into evaluating her reading. They
didn’t see what she was missing, and she didn’t
tell them.
I have been trying to get rid of grades my whole
career. Unfortunately, in the United States,
trying to get rid of grades is like trying to get us
to embrace the metric system. People just don’t
want to change. You can hand a parent this
long, beautiful, narrative description of their
kid’s progress and status, and they will turn
around and say, “But how is he doing compared
to the other kids?” or “But does he get an ​A?”
That’s how we’ve been programmed. At Thayer,
my effort to do away with grades was met with
so much resistance that I gave up the idea and
went for a compromise instead. We kept
grades, but added narratives as well. In fact, for
parent-teacher conferences, I had the teachers
discuss the child for a half hour ​before they
pulled out the report card. In my experience,
once a parent sees the letters on the report
card, they stop listening. If their kid got an ​A,
they’re happy and they’re ready to leave. If their
kid got an ​F, they’re pissed off at you and at the
kid, and most aren’t going to hear anything
else.
We avoided all of this at The Met by deciding
from the beginning that we wouldn’t give
grades. At the end of each quarter, every kid is
evaluated through a one- to two-page narrative
written by his or her advisor. Having a culture
where narratives replace report card grades is
in line with our philosophy of one student at a
time. ​To write a narrative, you’ve got to really
look at the student. ​It is easy to write down a
single letter for a kid you barely know—but it
tells that kid, and his parents, that you don’t
have any need or desire to get to know him
better.
At The Met, we use narratives not to rank
students or compare them to each other, but to
help each student understand what he or she
must do to meet his or her own learning goals
and needs. In other words, when a teacher
reads a student’s paper, she is not reading it to
mark the student’s progress in relation to a
predetermined set of activities and goals, but to
actually figure out what those activities and
goals ​should be for that student. When you say
you want to get rid of grades, some people
think you want to get rid of standards
altogether. It’s the exact opposite. Using
narratives really forces schools to look more
closely at each student’s accomplishments and
gaps. The standards are determined in a really
personalized way by developing an
individualized learning plan, with goals and
indicators of achievement for each student.
Then it’s a matter of evaluating that student in a
real-world way: ​assessing the student’s
progress as it compares to what he or she
will need in order to succeed in college and
in life. ​When you think about it, you can’t hold
students to any standard higher than that. Yes,
evaluating students through narratives is very
hard to do. And it’s very time-consuming.
Narratives are hard because they force the
teacher to understand a kid’s life. He or she has
to think about how to describe the way the kid
gets along with adults, the kid’s attitude toward
learning, his work habits, and the gaps in skills
and knowledge he needs to fill. Those are really
hard things to describe. It’s also true that when
you’re writing narratives every quarter, it can be
tough to say something new about each kid
every time. For example, you don’t want to say
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 3

4. for 16 narratives in a row that the kid’s grown
and she’s got “a great attitude.”
Narrative format is important here, because if
it’s designed right, it forces the teacher to go
deeper: for example, to define growth and
describe what he or she means by “a great
attitude.” Part of our Met narratives describes
what the kid has actually done in terms of work,
but the rest analyzes this work in terms of the
school’s learning goals (see Chapter 5, page
103), the teacher’s individualized goals for the
kid, the kid’s goals for himself or herself, and
the family’s goals for the kid.
A kid might walk into the school and be a great
speaker, but as that kid’s teacher, you’ve got to
be able to tell her how she can get even better.
No narrative should be the same from quarter
to quarter or from kid to kid. This is why “one
student at a time” is so important. There might
be a kid who enrolled in your school barely able
to read, but who has worked his butt off and
made great strides. If you compared him
against one standard and used grades, you’d
give him an ​F. But, if you compared him to
himself and used a narrative, you’d be writing
about where he’s improved and giving him
concrete guidance on how to improve more. Of
course, parents should know that their high
schooler is not yet ready to read a college-level
text or that he is not yet able to do the kind of
writing he’ll need to do later in school and in life.
A narrative is not meant to make every
child look good, but to evaluate him or her
realistically and through a broader lens.
The narrative is a tool to help learning. ​If the
kid’s really messing up and needs a reality
check, then the narrative will be more critical. If
you’ve been saying something over and over
again in the classroom and the kid isn’t hearing
you, the narrative is where you put it in writing.
And ​the narrative is ​not evaluation for
evaluation’s sake. ​It’s evaluation with a
purpose, and one of the challenges is making
sure that it leads to something real. Maybe you
need to tell the kid that he is lacking in certain
areas; when you’re writing the narrative, if you
don’t phrase this just right, you risk distancing
the parents and decreasing the kid’s motivation
to learn more. So the question becomes, how
do you write what is accurate, but also continue
to push the learning?
Met advisors struggle with this question every
quarter. Here is an example of an actual
narrative, one that I think really demonstrates
the right kind of balance between evaluation
and motivation:
Excerpt from the Met narrative of a third-quarter 9th
grader
Adjustment to the Met: During this past quarter, Michelle
has adjusted to the rhythm of the Met week, which
alternates between school and LTI. Though Michelle still
struggles with the freedoms afforded her at The Met, I
believe that she is making an effort to improve. She still
needs to understand the meaning of the word “no” and
understand that although The Met is a flexible place, there
are certain things that are simply non-negotiable. She
often gets frustrated and begins to get an attitude when
she is told that she cannot do something precisely when
she wants to do it. She needs to learn to think before
asking for something—that is, she should begin to
understand by herself what is reasonable and what is not.
But, with all this said and done, it really should be noted
that I have seen an incredible improvement in her
behavior—her attitude is much better and she is making
an effort to control her temper.
I want to mention here that, like Michelle’s
narrative, all of our 9th graders’ narratives talk
about their adjustment to The Met. With way too
many kids in this country dropping out while still
in their freshman year, this transition period
from middle to high school is important in
determining a kid’s success in high school and
beyond.​3 ​Even though everyone knows how
important it is for a kid to adjust to the high
school learning environment, do you see
“adjustment” on any traditional school report
cards? No. You also rarely see report cards that
talk about the kid’s personal growth. Or about
her time management skills. Or about whether
or not she is becoming an independent learner.
These are all real-world things that we deem
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 4

5. extremely important in employees. Don’t most
employees get write-ups or evaluations with
comments like, “She doesn’t hand things in on
time” or “She works well in a team”? These are
the same things that we look at in our kids at
The Met. And we try to give them the same kind
of feedback they would get in the real world.
Another example:
Excerpt from the Met narrative of a third-quarter 10th
grader
Overview: Barry is an absolute pleasure to have in the
advisory. He is still a stabilizing force—respected,
respectful, and never complaining. Watching his growth
this year has been amazing. . . . He is easygoing and so
easy to work with. As a result of his success at his
internship, his confidence has grown—not only as a
student, but also in his ability to admit to problems that he
is having with work. He no longer tries to find excuses,
which is really wonderful to see. If Barry just continues to
make progress as he has been making, he will keep
tapping his great potential and his results will be
astounding. It’s an exciting thought.
Of course, the narratives also focus on the
student’s development of specific essential
skills. We note and follow their progress in
areas like mathematics, computer programs
(PowerPoint, Excel, and so forth), and research
skills. We also assess skills relevant to the
student’s internship:
Excerpt from the Met narrative of a fourth-quarter 10th
grader
Overview: Toby’s fourth-quarter project was a continuation
of her third-quarter project: establish and maintain a
school aquarium, then teach a team of people proper
maintenance and the scientific reasons behind the
maintenance. She created a list of research-framing
questions, set out a timetable for research, and bought pH
paper to test common substances around the house, but
did not follow through on her experiment or her reading for
investigation. She has a basic understanding of pH, but,
as yet, it is not connected to her project work.
So there’s a little sample of what narratives
written by people who really know the students
can say both ​about those kids and ​to those
kids, their parents, and anyone else who reads
them. The alternative approach, of course, is to
have teachers sit at home at the end of the
quarter and add up meaningless numbers to
come up with meaningless letters. That is so
sad to me. And such a waste of a teacher’s
talent and energy.
YOU CAN SEE more of Littky’s book at
TINYURL.com/Littkychapter1 and hear the interview on NPR
at TINYURL.com/LittkyRadio
But I digress…. ​The main point of Looney’s presentation is “it didn’t always this
way.” There was a time before grades. The big shift began in the USA in 1897.
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 5

6. Mount Holyoke….
And people did not listen to Max Meyer (I want to track down more of his article in Science from 1908)
This must be a remarkable article… and Bravo to Scott Looney for finding this
early critique of grading. (now I have to figure out how to find back issues of
Science….)
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 6

7. If you are a fan of Alfie Kohn’s writing, this is nothing new. You can see more of Kohn’s work at his
blog AlfieKohn.com Follow him on Twitter ​https://twitter.com/alfiekohn
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 7

8. This is a particularly difficult passage to read… since there is little doubt that
procedures that are typical in traditional schools are causing hurt. School is
hurting kids..
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 8

9. Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 9

10. So, that’s what Scott Looney is offering… a new model.
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 10

11. This is similar to the Big Picture Learning model (where a teacher acts as advisor and students build
8-week projects)
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 11

12. How cool is this!? The tags are related to a list of skills, which is viewable at a press announcement on
the Cleveland Plain Dealer website. Search “Cleveland plain dealer no grades transcript scott
looney” ​https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2017/05/private_high_schools_including.html
As a teacher, I can imagine starting a system tomorrow. I just need a list of skills and I can
communicate to students “Hey, you did well on this. You made the effort to communicate.”
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 12

13. This list of skills is similar to the list that Tony Wagner has made popular.
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 13

14. The MTC is making it clear that many of these slides are “a work in progress”
Looney clearly meets his goal of making the transcript (see the next page) easily
understood in under 2 minutes. It is clear that this kid Alexander has a few
areas where he is strong (decision making and leadership) and several courses
(ten credits to go in communication and research and global issues) before he
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 14

15. can graduate.
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 15

16. The red oval shows where to look. A college admission officer can click and see comments by
teachers.
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 16

17. The timeline makes it difficult to reach parents who have high schoolers… but
how about parents with kids in elementary school? The ten years from now,
there might be kids (who are currently in elementary school) who will be in a
class where the teacher is at least experimenting with “a focus on skills” instead
of grades.
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 17

18. JOIN ME IN CLICKING.
Why not visit ​ TINYURL.com/noGradesImagine?​ See Scott Looney’s “Imagine a Transcript” video.
Why not take two minutes and click to join the Mastery.org newsletter?
Why not spend another two minutes sharing links to the videos?
How about clicking “LIKE” on Facebook and Twitter (follow)?
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 18

19. Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 19

20. Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 20

21. Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 21

22. Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 22

23. Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 23

24. What is next?
Sign up for their newsletter ​http://mastery.org/stay-connected/newsletter/
https://twitter.com/MastTranscript​ follow the Mastery on Twitter
Sow support by clicking “like” on some of their videos TINYURL.com/NoGradesImagine
Just view a video TINYURL.com/NoGradesVideo.
Share the links. Spread this idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Osrg6wqGZKc
If you learn more from this presentation, send me your comments. How can we get this idea to
spread? Steve (954) 646 8246
Spread this idea. Scott Looney’s idea has legs. TINYURL.com/noGradesVideo 24