As a younger associate principal in a larger 1970s high school, I commented at a district-wide AP’s meeting that I was concerned that so many students consistently earned D and F grades, and our school would be working to improve student achievement and diminish the number of Ds and Fs. Our director of secondary education halted me with this guidance. “If every student gets good grades, the instruction has lost its rigor.” End of discussion and I fought the urge to throw my pen at him.

Bell-curved thinking consigned some students to low grades on every assessment.

One of the tools taught in my teacher preparation was how to create a normal distribution of student test scores. It was not difficult, just tedious. The result was a plotting of scores on the bell curve to achieve 2.35% of grades as As, 13.5% as Bs, 68% as Cs, 13.5% as Ds, and 2.35% as Fs. This tool was consistent. On every test, I and my students were assured that almost 16% of the class would receive a grade of D or F – every time. Voila! Rigor was ensured.

Further investigation at the time confirmed for me that bell curving was not just standard practice in our school and school district, it was Gospel. Every teacher I worked with did the math and created a normal distribution to curve student grading. Tedious work but it was the expected practice. It did not matter if the assessment or assignment was 100-item multiple choice test, a 10-item true-false quiz, a five-part essay, a speech, or a term paper, the bell curved normal distribution ruled.

Sadly, students and parents accepted this alignment of grades because that is way things were done. If a student studied harder and improved their performance the next time, their grade always was a comparison to all other students not of what they learned and 15% of students received Ds or Fs.

In that high school, I could not convince the principal or my fellow APs that we should buck the system and drop the bell curve.

Autonomy can change practices.

Time passed. As a high school principal, it was much easier to implement changes. Autonomy has its privileges. In the mid-80s I found a group of faculty who were interested in changing their usual practices to achieve different outcomes. Not all faculty were of this mind, but enough to start a new beginning. We attended conferences with Bill Spady on outcome-based education (OBE) and quickly appreciated his dictum that “you get what you settle for.” We were no longer willing to accept that rigorous instruction and learning required some students to fail. Accordingly, we adopted A, B, C, I grading. Grades of Incomplete (I) were assigned instead of Ds or Fs.

This led to a second outcome-based change in our teaching. In a traditional classroom, when a grade of D or F is assigned, learning stops. Teachers and students go on to the next lesson and what was not learned completely or was learned with errors becomes permanent. In contrast, teachers using a grade of Incomplete told themselves and students that both teaching and learning are not complete and will not be until the I becomes an A, B, or C grade. Our cadre of OBE teachers were committed to adjusting their teaching or what would later be labeled as Tier 2 teaching so that all students would achieve an acceptable level of learning.

Change does not happen easily in schools. Traditional faculty in our school held to their traditional grading practices and a cadre of teachers began using OBE concepts of teaching and learning. The cadre studied Grant Wiggins’ and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design. Curricular units were reconstructed so that the curricular outcomes teachers wanted students to achieve drove lesson planning and daily teaching.

Cadre members represented most of the school’s curricular departments and grade levels. When the cadre met, they discussed pedagogy not departmental our grade level issues. They discussed student experiences across subject lines not just within a vertical curriculum. The cadre became increasingly student-focused, especially about the challenges that got in the way of student learning. Some of these challenges were institutional and some were student specific.

Things never came to blows but the contrasting practices were noticed by all faculty, students, and parents. An OBE characteristic that became painfully real was that success begets success. Students in cadre-taught were not failing courses. In successive semesters, and student course registrations trended toward cadre-taught courses. Increased student engagement meant fewer disciplinary referrals. Students and parents wanted out of traditional practices.

Rigor redefined.

After several semesters of cadre work, I asked these teachers to define academic rigor in teaching and learning. They quickly responded with these three points.

• Rigor is setting high quality curricular standards for student learning of content knowledge, academic skills, and dispositions.
• Rigor is designing teaching that causes all students to succeed in achieving these standards. Time is not a limited variable. Adjustment of initial teaching is expected.
• Rigor is accepting multiple ways in which a diverse student group can show the learning of the required outcomes.

Today, several decades of working with other cadre groups, rigor in many classrooms and schools is looking more like an OBE definition than my 1970s director of secondary education. However, Madeline Hunter taught us that in every faculty there will be Ernies. An Ernie, not gender-specific, is a teacher who leans back in a chair saying to self and others “this new discussion of rigor (fill in any other change initiative) will come and go. I do not need to change what I do in my classroom, and no one can make me.” She was right. There are Ernies in every faculty, but the cadres of higher quality teaching and learning are gaining on them.

Getting rigor right is a continuous struggle.

I always hope that lessons learned create new practices. But practices made permanent require little change in the teaching faculty. That is never the case. Forty years later and a new generation of teachers we still battle with the definition of rigor. Too many students receive permanent grades of D or F as educators continue to use D and F grades as a method of labeling student learning. Ds and Fs once again are permanent grades, even with RtI practices.

We have work to do.