Recent data published by the Fordham Institute suggests that teachers want to revisit “equitable” grading practices.
What is “equitable” grading?
“Equitable” grading arises from mastery-based grading practice, which has been discussed in the educational world for some time. Mastery-based learning is an individually-based method of instruction that values blended instruction and self-pacing over a structured lecture-based schedule. One example of a grading practice from this school of thought would be unlimited test retakes. After all, a student might be absent on certain days or simply struggle to understand the material. Instead of a poor grade that might destroy their confidence in class, giving them the opportunity to study again and pass the test ensures that they will ultimately understand the material and move forward as a confident student. Similarly, this school of thought would argue that penalizing a student for late work only serves to destroy their confidence.
(Mastery-based learning has many variations. For example, when I taught previously, my school’s policy was that a student could retake any test, and then the student’s first and second test grades would be averaged. While this increased my workload, I found that it had excellent student results.)
Over the past half-decade or so, mastery-based grading practices transformed into “equitable” grading theories, which rose to strong prominence during the days of COVID-19. The main concern behind the push for “equitable” grading practices was the desire to remove racist biases from the classroom. Proponents of the movement point to studies that suggest that teachers grade according to racial biases and large racial achievement gaps to argue that systemic bias impacts student grades. To this end, some grading reformers suggested that extra credit be eliminated or that written submissions be graded anonymously.
In 2018, Joe Feldman — a former teacher turned professional education consultant — completed a book entitled “Grading for Equity.” He used mastery-based theories of education and added one key innovation: the idea that grading reform could also create more racially equitable academic outputs for students.
During COVID-19, many schools struggled to adapt their grading policies to a digital, asynchronous landscape. The spring of 2020, which held both the killing of George Floyd and a global pandemic, created a perfect storm of educators that were looking to address racial disparities and avoid a catastrophic number of failing grades. Feldman credits this spring as the moment that, seemingly overnight, elevated his ideas to a national movement and elevated him into a very-in-demand rockstar teacher consultant.
“Equitable” grading does not require teachers to take students’ races into account while assigning grades. Instead, the component of “equity” comes from a belief that a grade should only reflect a student’s final understanding of course content, not other factors such as attendance, behavior, homework, or late work. The argument is that students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds may not be able to fulfill obligations such as homework due to factors outside of their control. Empathy and flexibility are the highest values within “equitable” grading.
Encouraged by pandemic-era concerns, schools across the country adopted “equitable” grading practices. Survey data suggests that about one half of American teachers say that their school or district has adopted at least one “equitable” grading policy. While not enough research has been conducted to fully illuminate the precise number of schools, “equitable” grading has been encouraged by many states. School districts in large cities like New York, Boston, L.A., San Diego and states like Maine, Oregon, and our own Minnesota have promoted “equitable” grading.
The Fordham Institute has identified five major practices connected with “equitable” grading across the nation. These are:
- No Zeros—Mandates that teachers assign a minimum grade of 50 percent (or something similar) for missed assignments or failed tests.
- No Late Penalties—Gives students the right to turn assignments in late without penalty.
- Unlimited Retakes—Gives students the right to retake tests/quizzes without penalty.
- No Homework—Prohibits teachers from including homework assignments in a student’s final grade.
- No Participation—Prohibits teachers from basing any part of a student’s grade on class participation.
The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE)’s recommendations for school districts also include the elimination of 1-100 grading scales in favor of 5 point grading scales, the elimination of grades connected to behavior, the elimination of grades connected to in-process learning (i.e. classroom activities), and the removal of extra credit in favor of unlimited retakes and redos.
(Interestingly, Feldman is close to the heart of Minnesota educators. Feldman’s book was cited seven times out of the sixteen total research citations found in MDE’s equitable grading recommendation. He recently facilitated an Equity Institute meeting, a three-day grading workshop with a $975 registration fee, for teachers in St. Paul. )
What do teachers think?
While teachers care deeply about the success of students of all races, recent data from the Fordham Institute appears to show that they are frustrated with the tactic of “equitable” grading.
Many teachers are familiar with the practice. About one half of American teachers say that their school or district has adopted at least one “equitable” grading practice, with more than a third (36 percent) saying that their schools have adopted more than one. At least a quarter of teachers say their school or district has adopted each of the three most common “equitable” grading policies—Unlimited Retakes, No Late Penalties, and No Zeros.
The Fordham Institute notes
Upon closer inspection, those top three policy changes are particularly common at the middle school level, where about two-fifths of teachers report that their school or district has adopted each of them (Figure 4). Moreover, No Zeros policies are particularly common in schools where most pupils are students of color. For example, about 55 percent of teachers in majority-minority middle schools say their school or district has some variant of No Zeros, suggesting a propensity among policymakers to lower standards for non-white students.
The majority of teachers (81%) stated that they believe the No Zeroes policy is harmful to academic engagement, with one teacher noting that the policy is nicknamed the “grifty fifty.” Significantly, this critique was universal across almost all teacher demographic lines. Teachers of color, teachers in majority-minority schools, and veteran teachers all say that this policy hurts the students it is designed to help.
Other practices are viewed with more nuance. More than half of teachers (56 percent) say “allowing students to turn in late work with no penalty” (No Late Penalties) is harmful to student engagement. However, teachers are evenly divided when it comes to “allowing students to retake tests with no penalty” (Unlimited Retakes).
In response to this question, teachers debated the practical advisability of the Unlimited Retakes practice. While some positive outcomes arose for students, teachers found that it affected their classroom culture and their workload.
One argued, “Students are allowed to turn in work at any point in the school year with zero penalty, which removes the incentive for students to ever turn work in on time, and then it becomes difficult to pass back graded work because of cheating.”
Another noted the additional burdens on the teacher. “I like the idea of students being able to edit/improve their work based on feedback from the teacher. However, if they do not have deadlines or policies in place to encourage them to try their best the first time, teachers will have to grade almost every assignment more than once.”
A third took a nuanced approach. “Allowing retakes without penalty encourages a growth mindset, but it also promotes avoidance and procrastination.”
Finally, the majority of teachers say that basing part of a student’s grade on participation or homework is helpful to academic engagement. Many courses, especially advanced courses at the high school level, cannot complete a year’s worth of material without students completing some study at home. Homework grades can encourage students to complete their assignments.
In summary, the findings seem to suggest that the majority of teachers do not support No Zeroes policies and No Late Penalty policies. The majority of teachers also want to be able to base part of a student’s grade on both participation and homework. However, the jury is still out on whether or not Unlimited Retakes policies work well for teachers in practice.
Most teachers reject the current trends within grading reform. The Fordham Institute writes
When given the choice between “reforming grading to be fairer to students with disadvantages” and grading policies that set “high expectations for everyone,” an overwhelming majority of teachers (71 percent) chose the latter… Moreover, many of teachers’ open responses suggest that in practice, there is a trade-off between high expectations and fairness, although the two aren’t necessarily in conflict.
So, teachers have strong opinions about how students should be graded. Does their expertise in the classroom translate to power over the gradebook? How much autonomy do teachers have over their own classroom?
Many teachers reported that they strongly felt administrative pressure to give high grades to students. Survey data suggests that most administrators preferred high, rather than low, student grades.
This is perhaps unsurprising: the weight of endless behavioral paperwork and vitriolic parent pushback to low grades affects administrators heavily.
Grading reforms, then, must come from strong administrators like principals and superintendents.
A Case Study: Rochester School District, Minnesota
In 2020, then-Superintendent Michael Muñoz implemented “Grading for Learning” in the Rochester school district, an “equitable” grading policy that allowed for unlimited quiz retakes and did not count participation or homework towards a student’s grade. Rochester was one of the first, and most visible, districts in the nation to pioneer the policies.
Munoz had previously been concerned about racial disparities in school discipline referrals and had created initiatives to provide additional deescalation training. In 2017, he faced community pushback for refusing to provide individual school data regarding which programs were implemented in each school and what the resulting discipline referral rate was.
Equitable discipline and racial discipline disparities have been newsworthy items in Minnesota for some time. In 2016, St. Paul superintendent Valeria Silva was fired after equitable discipline initiatives led to unacceptable levels of student violence, including a teacher who suffered brain damage after being beaten by a student in their own classroom.
Rochester has historically been a school district plagued with issues. In 2023, the school faced a heavy budget shortfall, in part because previous administrators hired staff at a faster rate than enrollment. At the time, the Mayo Clinic gifted Rochester $10 million to avoid significant redistricting issues related to the shortfall. (After Kent Pekel started as superintendent in 2021, the district cut more than $20 million from its budget.) Student discipline problems remained high in 2024. And, as of 2025, an advocacy group filed a civil rights suit against the district, alleging discrimination on the basis of race directed towards white teachers.
Superintendent Kent Pekel took over the Rochester position a year after “Grading for Learning” (in 2021), and immediately began to see that the policies eroded student effort and accountability in Rochester. He said that many students were, unfortunately,
Deciding that basic levels of effort were not necessary – because it wasn’t going to show up in their GPA and they never got the very recognizable symbol of an ‘F’ – there was a subset of kids who were seeing that possibility as a reason not to meet some level of basic requirements.
Teachers like Jake Johnson, a high-school math teacher in Rochester, were initially eager to attempt the “equitable” grading initiatives. Yet, the Wall Street Journal reports that
[Johnson] quickly ran into practical challenges. When students realized they could retake tests as often as they wanted, they began putting off studying, Johnson said. As the year went on, students fell behind….Many [teachers] came to resent it, Johnson and others said. Teachers had to grade and regrade assignments, and even create new work for students to retake. “It was really toxic. It was really bad for student learning,” Johnson said.
Pekel had attended graduate school with Feldman, but he grew suspicious that the “equitable” grading method worked. “People in Rochester kept describing him as a researcher and it as research,” Pekel said. “It’s really more theory than it is research.”
In 2023, Pekel adjusted Rochester’s steering wheel. The district no longer mandates unlimited retakes, and teachers can now base up to 30% of their grade on in-class and at-home participation.
Some initiatives remain. Students are given a ten-day window in which they are allowed to retake any summative assessment (test), with the highest score included in the gradebook. Attendance and some extra credit activities are not permitted to be considered in a student’s final grade.
How have these changes impacted Rochester?
In regards to Pekel’s changes, Rochester educators and administrators expressed 65 percent and 70 approval rates, respectively.
Academic changes in Rochester have been slow, with test scores roughly mapping onto Minnesota’s wider trends of academic decline. In 2021, students testing at or above proficiency in the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment was low, with Math at 40.1 percent, Reading at 51.4 percent, and Science at 39.6 percent. (Testing was not conducted in 2020, when “Grading for Learning” was implemented.) In 2025, after three years of “equitable” grading policies and two years of Pekel’s modifications, students saw slight improvements in Math (41.7 percent testing at or above grade level) and slight reductions in Reading (47.8 percent). Science test scores are not yet available for the 2025 school year, due to a change in assessment practices.
According to North Star Data, the racial achievement gap in Rochester has recently shrunk in reading, but not in math. In 2021, white students testing at or above proficiency saw Math scores at 49.4 percent and Reading scores at 60.7 percent. In the same year, black students testing at or above proficiency saw Math scores at 14.2 percent and Reading at 30 percent.
In 2025, white students testing at or above proficiency saw Math scores at 52.1 percent and Reading at 58.5 percent. In the same year, black students testing at or above proficiency saw Math scores at 20.2 percent and Reading at 28.4 percent.
In summary, over the 21-25 period, Rochester’s black students saw strong math gains and white students saw moderate math gains. Black and white students saw minor and proportional reading losses.
While teachers welcomed Pekel’s grading reforms, more long-term data from Rochester will need to arise before efficacy verdicts can arise.
Conclusions
Historically, America enjoys educational movements. In the late 1960s, researcher Ken Goodman offered the “cueing theory” of reading — the idea that students should learn to read by utilizing context clues and guessing, rather than methodically proceeding to decode a word via phonics. The theory shot him to educational icon status and dramatically reshaped the American educational landscape. Today, the theory has been scientifically disproven, but the practices still remain in many classrooms. Unsurprisingly, literacy rates in America have continued to decline.
It’s not surprising that “equitable” grading gained such immediate traction after the divisive spring of 2020. To their deep credit, educators and administrators have a mandate to ensure that minority children achieve excellence. The argument from educational consultants like Feldman strongly suggested that educators could achieve both racial equity and pandemic-era graciousness towards students with the simple adoption of the recommended “equitable” grading practices.
Has the solution to racial inequality been that simple? It remains to be seen. In Rochester, and in other schools around the country, many reforms have been discarded because administrators believe they simply do not allow for the successful function of an academic environment.
(Interestingly, the rhetoric presented by many of the rejectors of “equitable” grading sidesteps the discussion of race entirely. Many administrators chalk the changes up to COVID – related pressures, not theory-based attempts at racial equity.)
It’s helpful to evaluate each proposed grading change on its own merits, rather than make generalizations of the whole. For example, the teachers surveyed by Fordham overwhelmingly disliked no zeroes policies, but showed that a state of professional debate was present in regards to unlimited retake policies.
Administrators, too, must take their foot off the gas pedal. Teachers feel intense administrative pressure to inflate students’ grades and pass them to the next grade level. “Equitable” grading policies can provide a smokescreen for administrators to bully teachers into passing students in the guise of promoting racial equity. In 2025, Minnesota welcomed the largest graduating high school class on record — amid similarly record-breaking low national assessment scores. Children of all colors deserve an educational system that honors, challenges, and encourages them, not one that pushes them through grades regardless of their actual level of academic attainment.
Some simple policies that are proven to reduce racial bias address long-held concerns of grading reformers. The practices of grading papers anonymously, adhering to strict rubrics, and prohibiting extra credit for bringing in items to class (like school supplies) are all straightforward reforms that should shape best practices for educators.
Minnesota’s teachers care deeply about the success of the black, white, American Indian, Hmong, Hispanic, Asian, Somali, immigrant (and all other) students. They should be free to pursue carefully researched grading policies that benefit all of them. More data should be released from the Minnesota Department of Education that transparently shows which districts are using “equitable” grading practices and whether teachers find them to be profitable.