Dear NUSD Secondary Community,
After the April 16th credit/no credit grading announcement, I received feedback from several secondary community members. These students and parents stated that their or their student’s experience may have been overlooked in our solution and have requested that NUSD consider their perspective in the grading policy decision for the Spring of 2020. The NUSD Board of Trustees and I hear this message. This decision is being made in alignment with our commitment to create an inclusive and responsive culture of caring for all students.
Our decision to move to credit/no credit was not made lightly or in isolation. The Board was informed and updated as we moved through the process. Teachers and administrators were informally included in the process. As we faced mounting pressure to achieve clarity for our teachers and students, this process was not as prolonged as we would have all preferred. We have come to the conclusion that it will benefit our NUSD community to facilitate a more transparent process that includes greater input from the community and that further includes and educates our Board of Trustees.
At the end of this document you will find a link to a survey that should take you no more than a couple of minutes. We hope that, regardless of your feelings about the credit/no credit decision, you will respond to this survey by midnight on Wednesday, April 29. By completing the survey, you will give us important data to help inform our decision and we will appreciate a few minutes of your time.
A committee of secondary teachers, site administrators, student trustees, and district office administrators will study a number of resources including the survey results. The committee’s goal is to make a recommendation to the Board of Trustees on May 5, 2020, regarding secondary grading for the Spring of 2020 that is anchored in NUSD’s community values. If the committee is able to reach consensus around a grading recommendation, that recommendation will be presented to the community on Friday, May 1, and brought to Trustees for consideration on May 5. If the committee is unable to reach consensus, I will share my recommendation and the areas keeping us from achieving consensus.
If you are interested, I am including some of the information that will be shared with the committee.
- NUSD’s Vision and Values
- ABC 7 Interview With UC Admissions Official and Others
- CDE Guidance on Grading
- NUSD Equity Imperative
- Tamalpais Union High School District Decision
- San Rafael City Schools Decision
- Interview with Denise Pope, Ph.D., Stanford Lecturer and Co-Founder of Challenge Success, Joe Feldman, Ed.M., Founder of Crescendo Education Group, Stacy Caldwell, M.A., M.B.A., Executive Director or Mastery Transcript Consortium, and Randall Booker, Superintendent of Piedmont Unified School District.
Thank you to everyone who has reached out to me on this topic, regardless of whether you support credit/no credit or you do not. These are challenging and unprecedented times, I have every confidence that our decision making in NUSD will always keep our students and the needs of our community at the heart of our actions.
https://bit.ly/NUSDSecondaryGrading
Sincerely,
Kris Cosca