Establishing Consistent Standards-Based Grading Throughout Your School

Picture this: You’re packing up at the end of the school day when Marco, a history teacher down the hall, steps into your room. He says that because your students are allowed to redo assessments, he’s fielding the same requests in his class, too. Marco insists he doesn’t have time to grade extra tests and worries that the practice rewards laziness.

You explain that you only allow retakes when current scores don’t reflect proficiency and that you save time by not grading practice work. Marco is intrigued: “But if practice isn’t for points,” he asks, “why would students bother doing it?” The conversation between you and Marco connects to a larger problem: When a school has varying grading policies, confusion ensues for students.

With over 35 years of combined secondary classroom experience—and additional roles in school and district leadership—we have encountered this situation many times while supporting teachers and administrators. Standards-based, equity-focused grading can exist in a single classroom, but its impact is limited when it remains an isolated experiment, rather than a shared direction. A better method is to align an entire school around clear standards, so that grades begin to carry consistent meaning across classrooms. This in turn strengthens equity, eases tensions among staff, improves instruction, empowers learners, and helps report cards function as trustworthy indicators of what students actually know and can do.

The challenge for teacher leaders and building administrators is sparking and sustaining interest in schoolwide, standards-based grading. The encouraging news, drawn from our work with educators around the country, is that there are many paths toward building schoolwide consistency.

Creating Teacher-Led, Administration-Supported Change

A common theme we’ve discovered is that enduring grading reform rarely comes from a memo. It sticks when teachers shape the vision, language, and day-to-day expectations for how grades will work at a school. When teachers see their own questions—as well as their students’ questions and insights—reflected in a grading plan, then they are more likely to experiment, share what they learn, and stay with the work when it gets hard.

At the same time, schoolwide grading changes don’t happen because of teacher energy alone. Administrators play a crucial role: They protect collaboration time, provide targeted professional learnings, reaffirm a long-term commitment to equity, and encourage an alignment with preexisting priorities. By positioning teachers as the drivers of these reforms, school leaders can leverage grassroots innovation with strategic, system-level support in mutually reinforcing ways.

Don’t Start From Scratch—Use Existing Structures

The majority of teachers are no longer isolated behind their classroom doors; most already meet in teams, departments, and professional learning communities (PLCs). Grading reform is more likely to succeed when it fits within these existing structures and staff meetings, rather than being added on top of them. One way to make space for grading reform is to move routine announcements and logistical updates to emails and shared documents.

As a result, more in‑person time can be spent on analyzing student work, refining shared assessments, and aligning grading practices. Shared spaces allow for group book studies, conversations about grading, and focused inquiry on questions such as “What do our grades mean?” and “How do our grades connect to standards?” The aim is to keep the work manageable, rooted in daily practice, and oriented toward schoolwide understanding.

The same groups can also take on concrete tasks. For example, a department might kick off grading reform by agreeing on the most important standards and sketching out how they build from one course or grade level to the next. From there, the department can design common rubrics that clarify proficiency indicators and prompt substantive talks about expectations and grading, while simultaneously empowering students to set their own learning goals. And PLC members can work together to better align their existing, common assessments with essential standards. They might consider holding calibration sessions, which promote consistent and fair analysis and scoring.

Aligning standards, rubrics, and norming assessments takes time, but through collaboration, the lift for each educator is ultimately reduced. Collective endeavors help individual educators become more enthusiastic, rather than burn out in isolation.

Teachers can also collaborate on a shared bank of alternative assessments for retakes, so no single teacher has to shoulder the burden of designing opportunities for students to demonstrate proficiency. To ensure equitable student access, teachers and administrators can schedule dedicated time during the school day for retake preparation, tutoring, and reassessments. Alternatively, teacher teams can set up weekly rotations during lunchtime where they open their classrooms for retakes, with prior-course students serving as peer tutors.

Additionally, collaborative teams can experiment with more equitable and accurate ways of summarizing learning, so that schools diverge from the traditional and inequitable practice of averaging scores. The goal is to emphasize where students finish, not where they start. Teachers might prioritize the most recent test scores, or sustained performance over several assessments, or a decaying average that gives greater weight to later evidence of learning. By comparing results, sharing student work, and discussing the advantages and drawbacks of each grading approach, teams can select methods that best reflect growth while still maintaining clarity and rigor for students and families.

Moving From Individual Innovation to Collective Direction

When schools treat grading reform as a team effort rather than a solo project, individual innovators become catalysts instead of outliers. To help their colleagues, early adopters who are already experimenting with standards-based grading can share assessment designs, outcome data, and student reflections about new practices. These teachers’ classrooms become “test kitchens” that inform schoolwide thinking instead of remaining as isolated exceptions.

As more teachers talk openly within teams, departments, and staff meetings about what their grades are supposed to communicate, patterns start to surface. Colleagues notice where expectations align, where they differ, and where students are receiving mixed messages. Over time, these conversations make it easier to name common standards, calibrate proficiency levels, and move toward a shared picture of how evidence of learning should show up in grading across the school. Standards-based and equity-focused grading eventually becomes part of the school’s culture—not a compliance task—making change more likely to endure.