Wednesday, October 30, 2019

NOLA Admin’s Book-Cooking, “Fix Your Gradebook” Email: More Teacher Responses | deutsch29

NOLA Admin’s Book-Cooking, “Fix Your Gradebook” Email: More Teacher Responses | deutsch29

NOLA Admin’s Book-Cooking, “Fix Your Gradebook” Email: More Teacher Responses

On October 26, 2019, I posted a piece entitled, “NOLA School Admin’s Book-Cooking, ‘Fix Your Gradebook’ Email.”
That post concerned an email sent by New Orleans-based Abramson Sci Academy’s assistant principal, Whitney, Omosefe, telling a number of teachers that they needed to perform some last-minute adjustments in order to reshape the distribution of their grades in order to produce a distribution favorable to B’s and virtually devoid of D’s and F’s.
From Omosefe’s email, entitled, “Fix Your Gradebook” and dated October 03, 2019:
Because the quarter is almost over, I’m taking a close look at gradebook averages to ensure that teachers remember and meet their gradebook goals. The goal is that 25% of scholars in your course should have an A, 40% should have a B, 25% should have a C, and <10% should have a D/F.
In my original post, I mentioed submitting a public records request to Abramson Sci Academy for Omosefe’s email as well as teacher responses to her email. At the time of my original post, I had not received an acknowledgement of my request.
However, on October 28, 2019, I received a response to my request, which included files for the 27 “fix your gradebook” emails from Omosefe to specific teachers as well as 13 responses from 11 of those teachers (one teacher offered three brief responses).
(Note: Anyone wishing to see these emails may submit a records request to Justin Pickel at prr@collegiateacademies.org.)
In each of Omosefe’s emails to teachers, she included information about the current grade distributions for these teachers’ classes. In most cases, the percentage of students failing was at zero, and most of the students (70% to 90%) had averages of C+ or higher.
Still, these results did not represent the desired grade distribution outcome, so, Omosefe offered suggestions presumably to make students’ grades more CONTINUE READING: NOLA Admin’s Book-Cooking, “Fix Your Gradebook” Email: More Teacher Responses | deutsch29