Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

Earlier this month, The Washington Post’s Moriah Balingit and Donna St. George opened up a large debate by asking the question, is it becoming too hard to fail? Their article discussed how schools are shifting toward no-zero grading policies as a way to focus a student’s grade on what they know and are able to do rather than to use grades as a means to motivate or punish students for their academic behavior.   Balingit and St. George highlighted large school districts like Virginia’s Fairfax County and Maryland’s Prince George’s County that have created policies to make 50 the lowest possible failing grade. In his book Fair Isn’t Always Equal: Grading and Assessing in the Differentiated Classroom , former Fairfax County teacher turned educational speaker and author Rick Wormeli offers this strategy as one way to level the playing field and make a failing grade carry an equal weight to any other grade in the 100 point grading scale. His argument is that in the current scale,

Just a few short years ago, it was considered a luxury for a school to have enough technology devices to be able to assign one to each student for use in the classroom and often at home. This model is commonly referred to as a one to one technology program. With each passing year, the cost of moving a school to a one to one model has come down considerably. According to CNBC, today nearly half of all classroom devices sold are a Google Chromebook . Chromebooks make up 4.4 million of the 8.9 million devices sold to schools and school districts K-12. To put it in perspective, this means that on average, 30,000 new Chromebooks are activated in schools each school day. This news comes as no surprise because today’s Chromebooks can be purchased for under $200 and are some of the most robust, durable devices on the market with excellent battery and shelf lives. This purchase price comes at a considerable savings for school districts that would otherwise rely on printed textbooks f