It’s 5:00 p.m. on a Friday night, and my phone rings. It’s a close colleague, Bryan, who is a middle school assistant principal. Uh-oh, I think. Given the time of day, I don’t anticipate this to be good news. He starts in, “Ang, I’ve got a good one for ya…” And so the story begins.

Over the past year, Bryan and I had been engaged in some productive dialogue around current grading practices at his site. He was new to his school—just in his second year—and hadn’t been too comfortable with some of his observations of teacher practice. Coupled with complaints from students and parents, he had been trying to determine the reasons for the dissonance between the school’s grading policy—as it lives on paper—and what was actually practiced in classrooms. Read more