One Minnesota middle school did away with A-F letter grades. The students have questions.

A group of eight tween girls met Principal Amy Kujawski outside her office on a recent morning and offered their assessment of St. Anthony Middle School's grading system, which no longer offers A-F letter grades.

It's flunking, at least for them.

"I kind of, like, don't fully understand it," said Eliza Chinander, who wanted to know how to move past a "proficient" grade.

That kicked off an hour-long discussion about the "proficiency-based grading" model the middle school switched to two years ago. Instead of As and Bs and Cs, students are now measured from "beginning" to "acquiring" to "proficient" to "exceeding."

The St. Anthony-New Brighton school district plans to expand the model, known as competency-based grading, to its elementary and high schools by next school year. The aim is to emphasize students' display of new skills in grading. That's meant to shift the focus to learning rather than how many points a student needs on the next test to earn a certain letter grade, for example.

"Nobody wants to hear this," said Kujawski, "but years of research suggests that as soon as we put an A+ or an F, the students check out. … They think the learning is over."

Distance learning put a new spotlight on education and exacerbated long-standing learning gaps that, for decades, have led school leaders to try to find better ways to encourage and assess student learning and growth. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, districts across Minnesota and the nation adopted more forgiving grading policies. Some, like Rochester Public Schools, even did away with "Fs" on report cards — a policy that was just repealed in the district last summer.

Though many of the education concepts behind a competency-based teaching and grading model aren't necessarily new, more districts may be exploring the ideas now, said Lars Esdal, who wrote a guide on the model for Minnesota educators. Esdal is the executive director of Education Evolving, a nonprofit pushing for, among other things, better ways to measure and assess student learning.

It's an "oversimplification" to say that student learning fell behind during the pandemic, Esdal said.

"Bits and pieces of learning never actually happened within a particular subject or particular grade," he said. Instead of having students repeat a subject or class, schools embracing competency-based models are searching for ways to help students understand what specific skills they need to learn.

Competency or letter grades?

On a statewide level, the Minnesota Department of Education said it is in "the early stages of examining competency-based and personalized learning practices."

But the districts that are already trying it, like Spring Lake Park Schools, are attracting interest from education leaders from across the nation. Superintendent Jeff Ronneberg said school leaders from Ohio recently came for a tour and to learn more about how the change is going.

Spring Lake Park Schools is in its second year of competency-based grading and still trying to determine the best way to evaluate the new model's success, Ronneberg said. The move is part of a larger district-wide effort to make learning more individualized.

Unlike St. Anthony Middle School, Spring Lake Park Schools kept letter grades that are based on a competency-based formula underneath.

"It's what parents know," Ronneberg said. "It's what kids need if they're going to college. It's baked into society right now."

But getting that grade now involves more projects that ask students to show their learning, said Justine Tschida, a fourth-grade teacher at Park Terrace Elementary in Spring Lake Park.

"It's been a hard shift, but a great one," Tschida said, adding that assessment is more of a "constant conversation" with a student about their learning rather than handing them a bubble-sheet, multiple-choice exam. That takes more teacher time, but has helped her students adopt a "growth mindset instead of a grade mindset," she said.

"Change is slow and scary, but this feels more authentic," Tschida said. "You're never going to take a Scantron assessment in the real world."

Most of the Park Terrace Elementary students don't know the technical terms to describe the way their teachers are teaching or grading. But they know what they like.

"I love that we do projects instead of just sitting and listening to the teacher or taking a test," said fourth-grader Dakota Anderson. "I think I learn more."

Students 'like the idea'

At St. Anthony Middle School, however, the group of eighth-grade girls spent time researching their grading model before the conversation with Principal Kujawski.

She had sent them articles about the rise in mental health troubles among children and teens and the pressure students feel to get top letter grades. And she pointed them to studies suggesting the majority of students aren't motivated by letter grades themselves.

Still, the girls had lingering questions: Why they couldn't earn an A+ like their friends at other schools? How could they explain the significance of a grade of "proficient" or "in progress" to their parents? And what would a non-traditional report card eventually mean for their GPA and college applications?

Kujawski took notes, explained her reasons for supporting the model and thanked the girls for their feedback.

"When I get data like I am today that my system isn't helping, that's feedback I need to hear," she said, adding that as a principal, she spends a lot of time thinking about how to get students to care about their learning.

One of the girls, eighth-grader Ari Houltberg, spoke up.

"That's why I like the idea of what we're doing," she said as her friends nodded along. "But we just think this just needs some tweaks."