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Madison School District is phasing out letter grades in high schools, starting at East

Courtney Bell, a UW-Madison professor and director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, said evaluating students on how well they meet specific standards has always been part of the grading process. Although grades might show up differently on report cards now, Bell said standards-based learning dates back to the 1980s.  

“For decades, schools have been using some version of standards-based grading,” Bell said. “In education, we always relabel things and we want to talk about it as bright and shiny and new and different. And rarely, that’s true.”