The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading

Ellen C. Carillo

• Editorial: Utah State University Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781646422678
• Categoría: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoría: Linguistics

Current Arguments in Composition Series

The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading intervenes in the increasingly popular practice of labor-based grading by expanding the scope of this assessment practice to include students who are disabled and multiply marginalized. Through the lens of disability studies, the book critiques the assumption that labor is a neutral measure by which to assess students and explores how labor-based grading contracts put certain groups of students at a disadvantage. Ellen C. Carillo offers engagement-based grading contracts as an alternative that would provide a more equitable assessment model for students of color, those with disabilities, and students who are multiply marginalized.This short book explores the history of labor-based grading contracts, reviews the scholarship on this assessment tool, highlights the ways in which it normalizes labor as an unbiased tool, and demonstrates how to extend the conversation in new and generative ways both in research and in classrooms. Carillo encourages instructors to reflect on their assessment practices by demonstrating how even assessment methods that are designed through a social-justice lens may unintentionally privilege some students over others.

1

Assumptions in Labor-Based Contract Grading

As I suggest in the introduction, the issues I outline with labor-based contract grading are not necessarily within the scope of the important and impressive work that has already been done in this area to help move instructors toward antiracist pedagogies and assessment practices. My aim, then, is to open new pathways for “trying not to be unfair” (Inoue 2019, 11) in our classrooms by drawing attention to the need to expand the scope of the discussion beyond race and language while remaining mindful of how the current focus on race and language can guide us in important ways. While we don’t want to forget the importance of our contemporary context and the racial injustices that we must address, expanding the scope of the discussion allows us to explore populations of students that must be taken into consideration when creating assessments so that we “can ensure equitable and inclusive practices in inherently unfair systems that are by their nature inequitable and exclusive” (Inoue 2019, 11). Looking at some of the assumptions inherent in labor-based contract grading practices lays the foundation for this work.

While grading contracts are often idiosyncratic (Cowan 2020) to individual instructors, Inoue’s labor-based grading contract has captured the field’s attention and incited writing instructors and writing programs across the country to adopt this approach to assessment (e.g., Langston University, University of Connecticut, Texas A&M University-San Antonio, Western Washington University, Humboldt University). Certainly not all labor-based grading contracts will look like the version popularized by Inoue and explored most comprehensively in his book titled Labor-Based Contract Grading: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom, but this version, which has become the exemplar for many in writing studies, will play a major role in my discussion of this assessment practice.

Inoue (2019, 46) explains that labor-based grading contracts are necessary because more common grading schemes that consider the quality of students’ work as opposed to their labor (or in addition to labor) are relying on a single standard of “quality that is determined by a racialized group in power, a White, middle-class group.” He explains further: “Grading by a single standard is how most, if not all, schools and writing classrooms exercise the historical right to exclude in order to protect literacy as White property. . . . Put more directly, in all schools, grades are the means of discrimination, the methods of exclusion, not inclusion, no matter what else we may think they do for our students” (2019, 11). Inoue turns, instead, to labor, which he defines as “the work done in and for a course, that is, the bodily work of reading, writing, and other activities associated with what it takes to engage in a writing course” (2019, 78). Labor seems attractive to Inoue because it is quantifiable while quality is not. “The use of labor-based grading contracts, I believe,” further explains Inoue (2019, 8), “changes the rules of the grading game in such a way that White language supremacy can not only be seen for what it is, but effectively countered. This makes for a fairer, more equitable, and inclusive language classroom.”

In Inoue’s classes, and in any classes that adopt labor-based grading contracts in their purest sense, labor is the sole assessment measure. In these classes, students are often asked to record all of their labor by tracking the number of minutes spent on each task. In Inoue’s classes, estimates of the amount of labor necessary for each task within each assignment are shared with students as part of the assignment: “All labor is quantified in words read or written, and in estimated time a student is expected to spend on the activity, which is also broken up into steps with duration per step also listed” (Inoue 2019, 130).

When labor is quantified in this way, though, labor-based contract grading inaccurately assumes that labor is a neutral measure—or at least that it is less inequitable a measure than quality. The suggestion is that because labor is more easily quantifiable than quality, labor offers a more equitable form of assessment. Underscoring this point, Inoue (2019, 131) notes: “One hour of labor is worth one hour of labor, regardless of the kind of labor you are engaged in during that hour.”

However, while labor-based grading contracts may help mitigate the structural injustices perpetuated on some students by the grading system, unfortunately, these contracts perpetuate injustices for other students. These contracts enforce a White, middle-class, and, most important for my purposes, normative, ableist, and neurotypical conception of labor. Consider, for example, who is at the center of this grading philosophy, the contracts themselves, or even at the center of Inoue’s assignment, detailed above: “[On each assignment] all labor is quantified in words read or written, and in estimated time a student is expected to spend on the activity” (Inoue 2019, 130). There is a single standard of labor implicit across all three sites. How has this standard of labor been arrived at and by whom? How is this standard different from the static, single standard of quality that labor-based grading contracts are intended to challenge?

Unfortunately, this assessment practice seems to neglect important groups of students whose labor is not represented by this standard, including students who are physically and otherwise disabled and students who are twice (or more) marginalized, the implications of which I discuss in more detail below.1

Beyond the foundational assumption upon which labor-based contract grading rests—namely that labor is neutral—there are other assumptions that inform this assessment practice that are worth addressing. I want to spend some time unpacking the concept of “willingness” that is central at least to Inoue’s version of labor-based grading contracts. I intend to complicate the assumption that a willingness to labor is enough to succeed within the labor-based grading contract ecology he describes.

While willingness may or may not be at the center of all labor-based grading contracts, it does seem to inform the very concept of labor. Moreover, because Inoue’s model has circulated so widely, it’s worthwhile to unpack that concept and the assumptions therein. The very goal of Inoue’s writing courses draws on this concept of willingness:

The purpose of this writing course is to encourage students to engage in a willingness to labor in mindful and meaningful reading and writing practices that lead them toward an awareness of language (and perhaps its politics) in a compassionate and safe environment that makes the course’s opportunities for learning and all grades attainable by all students, no matter where they come from or the version of English they use. (2019, 244)

The emphasis on what Inoue (2019, 25) calls “noncognitive dimensions of students’ learning,” the category into which willingness falls, underscores his commitment to more inclusive assessment practices, and these dimensions play a role in how students are evaluated. Inoue (2019, 247) explains further, “Thus the overarching goal of labor-based grading contract ecologies, for me, is to get students to practice a network of interlocking, noncognitive competencies (engagement, coping and resilience, and metacognition), which I think of as a willingness to labor.” Inoue does acknowledge, however, that there may be “unforeseen problems and situations that come up in students’ lives . . . that may keep a student from meeting the contract obligations, despite their willingness to” (2019, 140). Inoue (2019, 140) explains that for this very reason he includes a “gimme” clause in the contract, a one-time free pass, so to speak, for each student. The very need for this clause suggests that one’s willingness to labor is not always accompanied by one’s ability to do so. Inoue, thus, creates an opening for more exploration of this very concept of willingness, as well as the assumption that students’ willingness is enough to succeed in their courses.

As much as labor-based grading contracts are intended to eradicate inequities and may do so when it comes to racial formations, when willingness is conflated with ability—with just one chance per semester to decouple the two—students with disabilities are at a disadvantage. Just because someone is willing does not mean they are able to labor or at least labor in the ways that are expected when a normative body and neurotypical mind are at the center of an assessment model.

In addition to the barriers for those with disabilities that this approach poses, it also creates barriers for those belonging to certain socioeconomic classes. Inoue addresses this in his book, but finds solace in the fact that labor-based contracts only reflect rather than cause certain inequities:

The conditions that create such time constraints for many students come from larger structural forces in society, the rising costs of higher education, the reduction of Pell grants and other support for college, changing admission standards, increasing wealth gaps between the very rich and everyone else, the need for more students to work while going to school, among other factors. Labor-based grading contract ecologies do not create the disadvantages of limited time that many students face, but they do make this larger societal problem more present and obvious, which may fool some into believing it creates the problem. (2019, 222)

The distinction that Inoue seems to be making here—and perhaps why he is focused on racial formations and language rather than class—is that whereas assessment practices create racist structures these practices only make the larger societal problems surrounding class “more present and obvious.” Even if the relationship is not a causal one, it seems important to address the issues that emerge when we broaden the scope of the discussion surrounding assessment and look at students’ identities in more complex ways, including their socioeconomic class.

Ira Shor, a prominent voice in early discussions about grading contracts, has also expressed how societal forces, including class, have posed recent challenges for him and his students as compared to when he wrote When Students Have Power in 1996. In that book, he describes his grading contract approach, as well as the important work of the “After-Class Group,” a cadre of students who would stay after class to help co-create the class curriculum. He explained, however, in a 2017 interview that

conditions for teaching and learning, as well as for everyday life and raising families, deteriorated dramatically for me and for the working-class students at my college across the 45 years I have taught there. Students were paying higher tuition for lower quality education. Many were unable to afford tuition and had to drop out after the class began. It became harder and more hostile to be a teacher or a student—bridge tolls and mass transit rose in cost, as did textbooks and food in the cafeteria. Fewer students would stay with me after class for the very unique and useful After-Class Group I began and wrote about in When Students Have Power. I discovered that the ACG worked best with a minimum of 4 students and a maximum of 8, but fewer than 4 typically volunteered in recent years. Students had to leave class immediately to go to jobs, to families, or to prepare for tests in other classes. Critical-democratic teaching and learning became a class luxury harder to practice here as the income inequality gap kept widening. (12)

Shor’s compelling description of the changes in the educational, economical, and personal landscapes of his students’ lives remind us that while students may be willing to participate, time is a luxury that not all students have. Essentially, Shor is pointing out the privilege associated with even being able to undertake “critical-democratic teaching and learning.” In doing so, Shor reminds us that decoupling the willingness to labor from labor itself is an important way to avoid punishing those whose socioeconomic class does not afford them the luxury of engaging in labor even if they possess the will. What emerges is the need to focus on more than language and race in our assessment practices.

Inoue (2019, 225–226) does address the multidimensional ways in which labor is treated in his class, which could be said to mitigate some of the issues I describe above. He notes how labor is separated out in the following ways:

(1) the ideal labor time required for most students to succeed in a class, expressed by both the teacher and the student; (2) the actual time for individual students to do [sic] succeed in the class; (3) the estimated labor time for all work calculated and provided by the teacher; and (4) the time each student feels they have available to spend on this class in order to get what they want out of it, which may fluctuate week by week.

While this approach potentially offers more flexibility than is necessarily visible in Inoue’s assignments that lay out for students how much time they should spend on each task, the labor-based grading contract remains problematic because of the normative, neurotypical student at its center. For example, there is still an ideal amount of labor that has been calculated around which these discussions take place. Moreover, I suspect that the ideal amount of labor indicated on each assignment (and...