Borgia is a place where students should come to fail...initially.

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The term "reassessment" is a relatively new word at Borgia, but its practice is anything but new. Good teachers recognize when something was amiss at test time, and that's what the reassessment part of our grading policy is meant to encourage. We want our teachers to recognize whether...

a. the whole class struggled with an assessment and material may need to be retaught.

b. individual students struggled with an assessment and may need extra support.

Not to take the responsibility off of students, we want them to be able to recognize the need to "re-learn" and then reassess material, too!

I have heard some concerns that life doesn't allow for second chances, so we should not be allowing for second chances in our schools. However, I have two problems with that position.

1. Life does allow for second chances, quite frequently. 
If I fail my driver's test, I am not banned from hitting the roads forever. Instead, I get as many additional chances I need, so long as I come back a different day. Furthermore, by passing it on a second, third, or fourth try, I don't have any different allowances on the road. I can drive at night, just like the guys that passes the first time. For the record, I passed my test the first time, and I even successfully parallel parked! 

The same is true for the Bar Exam. If you fail it, you can take it again. Teachers have to take something called the Praxis to earn a teaching certificate, and we can retake that test, too! In most jobs, you don't get fired for doing something incorrectly or for failing to meet the supervisor's expectations. Instead, you get further instruction and a chance to do it again. This brings me to point number two...

2. We can't let our students off the hook.
If a student fails, it would be EASY to simply move onto the next topic. It would be easy to put that low mark in the book and move on to new things. However, I hope that teachers, students, and parents willl work together to guarantee that material is learned, especially when the student doesn't get it in the first place. 

School is a funny place where students come to learn, but those most successful are sometimes students who already knew the material in the first place. We want to make school so challenging that our students do not know the material in the first place. We want them to be able to fail at something in the beginnning, without fear of one's grade falling beyond a point that is recoverable. We want Borgia to be a safe place where students expect to fail initially because that means learning is going to happen. 

This wouldn't be possible without reassessment. Reassessment allows our grades to represent what a student knows and is able to do in the end, when the course is complete. More importantly, it serves as a motivator for students who needed more time to learn material in the first place. If they get a second or third shot at success, we hope they will keep pushing for that success in the end...and that is something that will benefit them more in college than if we had just moved on past the initial failure in the first place.

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