Grades are racist or something.
So, school districts are rethinking the idea of grading altogether. Perhaps nobody should get A’s, D’s, or F’s.
Everybody is average, and average is all right with them.
Dublin Unified School District (east of the Bay Area) is dropping the traditional grading system in favor of “Equity Grading,” and it looks like they are at the forefront of a trend. The idea is to get kids to quit focusing on grades and make everybody feel better about themselves.
Hrihaan Bhutani is already thinking about college. The Dublin High freshman is taking four Advanced Placement classes next year and has crammed his schedule with extracurricular activities to better his chances of getting into an Ivy League school.
But a change at the high school designed to get students less focused on grades has done the opposite. Suddenly, in some classes, A’s are almost unachievable, unless you score 100%. And F’s don’t exist. For high-achieving students like Bhutani, the pressure to be perfect is even more of a burden.
“I feel more stressed … now with this new system,” said Bhutani, who is especially sweating his biology class, one of dozens trying a variety of new grading scales under a two-year experiment. “Even if you’re at a 99, you would get moved down to an 85,” he explained, which translates to a world-ending B.
What the holy hell are they thinking?
Actually, that’s a really stupid question. We all know what they are thinking: they are duplicating Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron dystopia in which the underachievers run the world. Or perhaps the world of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, in which the truly mediocre take their revenge against the people who make the world work.
What would have been considered insane yesterday is accepted wisdom today. Furries are encouraged in the schools, while kids focused on their futures are being punished for working hard. And if you think this will help the kids on the bottom of the academic ladder–essentially hiding their illiteracy–you have lost the plot. Education is supposed to ensure that the economic and social ladder can be climbed.
This policy pulls the ladder up while tossing the kids at the top down into the sewers.
Dublin Unified’s new grading policy will go into effect for all 6th through 12th grade classes next year and is part of a national shift toward “equity grading” – a controversial concept that moves away from traditional grading to better measure how well students understand what they are being taught.
The goal is to lower the impact of things that “fluff” grades – extra credit, class participation and homework – while also making it easier for lower-performing students to bounce back from failing.
Several school districts in the Bay Area have explored similar ideas, including Oakland Unified, Pleasanton Unified, Santa Clara Unified and most recently Palo Alto Unified. But how districts implement the change differs, with some choosing to eliminate D’s and F’s, while others move away from zero grades or eliminate late penalties.
Of course, much of this isn’t even an ill-considered attempt to pat low performers on the head and assure them they are special flowers. It helps the district by hiding the inability of the public schools to teach lower-performing students to do basic math and reading.
If you graduate everyone with a ‘B’ average, there is no way to suss out the schools’ failure to do their jobs.
The performance gap between White and Asian students and minority students has been a persistent thorn in the side of educators. It makes them look bad. Best to hide the fact behind “equity grading.”
Equitable grading was first coined by Joe Feldman in his 2018 book, “Grading for Equity,” which has become the instruction manual for more than 200 schools across the country. Feldman said he’s partnered with 25 districts and schools in California to guide them as they make the transition.
Liliana Castrellon, an assistant professor in the department of education at San Jose State University whose research focuses on equity in education, said equitable grading practices became more common in school districts after the COVID-19 pandemic.
I wonder why? Pandemic policies took a bad situation and made it infinitely worse.
Schools are, we should admit, just plain awful. Not the concept of schools, and not every school, but on the whole America’s education system is a cesspool of ideology and is now focused on producing emotionally disturbed and ignorant graduates who hate America and our entire society’s norms.
As schools have shifted to a “Social and Emotional” curriculum, our kids’ mental health has suffered grievously. No generation has been so anxious, so depressed, and so isolated. Resilience–remember the “kids are resilient” mantra–is barely a thing anymore.
Educators have killed it. They work assiduously to undo any good parents do and then instruct kids to hide their distress from their parents.
Schools are also hiding their kids’ inability to do math and reading. They say it is about equity, but the truth is that equity comes second to preserving public schools’ failures.
Some low-performing kids cannot improve, but the vast majority have enough native talent to succeed if given the tools. Most of the achievement gap is created by poor parenting and poor schooling. You can’t fix either by ignoring the problems.
Public schools, though, are more a jobs program for mediocre activists these days than educational institutions. It pains me to say that because hundreds of thousands of teachers got into the profession to do good, for which we should salute them. But somewhere along the way–decades ago now–the schools transfigured into a refuge for the mediocre.
What must it be like to be a good teacher in that environment? It must be depressing, surely.
After decades of frustration, the movement for school choice has gained incredible momentum because people are fed up. Many parents want their kids to have a future, not a pat on the head. Even some Democrats are crossing the picket line.
BREAKING: Missouri Democrat Representative Marlene Terry announces she will vote FOR SCHOOL CHOICE today.
She’s also a former school board president. #SB727 #MOLeg pic.twitter.com/eC7ZEGUByU
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) April 18, 2024
Republicans have been fighting the rot for decades, but as usual, we were called mean and racist.
We are finally winning the battle because the truth is getting hard to hide.
And still, once we win, we will be called mean and racist. No good deed goes unpunished.