When I am forced to consider what is considered “right” and “wrong” in California in general and San Francisco particularly, I feel like I have stumbled into a real life Bizarro World. That is the cube-shaped planet in “Superman” comics where brain-damaged mutations of Superman and Lois Lane pursue a topsy-turvy existence constrained by practices and values that are the reverse of what normal Earthlings regard as self-evident.
The latest manifestation of this West Coast insanity is, or was, “Grading for Equity“, a woke education scheme that was scheduled to be imposed this fall at 14 high schools and over 10,000 students. “Grading for Equity” forbids homework or weekly tests from being counted in a student’s final semester grade. All that counts are student grades on a final examination, which can be taken as many times as it takes to pass. “Grading for Equity” also de-emphasizes the importance of timely performance, completion of assignments, and consistent attendance, so students turning in assignments late will not be penalized. Not showing up at class will not affect grades either.Students with scores as low as 80 (out of 100) will get an A; a score as low as 21 will be considered sufficient to pass, with a D.
The fact that the habits of diligence, responsibility, reliability and trustworthiness essential in the workplace are not just ignored under the system but actively undermined is not seen as a problem, somehow. The idea is to reduce the advantage “privileged” students have by making achievement, development of skills, knowledge and initiative irrelevant to school success.
Brilliant.
SF School Superintendent Maria Su tried to sneak this abomination into the school system without a vote, but after “Grading for Equity,” was presented to the city’s Unified School District Board of Education this week, the proposal seems dead on arrival. Yes, this was even too crazy for San Francisco.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie wrote on X that the younger generation is owed “an education that prepares them to succeed” and the “changes to grading at SFUSF would not accomplish that.” U.S. Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Cal.)resorted to sarcasm to attack the proposal, tweeting, “San Francisco has come up with a brilliant solution for its failing schools. Students simply won’t be failed. Under the new ‘Grading for Equity’ plan, Fs are now Cs; Bs are now As; homework and tests are ungraded; truancy is unpunished; and finals can be re-taken again and again.”
More Democrats than just the mayor were disgusted. U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Cal.) tweeted, “My immigrant dad asked me where the missing 10% went when I scored a 90. He came to America for the chance to work hard & pursue excellence. Giving A’s for 80% & no homework is not equity—it betrays the American Dream and every parent who wants more for their kids.”
“Grading for Equity” is no longer on the march, but Su is still in her position, which is indefensible and would be considered so in a less addled community. How can a school superintendent who supports something as destructive as “Grading for Equity” be trusted to make any decisions whatsoever? She’s incompetent and irresponsible.
But Su is also a female of-color, and in the rotting City by the Bay in the tarnished Golden State, that’s apparently all that matters.
Ethics Alarms 
This time, WESconsin generally, and the 77 Square Miles Surrounded By A Sea Of Reality specifically, didn’t have to wait for Bay Area Academic/Cultural Cancer to metastasize to America’s Heartland.
WI Department of Public Instruction’s Jill “If You Can’t Meet Standards, Lower ‘Em!“Underly saw to that.
PWS
I will argue, Devil’s Advocate-style that having unusual thresholds for letter-grades can be appropriate and even desirable for tests that are unusually-constructed. If the basic, “if you can answer this, you pass” information is only 20% of the test, then a 21% as a passing grade would be correct because the test was designed as such. The rest of the test could be more advanced parts of the topic, with the hardest material also comprising 20% of the test, making an 80% score appropriate for an “A”.
Of course, this presumes you’ve constructed a test in exactly that way. This doesn’t make sense at all for the general grading of everything.
I’ll similarly argue for the reduction in importance of attendance and homework if the student can demonstrate mastery of the subject via a final test.
Story Time: While growing up, my family moved from one State to another during the school year. In the previous State, I’d been in an advanced math program, taking classes that were ordinarily a grade or two above my actual grade. The new State didn’t have anything like this, so I got put into the same math classes with the others of my grade (albeit the most advanced one).
The problem was that in the new State I quite literally took the exact same class that I had already taken a year before. The material was not new to me. The homework had no educational value to me. If I could have taken the final exam and been graded on that alone, it would have been a huge boon for me in terms of time not being wasted on relearning what I already knew and in terms of not boring me to tears.
Again, of course, this was a VERY unusual case–one that probably never happened before or since–but is indeed a case where just a final test grade would have been appropriate.
–Dwayne
In the bad old days, it was illegal to teach black people to read.
In our enlightened times, we have made it legal not to teach them.
-Jut
Jut,
Sometimes short responses can be incredibly profound. Yours is exactly that.
thank you.
I have my moments.
-Jut
And many activists advocating for equitable treatment of minorities will endorse the latter. How ironic.
A M Golden,
The modern attitude that everything is “white supremacy” is maddening.
Enforcing standards of proper spelling, diction, diligence, attendance, and accountability is “white supremacy.”
It is as if they don’t want minorities to succeed in society.
-Jut
I took an Analytic Geometry class in as a junior in high school, and scored 89.87% for the semester. An “A” was 90%. When I talked to the teacher, he said if I had answered just one additional question correct on a homework/quiz/test, I would have been over the 90% threshold. I asked, “Couldn’t you simply round to the nearest whole number?” His response?…”Couldn’t you simply have given me one more correct answer?”
I got a B+.
Apparently, Ms. Su overlooked one vital piece of information in her “Grading for Equity” proposal: poor students rarely live up to expectations, but good students do. So if you lower expectations, guess what?…good students will live up to those, and the poor students still won’t. What they risk is good students working less, studying less, and retaining less, simply because they don’t need to put forth as much effort to get the grades they want. We not only pass students that should fail, we face the prospect of our best students being less educated, less knowledgeable, and less prepared for work and life.
Setting aside other factors (which are as important or more than what I’m going to discuss) of parental involvement, ensuring sufficient mastery of subjects, and enforcing a certain amount of discipline, the issue that I believe is at stake is self-esteem. I spent a year in the University of Wyoming’s Department of Education, and we had a couple of segments that dealt with self-perception, how teacher attitudes can dramatically impact students, and how putting students into tracks seems to ensure students never escape a lower track when they could potentially succeed. One particular exercise has stuck in my mind.
Our professor handed back an assignment one day, and then separated the class into those who had a high performance and those who had a low performance on the assignment. Somehow I had a low score, for which I was disturbed and flabbergasted. We low-achievers were sent into the hall while the professor talked with the high-achievers. Then we swapped. The high-achievers went into the hall, and we low-achievers were brought in. And the professor then proceeded to berate us for being so dumb, out-of-touch, and so on. And then the high-achievers came back into the class, and the professor revealed what this lesson was really about. She never even looked at the assignments, just handed out grades at random, and then treated the high-achievers with all kinds of praise that made them feel encouraged and inspired. We low-achievers then reported how we felt, and how some of us even considered giving up on the class, even a degree, right then and there. The whole point was that treating students as dumb tended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and teachers had to be very careful about how bias could bleed through to influence (often negatively) students who would need encouragement.
(She also said she makes sure with this exercise to always do the lambasting second. One year she did that first, and some of the students did walk away and never came back to find that the exercise was a staged event!)
Students with low self-esteem or who have been deemed by teachers to be failures struggle to achieve. There’s a certain thought that getting students to achieve is to bolster their self-image. If only they believe they can actually succeed, then they would succeed. And there’s a certain truth to this. So the question is how do you inculcate this attitude of self-belief?
Here is then where the liberal view of things goes wrong. The attitude seems to be that if we just ramp up the encouragement and tone down the discouragement, students will immediately drift towards a more can-do attitude. Years ago, the focus was on preventing teachers from grading with red ink because red has such a harsh, negative feel to it. A few years back, lowering standards became the norm, and this “Grading for Equity” in San Francisco is just the latest example. I’m not even sure it is the most extreme example we’ve seen, since we’ve had iterations of not assigning any grades, or only grading at pass/fail, or not giving any tests at all and only looking at the student’s “portfolio” to determine a student’s success, to only looking at a test and not any of the homework. And let’s not forget the endless slew of participation trophies!
The problem is that the liberal view ignores human nature. Yes, self-esteem is important, but it can’t be built through non-achievement coupled with words of affirmation. The encouragement has to be coupled with actual achievement, so all the efforts to lower the bar are actually self-defeated. Kids know that they aren’t accomplishing anything. They know that missing the majority of the questions on a test is problem, no matter how you adjust the grading scale. And in reality, this standards-lowering approach has only succeed at making scores worse, because it discourages hard work, it celebrates mediocrity (or downright failure), and the students lose respect for a system that they can apparently game. It also breeds a mentality that is ill-prepared for real-world hardships, and thus has created a generation of “snowflakes” that cannot face any adversity whatsoever.
Of course, the liberal response is along the lines of, “We’re trying to help these kids, even if the ideas are bad. You conservatives just want them to fail!” Conservatives counter back, “You have to be willing to fail kids so they take seriously the consequences of not mastering the material!” I think holding kids back who do not demonstrate mastery is important, but I also think it is important to encourage those students and work with them so they can achieve mastery, even if it takes longer and more work than their peers require. I also believe that self-esteem is acquired through achieving something difficult, so the focus needs to be on actually accomplishing that difficult task, not providing handicaps until the task is already accomplished.
I would love to hear any of teachers comment on the subject of properly encouraging self-esteem in the classroom.
This is a perfect example of the predictions made by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt in her 1999 book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, and to think that Iserbyt was publicly tarred as a lunatic conspiracy theorist.