Why do Leftists bother to measure? Because they all think and act the same in their ideological cult.
This is why grades are unnecessary. But conformance is.
And in an effort to make sure all students conform (to stupidity), some California schools are getting rid of grades. All in an effort to close the racial achievement gap. Its the entire “participation trophy” culture taking over every aspect of the upcoming generation.
Put another way, “educators” no longer want to expose their inability to teach minority students. Thus, they simply get rid of the gridlines and goalposts.
According to the LA Times, not knowing how a student performs will boost student achievement levels. Thus a number of California schools have directed teachers to apply grades based on “whether students have learned what was expected of them during a course. This precludes teachers for penalizes students for behavior, work habits and missed deadlines.”
And what do “educators” blame this time? WuFlu, of course.
Student grades have suffered nationwide as a result of school closures and online learning, and in California, only 46% of the projected class of 2022 is on track to meet the state university system’s admission requirements, compared to 59% of the class of 2019, the last full year of schooling before the pandemic.
While the pandemic caused a major drop in student achievement, the racial achievement gap between white and Asian students compared to black and Hispanic students has been a primary driver in the push for what school administrators in Los Angeles and San Diego call “equitable.” “Equitable” grading practices include eliminating deadlines and allowing students to retake tests and revise essays for better grades.
Equitable is the dog whistle for an underperforming education system.
Think of it this way: if Republicans owned the education system, equity would be called RACISM.
LA Unified School District Chief Academic Officer Alison Yoshimoto-Towery said that traditional and commonplace grading practices “justify and to provide unequal educational opportunities based on a student’s race or class” in a letter to principals the Los Angeles Times cited.
Heavily cited in that letter was grading consultant Joe Feldman, who argued in 2019 that “equity must be part of grading reform” and that “continuing to use century-old grading practices, we inadvertently perpetuate achievement and opportunity gaps, rewarding our most privileged students and punishing those who are not.”
“When teachers include in grades a participation or effort category that is populated entirely by subjective judgments of student behavior, they invite bias into their grading, particularly when teachers come from a dominant culture and their students don’t,” Feldman wrote at the time. “Awarding points for behavior imposes on students a culturally specific definition of appropriate conduct that involves interpreting their actions through an unavoidably biased lens.”
Aren’t most things we are taught subjective? Ergo, subject to change. Further, this idea that we can remove bias from everything is ridiculous.
Understandably, we don’t want bad teachers penalizing students for ideological differences. However, that is EXACTLY the system we currently have, where teachers stifle any ideas contrary to Leftism.
Education needs an overhaul. But the people overhauling the system broke it and now want to break it further.
White students are indoctrinated, while minority students jump on the pipeline to prison or poverty.
How do you not measure? Standards exist, because we need to know the quality of a product. By removing standards, the “education” system admits to having such low standards, it no longer wants to measure. Like Colonel Nathan Jessup once said, “You want the truth?! YOU CAN’T HANDLE the TRUTH!!”
