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School District in San Diego Changes Grading System to ‘Combat Racism’

School District in San Diego Changes Grading System to ‘Combat Racism’

“under the old grading system, teachers fail minority students more than White students”

Doesn’t this ultimately hurt the students? Even the ones they think they’re trying to help?

NBC News in San Diego reports:

San Diego Unified School District Changes Grading System to ‘Combat Racism’

Students will no longer be graded based on a yearly average, or on how late they turn in assignments. Those are just some of the major grading changes approved this week by California’s second-largest school district.

The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) is overhauling the way it grades students. Board members say the changes are part of a larger effort to combat racism.

“This is part of our honest reckoning as a school district,” says SDUSD Vice President Richard Barrera. “If we’re actually going to be an anti-racist school district, we have to confront practices like this that have gone on for years and years.”

According to data presented by the district, under the old grading system, teachers fail minority students more than White students – a lot more.

During the first semester of last year, 30% of all D or F grades were given to English learners. One in four, 25%, of failing marks went to students with disabilities.

By ethnicity, 23% went to Native Americans. Another 23% of failing grades went to Hispanics. And 20% of D or F grades went to Black students.

By comparison, just 7% of failing marks went to White students.

In an effort to change that racial imbalance, the school board voted unanimously this week to make several big changes to its grading system.

Academic grades will now focus on mastery of the material, not a yearly average, which board members say penalizes students who get a slow start, or who struggle at points throughout the year.

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Comments

This will make white people feel very good about themselves.

So this will make it more like college where a lot of the grading weight is on the final exam i.e. mastery as of the end of the class.

Except the passing level will be set so that almost everyone can pass. Hey I don’t mind. Next maybe we could let the faster kids test out of levels they already understand and get through high school sooner.

Yes, it’s a disgrace—all those Asian students being failed. A minority just can’t get a break.

RightStuff1944 | October 19, 2020 at 1:47 pm

This action on the part of the school board is SO typical of school boards. The action is a direct, in-the-face insult to minority children. It says, “we know that you can’t live up to standards, so we will lower the standards for you”. I don’t see how the teacher’s union would support this action. Teachers need to have daily or weekly grades as an ongoing measurement of the academic achievement, and an indication that teaching needs to be adjusted to be more effective. I predict this grading policy will fail, and will soon be cleaned up.

One of schools goals should be preparing our young to enter the work place. An employers need employees with the ability to learn and follow orders promptly. Allowing students to know they will not be judged for most of the term’s length, will encourage students to take it easy, with the hope they will ace the midterm.

I predict that this will dumb down most of the students.

    Geoffrey Britain in reply to ParkRidgeIL. | October 19, 2020 at 10:16 pm

    Dumbing down most of the students is the intent. Dumbing them down is a feature not a bug. Nor are 95% of today’s teachers the least bit interested in preparing students for the workplace. They’re only interested in indoctrinating children into the left’s secular ‘religion’.

antisocialjustice | October 19, 2020 at 3:25 pm

Like crabs in a bucket, they can’t get out so they don’t want anyone getting out.

If they want to combat racism, make the same rules for students.

Give all students the same books, curriculum, tests…

Grade them on their results. No BS.

People that can’t pass, well tell them what I was told: we need ditch diggers too.

Tell them no welfare, no gifts of affirmative action, no noting over what everyone gets, and if you want a good job then pay attention and study.

    Geoffrey Britain in reply to antisocialjustice. | October 19, 2020 at 10:24 pm

    The school board, administrators and 95% of the ‘teachers’ are not interested in combating essentially non-existent racism. That’s an excuse to further the indoctrination of the students.

    It’s not about racism, inequality, poverty or any of the other ’causes’. That’s just pablum for the liberal, “useful idiots” enabling the left to fundamentally transform America into the United Socialist States of AmeriKa. Though the name America will have to be canceled too because Amerigo Vespucci was a white European. Which, for the left makes him a racist, colonizing “evil person”.

    The Friendly Grizzly in reply to antisocialjustice. | October 20, 2020 at 6:32 am

    It’s how it was before all of this “caring”. Funny thing: those who were just plain not capable of doing the work DID become ditch diggers, veg preppers, floor sweepers. The disruptive ones were expelled. Period. Those who were capable, and studied, became the Clarence Thomas’s, the Walter Williams’s, the Tom Sowell’s, despite segregation, etc. They also became the doctors, lawyers, dentists, business owners, and shop-keepers found in their part of town.

    I despise the term “role model”, but those very same doctors, lawyers, et alii, were the role models for the youth of those communities. Now, it is chanters of vulgar poetry, or people who bounce, throw, or hit balls for a living.

Nobody seems to be asking an obvious question: why should differential fail rates matter? Sometimes you have to blame the student for their failures. The presumption that low intelligence, disapproving culture, and simple student disinterest can be fixed by a policy change is stupendously arrogant.

Because being successful is one of those “evil” white traits.