In the old days, meaning about a decade ago, if lots of students were getting Ds and Fs instead of As and Bs, the school might examine the teacher or teachers of those students. The school might try to focus on a better way to teach the failing students.
Now they have discovered a much faster and easier method. Just drop the grading system altogether. Problem solved!
The Los Angeles Times reports:
Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of gradingA few years ago, high school teacher Joshua Moreno got fed up with his grading system, which had become a points game.Some students accumulated so many points early on that by the end of the term they knew they didn’t need to do more work and could still get an A. Others — often those who had to work or care for family members after school — would fail to turn in their homework and fall so far behind that they would just stop trying.“It was literally inequitable,” he said. “As a teacher you get frustrated because what you signed up for was for students to learn. And it just ended up being a conversation about points all the time.”These days, the Alhambra High School English teacher has done away with points entirely. He no longer gives students homework and gives them multiple opportunities to improve essays and classwork. The goal is to base grades on what students are learning, and remove behavior, deadlines and how much work they do from the equation.The changes Moreno embraced are part of a growing trend in which educators are moving away from traditional point-driven grading systems, aiming to close large academic gaps among racial, ethnic and economic groups. The trend was accelerated by the pandemic and school closures that caused troubling increases in Ds and Fs across the country and by calls to examine the role of institutionalized racism in schools in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer.
Jazz Shaw of Hot Air asks the obvious questions:
Has the possibility occurred to this teacher that when successful kids “stop trying” a good teacher would find a way to motivate them to excel even further? Has he considered the possibility that the kids who are rapidly falling behind may have external factors that need to be addressed or they might need individual tutoring and find a way to make that happen? Grades have always existed for a reason. When you find students getting straight A grades, you know that they are on track. If they are getting worse grades it’s a sign that more work is required to bring them up to speed.
Also, if you note the last part of the excerpt from the LA Times, you may be surprised to learn that this supposedly has anything to do with George Floyd.
Ace of Spades notes that this is proof that CRT is embedded in education, no matter how much Democrats and their media allies insist that this isn’t being taught in schools:
CRT isn’t in the schools, everybody…Equity is a CRT idea. It is the “E” in DEI, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Equity is not equality; equality is about giving everyone an equal chance, equity is about mandating equal outcomes, no matter what the actual performance level.But CRT isn’t in the schools, everyone…And by the way: How much you want to bet that “citizenship” grade includes “protesting”?Now if any of you have taken from this that they’re teaching CRT in the schools: BZZZ, try again, racists. They’re not teaching CRT. They are simply using CRT theories to determine how students will be taught and what they will be taught.And, and they’re also teaching CRT (“rooting out structural racism”).But there is no CRT in the schools.
What these schools are doing is a disservice to students on two levels. They are failing the students by not educating them. They are also filling their heads with useless garbage that will not serve them later in life.
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