With Grades of Ds and Fs Soaring, Schools Decide to Ditch "Inequitable" (Racist) Grade Systems

The students are failing, which means the schools are failing the students.

If I'm following my Communism Crisis Playbook correctly, that means it's time to redefine what "success" even means.

And then murder a lot of people.

But for now: Let's get rid of Capitalist (Racist) objective measure of student performance.

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.

How "often" was this the case?

And if a kid crushed it early in the term, what is the problem if he coasts the rest of the way? Students have been making that kind of calculation to determine the least effort required to get the grade needed forever.

My friends and I used to have a joke. Well, sort of a joke. Sort of true. If anyone got a 91 or higher on a test, we'd mock him for being dumb and having effectively failed the real test -- the real test was to calculate the minimum work necessary to get an A, and get "A Perfect 90."

Anyway, based on the fact that high-scoring kids were smart enough to know they'd scored high and could coast in the last weeks of a class, this genius decides to end grading altogether.

"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.

Well, behavior, deadlines, and how hard someone works has nothing to do with someone's success in life, so kudos in teaching students that it doesn't matter.

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.

CRT isn't in the schools, everybody.

Los Angeles and San Diego Unified -- the state's two largest school districts, with some 660,000 students combined -- have recently directed teachers to base academic grades on whether students have learned what was expected of them during a course -- and not penalize them for behavior, work habits and missed deadlines. The policies encourage teachers to give students opportunities to revise essays or retake tests to show that they have met learning goals, rather than enforcing hard deadlines.

...

Feldman, a former teacher and administrator who wrote the book "Grading for Equity," had been working for several years with school districts across the country as they reconsidered grading policies. In October and November of the 2020-21 academic school year, he suddenly found himself fielding a "tidal wave" of calls from districts, as teachers issued progress reports and realized that Ds and Fs were skyrocketing.

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.

Several school districts across California, reflecting a diversity of demographics, are taking steps toward revising grading with an eye toward equity. Some have formally adopted new policies while others are offering training and support for teachers who want to grade differently.

Last year, West Contra Costa Unified, which is majority Latino, issued a memo encouraging secondary teachers to give students a five-day grace period to turn in work and eliminate zeroes in grade books.

... In San Diego, district officials said they were compelled to make changes following calls for social justice in the aftermath of Floyd's death and the pandemic's exposure of long-existing racial inequities.

"Our goal should not simply be to re-create the system in place before March 13, 2020. Rather, we should seek to reopen as a better system, one focused on rooting out systemic racism in our society," the board declared last summer.

There is no, repeat no, CRT being taught in the schools. How do you ignorant racists keep hallucinating that there is?

Similar to Los Angeles, the San Diego changes include giving students opportunities to revise work and re-do tests. Teachers are to remove factors such as behavior, punctuality, effort and work habits from academic grades and shift them to a student' "citizenship" grade, which is often factored into sports and extra-curricular eligibility, said Nicole DeWitt, executive director in the district's office of leadership and learning.

Look, you can't read this and not feel the racial implications radiating off of this.

Punctuality is important. As someone who has long lived on Ace Time, and who has suffered for that, I can attest that it is important to teach kids that being on time is important.

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.

How many times to I have to tell your uneducated racist quasihumans the same lie before it finally perforates your unfashionably thick skulls?

Another story from Morning Greatness:

A mom who exposed pornographic books in the Fairfax school libraries has been told that parents aren't allowed in the school libraries they pay for.

Langton previously spoke out at a Sept. 23 Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) school board meeting, where she went viral for her calling out the contents of "Lawn Boy" by Jonathan Evison and "Gender Queer" by Maia Kobabe, which she said contained child pornography and pedophilia available to young teenagers in the district's libraries.

On Nov. 3, she missed a call from the school's principal, Maureen Keck, who called her again the next day. Keck said it had been brought to her attention that Langton was on campus on Oct. 27 and had checked out "All Boys Aren't Blue," which the principal claimed was against the rules, Langton told the DCNF.

"I was like, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Could you please repeat that for me slowly, because I want to make sure I heard you correctly,'" Langton said, describing the phone call to the DCNF.

"I said, 'Did you just say that I personally am not allowed into the library to check out books or are you saying no parents are allowed into the library to check out books?,'" Langton asked.

The principal told Langton the rule was not specific to her, but that all parents were prohibited from checking out library books. Langton told her that she had not heard of this policy and requested Keck send her proof once they got off the phone.

By the way, Noted True Conservative AllahPundit has written about five posts repeatedly claiming the only "pornographic" book being complained of is Toni Morrison's Beloved. He claims this because that book won a Pulitzer (or something) and therefore it helps him advance his All Conservatives are Stupid Trash Narrative.

He either does not know, or dishonestly chooses to omit, the fact that "Gender Queer" is available in Virginia school libraries, and it features uncensored comic book drawings of underaged boys giving blowjobs to other underaged boys. Not in silhouette; not merely suggested. You see actual underage penis in actual underage mouth.

"Gender Queer" has not, as far as I know, won a Pulitzer.

Yet.

AllahPundit is either lying as usual to advance his nasty, dishonest leftwing agenda, or he honestly doesn't know about Gender Queer, because he reads almost no right-of-center sources any longer.

Except, giggle, "The Bulwark."

At National Review, two actual teachers rebut the leftwing lie that CRT is not being taught in public schools.

In most cases of such assertions, we assume naïvete. In others, however, schools have outright lied to parents about the issue. Indianapolis Public Schools advised their principals to tell parents that CRT is not taught in their schools while offering professional development for their teachers that explicitly outlines the tenets of CRT, recommends strategies for incorporating it, and suggests further reading -- including Ibram X. Kendi.

The genesis of CRT in education is arguably Gloria Ladson-Billings’s seminal essay “Just what is critical race theory and what is it doing in a nice field like education?" In it, she repudiates the slow progress of the civil-rights movement and concludes that liberalism is insufficient due to its lack of sweeping changes. Since its publication, Ladson-Billings has been ranked as one of the country's most influential scholars of education.

Critical race theory is but one branch of a larger approach to instruction called critical pedagogy, which includes CRT, deconstructionist, feminist, postcolonial, and other progressive approaches to teaching. Critical pedagogy forms the basis of many teacher-training programs -- Ladson-Billings and other critical pedagogues, like bell hooks and Paulo Freire, are canon at these institutions -- and these ideas then leak onto K–12 schools.

There are plenty of examples of critical race theory manifesting itself in public education: fifth graders told to celebrate Communism and brought through a mock black-power rally, or third graders mapping their racial identity and ranking themselves according to privilege. Even in Seattle’s math curriculum, concepts such as geometry and algebraic equations play second fiddle to identity, power, liberation, and activism. The guiding questions encourage students to consider "How can we use math to measure the impact of activism?" One common textbook encourages teachers to, if they must read literature, do so through a Marxist or critical-race lens.

James Lindsey mentioned how Critical Race Theory/"privilege" is being introduced to math-- when math teachers are teaching the number line, they are told to tell students to locate themselves on the number line according to how much privilege they have. When introducing the X/Y two-axis coordinate system, teachers tell students to locate themselves according to amount of privilege (X) versus awareness of systematic oppression (Y).

And then, teachers are encouraged to then spend class time discussing privilege and oppression.

Not only is all of this pushing racist Marxist ideology on students, but what it is obviously doing is very strongly pushing the emphasis in math class away from anything to do with math. Time is spent and focus is trained instead on political propaganda -- and that is what students are graded on, so they'd better pay attention and participate in class like good little Marxist sponges!

Below, CNN dum-dum and Talking Points Robot and Semi-Mobile Carbohydrate Storage Unit Breanna Keller mechanically insists that CRT is not being taught in Virginia even as Rick Scott reads from the Virginia Department of Education website instructing teachers to "embrace critical race theory" as a "lens" through which to teach all subject matters.

Look at her flap those cud-choppers.

The NPC programming for this fat-faced porkchop is really simple:

10 REPEAT DNC TALKING POINT THAT "THERE IS NO CRT IN THE CURRICULA"

20 BLINK STUPIDLY LIKE A FISH ON A DOCK

30 GOTO 10 AND ALSO EAT AN ENTIRE PIE

posted by Ace at 01:16 PM

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