“Grading For Equity”: San Fran Public Schools Trigger Outcry With Plan To Lower Standards For Students

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

The Voice of San Francisco is reporting that San Francisco Board of Education Superintendent Maria Su has found a solution for the declining scores in the public schools: lowering the standards for better grades.

It is known as the New Grading for Equity plan. That is far easier than actually teaching students to meet basic proficiency levels. 

Even in the uber-liberal district, parents were outraged and there are reports that the plan is now dead.

The Voice reports that:

Superintendent of Schools Maria Su plans to unveil a new Grading for Equity plan on Tuesday that will go into effect this fall at 14 high schools and cover over 10,000 students. The school district is already negotiating with an outside consultant to train teachers in August in a system that awards a passing C grade to as low as a score of 41 on a 100-point exam.

…It is buried in a three-word phrase on the last page of a PowerPoint presentation embedded in the school board meeting’s 25-page agenda…

While the school district acknowledges that parent aversion to this grading approach is typically high and understands the need for “vigilant communication,” outreach to parents has been minimal and may be nonexistent….

Grading for Equity eliminates homework or weekly tests from being counted in a student’s final semester grade. All that matters is how the student scores on a final examination, which can be taken multiple times. Students can be late turning in an assignment or showing up to class or not showing up at all without it affecting their academic grade. Currently, a student needs a 90 for an A and at least 61 for a D. Under the San Leandro Unified School District’s grading for equity system touted by the San Francisco Unified School District and its consultant, a student with a score as low as 80 can attain an A and as low as 21 can pass with a D.

It is grading for equity rather than education.

The school district is not the first to “solve” the problem by lowering standards to guarantee greater success.

Public educators have continued to lower proficiency requirements and cancel gifted programs to “even the playing field.” The result has been to further hide the dismal scores and educational standards of many public school districts.

Teachers and school boards are killing the institution of public education by treating children and parents more like captives than consumers. They are force-feeding social and political priorities, including passes for engaging in approved protests.

Faced with abysmal scores, particularly for minority students, school boards and union officials have called for lowering or suspending proficiency standards or declared meritocracy to be a form of “white supremacy.” Gifted and talented programs are being eliminated in the name of “equity.”

At the same time, we have previously discussed how schools have been dropping the use of standardized tests to achieve diversity goals in admissions. Cal State dropped standardized testing “to level the playing field” for minority students.

The result is that colleges and universities are dealing with students who lack proficiency in basic subjects. This year, Harvard University was forced to introduce remedial, high-school-level math courses for its students due to falling scholastic standards.

Notably, this “Grading for Equity” plan was not revealed to the public, as the district reportedly set about training teachers on the plan while preparing for the likely backlash. All of this was easier than getting the teachers and their union to improve their performance.  San Francisco has the third-largest expenditures per student at $23,654. Yet, they wanted to lower the standards to improve their statistical success artificially.

Of course, the losers will remain the students who graduate without basic proficiencies in an increasingly difficult job market. These administrators and teachers are leaving them in the same vicious cycle with little real opportunity to escape.

Yet, these same unions and teachers oppose every effort to fund vouchers to allow families to seek schools that can offer their children a real future. Democratic politicians have joined that opposition in preserving this failing system. The status quo has remained unchanged in these major cities for decades, as politicians replicate the same generational failures.