No D's and F's? No extra credit? Will Bay Area schools' switch to equity grading help or harm students?
Dublin Unified School District says the public school grading system is unfair
Hrihaan Bhutani is already thinking about college. The Dublin High freshman is taking four Advanced Placement classes next year and has crammed his schedule with extracurricular activities to better his chances of getting into an Ivy League school.
But a change at the high school designed to get students less focused on grades has done the opposite. Suddenly, in some classes, A's are almost unachievable, unless you score 100%. And F's don't exist. For high-achieving students like Bhutani, the pressure to be perfect is even more of a burden.
"I feel more stressed ... now with this new system," said Bhutani, who is especially sweating his biology class, one of dozens trying a variety of new grading scales under a two-year experiment. "Even if you're at a 99, you would get moved down to an 85," he explained, which translates to a world-ending B.
Dublin Unified's new grading policy will go into effect for all 6th through 12th grade classes next year and is part of a national shift toward "equity grading" -- a controversial concept that moves away from traditional grading to better measure how well students understand what they are being taught.
No, that's a lie. The new "grading" system is designed for the exact opposite reason, to hide how well students understand what they're being taught.
It's good for bad students and it's great for bad teachers, who can now say, "I'm doing a great job, even my dumbest kids got C's!"
The goal is to lower the impact of things that "fluff" grades -- extra credit, class participation and homework -- while also making it easier for lower-performing students to bounce back from failing.
Extra credit, class participation, and homework are "fluff" that has nothing to do with how well kids learn?
Homework is 100% critical to learning. Anyone can follow the teacher in class as he explains an algebra problem's solution. The only way you actually learn it is when you do it on your own.
But the bad students don't do homework, so homework is now outlawed. It's "fluff."
And yes, it will be easier for failing students to "bounce back from failing" when all of their F's and D's will be changed with the stroke of a pen to C's.
...
Next year, the district will restrict all letter grades to a 10% range and remove the practice of awarding zero points for assignments as long as they were "reasonably attempted." The new policy will also remove extra credit and bonus points that elevated grades, and provide students with multiple chances to make up missed or failed assignments and minimize homework's impact on a student's grade.
Some parents and teachers said they worry the changes will encourage students to slack off and leave them unprepared for college.
"I think the dumbing down of curriculum will lead to our kids failing in college because they're not going to be prepared on the same level as kids from other districts and other states," said Dublin parent Olena Stadnyuk.
Skeptics say school districts are implementing no-zero policies and removing failing letter grades to boost graduation rates as they struggle to recover from learning loss caused by the pandemic.
"This will up kids graduating, it will up their numbers," said Laurie Sargent, an eighth grade English teacher at Cottonwood Creek, a TK-8th grade school in Dublin. "They'll have fewer kids failing and then that looks good. It's strategic."
Yup.
All the people who failed us in the past are in full cover-up mode.
Related: Renegade anti-woke former teacher Chalkboard Heresy explains why it's impossible to get woke teachers to stick to the curriculum and leave their politics at home.
Chalkboard Heresy
@CBHeresy
One thing I've realized after working with teachers for 12 years is that it's very hard to get them to commit to political or ideological neutrality in the classroom because:
A. They view teaching as an inherently political act intended to turn students into political units (activists/"change agents.")
B. They attach moral value to their beliefs, and thus view the proliferation of those beliefs as a moral obligation.
C. They do not recognize particular beliefs as political or ideological, and believe they're "just teaching truth."
Yes, the leftwing media teaches them that. The leftwing media made that up in order to combat charges that they were biased to the left. They are biased to the left and they know it, so they invented the doctrine that there is no left, there is only "truth," and sure, they're biased in favor of "the truth," who wouldn't be?
So "leftwing bias" is changed into "the truth" with a simple semantic intervention. It's as simple as changing D-students into B-students. There is no reality, only the sorcery of what words we call things.
D. When trying to be balanced, requiring students to compare two sources or opinions, they engineer- purposefully or unwittingly- the lesson to bring students to certain conclusions.
Meanwhile:
Don't worry, though: A local media propaganda outlet interviews a furry calling themself (yes, themself) "Strudel" who says this is all overblown.
And if you can't trust a nonbinary that dresses up like a cartoon dog and calls themself "Strudel," who can you trust?