San Francisco Schools’ ‘Equity Grading’ Scheme Backfires

California recently parents discovered that the San Francisco Unified School District had proposed a “grading for equity” initiative, dumbing down all students to the lowest common denominator, the Globe reported.

Rather than lifting struggling students, San Francisco district comrades chose to drag everyone’s kids down, because uneducated, ignorant youth are so much easier to control.

Parental outrage hit peak levels after learning the plan had been deliberately withheld from them. When they learned that the district proposal included allowing students to retake tests multiple times, excluding lateness, effort, and participation from final grades, discarding homework and classwork from grading; and basing 100% of the grade on “summative” testing was “grading for equity” according to a an SFUSD staff report, Superintendent Maria Su announced a “delay” in the implementation of the communistic plan –  which really only sought to lower the educational bar for all students.

Lance Izumi, senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute reports that San Francisco’s equity grading scheme has been halted, it “sparked national uproar and derision.”

“The real lesson of this fiasco is the near-total lack of transparency in the school district’s education decision-making process.”

Izumi continues:

Equity grading, which has been adopted by school districts across the country, is basically grade inflation dressed up in social-justice rhetoric.

Under San Francisco’s version of equity grading, homework and most tests, outside of the final exam, would not count toward a student’s final grade. Students would be able to take the final exam multiple times. Further, students could turn in assignments late and not be marked down.

The key problem with equity grading is that it inflates grades but does not increase learning. Making it easier to get high grades disincentivizes students from putting in the effort to learn the subject matter.

In New York City, where equity grading was instituted, high school math teacher Janessa Tamayo said that fewer students did their homework, fewer participated in class, and many stopped taking tests seriously.

For most kids, warned Tamayo, equity grading “encouraged them to do the minimum.”

It is little wonder then that there is no evidence that equity grading improves student performance on standardized tests, despite inflated grades.

As the Globe reported, far too many school districts in California adhere to teaching “the whole child,” which is a truckload of horseshite.

Social and Emotional Learning (“belongingness”)

Sustainable Physical Environment (“every day is earth day”)

Student Nutrition Services (because mommy doesn’t feel like packing you a lunch)

Counseling, Psychological, and Social Services (“31% of high school students report feeling sad”)

Health Education (Sexual education)

Family Engagement (“Community and Family Partnerships. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is about helping students develop a range of skills they need for school and life’)

The San Francisco children learning about “equity,” belongingness and sexual “health” can’t read or write at grade level. These people aren’t educators, they are indoctrinators.

As Izumi concludes, “The bottom line is that unelected bureaucrats tried to implement a controversial policy without any meaningful input from parents and even school board members. The goal was to hand the public a fait accompli that families in the district would have to accept.

“The San Francisco equity grading implosion is therefore both an academic disaster and, even more importantly, an arrogant insult to the democratic process. Not only should equity grading be discarded permanently, education policymaking in San Francisco and throughout the country must become more transparent if parents are to have real influence over the education of their children.”