San Diego School Officials' Plan To Ruin Children
"Benevolent ruin," I guess we could call it. Or, perhaps "trendy easy way out for administrators in charge of schools failing to educate kids."

San Diego school officials are wiping away grades and standards for students in the name of "anti-racism." Robby Soave writes at Reason:

The San Diego Unified School District, for instance, moved this fall to abolish its traditional grading system. Students will still receive letter grades, but they won't reflect average scores on papers, quizzes, and tests. Under the new system, pupils will not be penalized for failing to complete assignments or even show up for class, and teachers will give them extra opportunities to demonstrate their "mastery" of subjects. What constitutes mastery is not quite clear, but grades "shall not be influenced by behavior or factors that directly measure students' knowledge and skills in the content area," according to guidance from the district.

Who will get hired when these kids become adults? Kids who went to Catholic school and other private schools.

District officials evidently believe that the practice of grading students based on average scores is racist and that "anti-racism" demands a learning environment free of the pressure to turn in assignments on time. As evidence for the urgency of these changes, the district released data showing that minority students received more Ds and Fs than white students: Just 7 percent of whites received failing grades, compared to 23 percent of Native Americans, 23 percent of Hispanics, and 20 percent of black students.

This is like the idiotic notion that if you don't give a woman a pregnancy test, she just won't be pregnant, and never mind whether there was a meeting of egg and sperm.

You help kids by helping them not by removing the standards that say they're failing school!

Soave:

Getting rid of grades is an old idea: As far back as 1964, the Public Education Association urged high schools to stop using grades due to fears that students were deliberately choosing easier classes. "By eliminating percentage grading, students would no longer be tempted to obtain a more favorable final grade by enrolling in classes that are below their level of ability," said the association in a report obtained by The New York Times. But in the past, the concern was that grades tell us too little. Today, the concern seems to be that grades tell us too much.

A related push is occurring in the world of standardized testing. In 2020, California eliminated the SAT--a measure on which students of color have historically underperformed whites--as a mandatory requirement for applicants to state universities. Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California, is giving officials four years to propose a better and more equitable test; if one does not materialize, testing will cease to be an admissions factor entirely.

But this elides a serious problem for minority students: Other admissions criteria--such as legacy considerations and extracurricular activities--favor privileged applicants even more dramatically than grades and tests do. The wealthiest (and usually whitest) students have better access to résumé-padding activities. Yes, they can also hire tutors and take test prep courses, but there's only so much extra value to be extracted from such things. Grades and standardized tests have problems, but without them, the deck would be stacked against the underprivileged to an even greater degree.

More from Soave:

The fact of the matter is that the most racially disparate problem in K-12 right now has nothing to do with microaggressions, or grades and testing, or even curricula. It's that students in cities across the U.S. who rely on public education are stuck at home, while children in the same age cohorts who attend private schools have largely returned to class. New York City, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, and countless other big districts have opted to keep schools closed, even though many working-class families depend on them to provide in-person instruction, guidance, and day care.

It's the same story in San Diego. Officials may want to provide an anti-racist education, but at present they aren't providing much of an education at all.