Students left behind?: San Francisco tried to bury this radical school policy
While San Francisco's recently halted equity grading scheme 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.
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.
Also, according to the publication The Voice of San Francisco, which broke the story on the district administration's equity grading plan, "Currently, a student needs a 90 for an A and at least 61 for a D," but the district envisions "a student with a score as low as 80 can attain an A" and would give "a passing C grade to as low as a score of 41 on a 100-point exam."
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.
The outcry from across the political spectrum was brutal, with Northern California Democrat and Republican members of Congress and the Democratic mayor of San Francisco slamming the plan.
All this backlash caused San Francisco school district superintendent Maria Su to retreat and pause adoption of the pilot equity grading plan for a year.
The dumbing-down element of equity grading, however, is just half of the story. The other half is even more ominous.
The rollout of the scheme was designed to fly under the radar and thereby eliminate democratic scrutiny and debate.
According to The Voice of San Francisco, reference to the plan was "buried in a three-word phrase on the last page of a PowerPoint presentation embedded in the school board meeting's 25-page agenda." The idea was to implement the plan, "[w]ithout seeking approval of the San Francisco Board of Education," with outreach to parents being "minimal" or "nonexistent."
The publication found, "The school district's Office of Equity homepage does not mention [the equity grading plan] and a page containing the SFUSD definition of equity has not been updated in almost three years." In other words, the goal was to keep the public ignorant.
After the plan was exposed, Su acknowledged the district's lack of transparency, saying, "I have decided to not pursue this strategy for next year to ensure we have time to meaningfully engage the community." Further, she wanted to focus on, among other things, "rebuilding trust." Rebuilding trust became a goal only because the initial goal to deceive failed.
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.
As one former teacher observed, "the lack of transparency in public education has eroded public trust in schools."
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.
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