Originally posted on Quora May 31, 2022
Source: OPRF to implement race-based grading system in 2022-23 school year
Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will require teachers next school year to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students.
School board members discussed the plan called “Transformative Education Professional Development & Grading” at a meeting on May 26, presented by Assistant Superintendent for Student Learning Laurie Fiorenza.
In an effort to equalize test scores among racial groups, OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionally hurt the grades of black students. They can no longer be docked for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in their assignments, according to the plan.
“Traditional grading practices perpetuate inequities and intensify the opportunity gap,” reads a slide in the PowerPoint deck outlining its rationale and goals
It calls for what OPRF leaders describe as “competency-based grading, eliminating zeros from the grade book…encouraging and rewarding growth over time...”
According to the Illinois State Board of Education, 38 percent of OPRF sophomore students taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) failed.
The OPRF failure rate was 77 percent for black students, 49 percent for Hispanics, 27 percent for Asians and 25 percent for whites…
Advocates for so-called “equity based” grading practices, which seek to raise the grade point averages of black students and lower scores of higher-achieving Asian, white and Hispanic ones, say new grading criteria are necessary to further school districts’ mission of DEIJ, or “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice.”
“By training teachers to remove the non-academic factors from their grading practices and recognize when personal biases manifest, districts can proactively signal a clear commitment toward DEIJ,” said Margaret Sullivan, associate director at the Education Advisory Board, which sells consulting services to colleges and universities.
Sullivan calls grading based on traditional classroom testing and homework performance “outdated practices” and foster “unconscious biases.”
awesome. So when people can't pass the test we just make the tests easier until they do. There's no way that will backfire and create an entitled and ignorant society.
I feel genuinely bad for educators these days. I remember as a child really admiring the profession but these days you couldn't offer a salary high enough for me to take on the job.
This sounds a lot like something I was reading the other day about women in the military and how they were dramatically reducing the physical requirements for them to be in the Marines. That'll be extremely helpful on the battlefield when the people that you are depending on can't carry their backpack.
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