San Francisco announced and then swiftly reversed a new “grading for equity” initiative last week. The rapid reversal is a sign of a resurgent moderate wing of urban politics — and of a growing anxiety among Democrats that they are losing their traditional status as the party the public trusts on education.
There are many dimensions to this issue, but central to it is the idea that “equity” in education has come to be code for low standards and a lack of rigor. The proposal itself included ideas like making it easier for students to retake tests, excluding factors like lateness and participation from final grades, excluding consideration of homework from grades and relying on “summative” testing to assess student learning.
Grading for equity sparks intense controversy wherever it pops up, because it sounds to many parents like simply giving up on education and standards for school performance. An indication that Democrats are taking it seriously is the reaction of US Representative Ro Khanna of California, whose Silicon Valley district does not even include San Francisco.
Illustration: Mountain People
He teed off on an aspect of the proposal that would lower the bar for what it took to get a grade of A, observing that when he scored 90 percent on a test, “my immigrant dad asked me where the missing 10 percent went.” The idea of awarding an A to students who average 80 percent and do not do homework “betrays the American Dream and every parent who wants more for their kids,” he said.
The case for grading for equity, it should be noted, is more nuanced than a simple lowering of standards, but make no mistake: There are inescapable tradeoffs between the pursuit of excellence and a focus on purely egalitarian outcomes. There is also precious little evidence that faddish progressive ideas about equity actually improve things for students at the bottom.
The “equity” proposal starts with an observation that I sympathize with: When you give children homework, especially younger children, you are evaluating the parents as much as the students.
My 10-year-old attends a public school in a once-poor, now increasingly affluent gentrifying neighborhood. The school recognizes that the children come from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, and as a result, does not assign that much homework — and the homework it does assign does not count for much.
Taking extra time to practice outside of class is important for a child’s learning, but as an assessment tool, it is mostly telling you about the home environment rather than the child. The “equity” perspective on this makes sense to me. What is more, given the ongoing rise of artificial intelligence tools and other digital technologies, the whole concept of homework probably needs to be rethought.
All that said, the equity framework does not adequately address the problem.
Go back to Khanna’s comment. His point — and I think most people would agree — is that it is good that the elder Khanna held his son to high standards. It is genuinely unfortunate that not all parents can be as focused and disciplined about this sort of thing, whether because they have to work, have other family obligations or simply are not interested. It is important to create positive incentives for children and their parents to take education seriously and apply themselves.
Meanwhile, the hypothetical student envisioned by the grading for equity movement — the child who fails to turn in work on time all year, but performs well on year-end assessments — seems largely hypothetical, and if she does exist, it is because she is a prodigy who could probably be doing even better if she were challenged to do consistent hard work.
It is hard when a student gets a negative evaluation based on family circumstances outside their control, but many academic assessments evaluate students on the basis of innate talents that are also outside their control. For students to learn, they need rigorous assessments, and the whole point of such assessments is to make distinctions among students, a concept that is fundamentally at odds with a focus on equity.
The good news is that acknowledging this tradeoff does not have to mean shortchanging the most disadvantaged students. In fact, the best success stories for low-income children — whether the “Mississippi Miracle” in reading or the high-performing charter schools — emphasize discipline and old-fashioned educational fundamentals. These policies do not necessarily generate “equity” — some children still do much better than others, but they do deliver better results for children at the bottom.
During the No Child Left Behind era, when the US Congress held schools accountable for poor children’s results, the “achievement gap” did not actually close because students up and down the spectrum did better. After Congress reversed course on accountability in 2015, results for everyone got worse, even as progressive jurisdictions began adopting increasingly esoteric equity strategies.
Sometimes it is necessary to state the obvious: Every child is different, as is every family. The best schools make rigorous assessments and hold students to high standards, and while their outcomes would not be fully equitable, they would be better for disadvantaged children than those of dysfunctional schools.
Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A cofounder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is the author of One Billion Americans. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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