By Katie Daviscourt – The Postmillennial
On Tuesday, the San Francisco public school district announced a new grading policy that will allow students to graduate classes with a score as low as 21 percent. The “Grading for Equity” method eliminates homework and weekly test scores from a student’s final semester grade.
Instead, there will be one test at the end of each semester to decide if a student has passed the class. The final exam can be retaken several times, The Voice San Francisco reported.
Maria Su, the Superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District, enacted the new guidelines without seeking approval from the board, according to the nonprofit. The changes will impact 10,000 students across 14 high schools in California’s Bay Area.
Students may submit assignments late, fail to attend class, or choose not to attend at all without consequence to their academic performance. As of current, receiving an A requires a minimum score of 90 percent, while a D is set at 61 percent. Under the new scale, a student can obtain an A with a score as low as 80 percent, typically a B- and a D with a score as low as 21 percent, which is otherwise known as an F.
Educators, students, and parents have expressed concerns regarding the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiative, particularly how it would impact academic standards and college readiness, Newsweek reported. The San Francisco school district’s experiment comes in spite of President Donald Trump’s executive order signed in January that eliminated DEI programs in federal taxpayer-funded institutions.
Supporters of the policy argue that by reducing the emphasis on behavior-based penalties like missing or late assignments, it more accurately reflects a student’s learning, while critics believe it would hurt students who are already on pace for college placement.