Tag: education

San Diego Public Schools Will Overhaul Its Grading System To Achieve ‘Anti-Racism’

San Diego’s public schools want to be anti-racist, so they’re…abolishing the traditional grading system?

“This is part of our honest reckoning as a school district,” San Diego Unified School District Vice President Richard Barrera told a local NBC affiliate. “If we’re actually going to be an anti-racist school district, we have to confront practices like this that have gone on for years and years.”

District officials evidently believe that the practice of grading students based on their average score is racist, and that an active effort to dismantle racism necessitates 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, as opposed to 23 percent of Native Americans, 23 percent of Hispanics, and 20 percent of black students.

Keep reading

San Francisco Won’t Reopen Schools. But It Will Rename Them.

The officials in charge of San Francisco’s public schools are hard at work—not coming up with a plan to quickly reopen the schools, but to rename as many as 44 of them.

As parents, teachers, and principals deal with the frustrations of distance learning, the San Francisco Unified School District recently asked them to brainstorm replacements for schools that are “inappropriately” named after problematic historical figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and even Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.).

“I don’t think there is ever going to be a time when people are ready for this,” Mark Sanchez, president of the school board and a member of the committee that proposed the changes, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Predictably people are going to be upset no matter when we do this.”

Maybe. But people are more upset right now, because San Francisco’s public schools aren’t even open and have no plans to reopen until probably January.

Keep reading