I remember how it was -- JR
School district’s new ‘equitable grading’ practices won’t penalize late work or issue zeros, even for cheating
A Portland, Oregon, school district recently issued new “equitable grading” practices that will require teachers to accept late work without penalty and refrain from giving students zeros, even if they are caught cheating, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
A new district handout titled “Portland Public Schools Equitable Grading Practices Summary” highlights the district’s “rationale” for implementing a so-called “equitable” approach to grading students’ class performance.
“Historical data shows that there are racial disparities in our pass/fail rate in multiple subjects in both middle grades and high school,” the district’s handout stated. “During the pandemic we adjusted our grading to accommodate for some of the inequities in access to curriculum and instruction. This caused many teachers to begin the journey towards equitable grading but has led to a mosaic of grading practices across schools and across the district that is confusing to students and families. We need to organize and consolidate our efforts towards common policies to more consistently and better support students and families with equitable grading.”
The district explained that its new grading practices would be based on Joe Feldman’s book, “Grading for Equity,” which provides a framework based on three pillars — “accurate, bias-resistant, and motivational.”
The PPS handout described the equitable grading practices as “accurate” because they are “based on calculations that are mathematically sound.” Those practices include never giving students a grade of zero. Instead, teachers are told to “provide a minimum grade greater than or equal to 50% for work that does not meet expectations, is incomplete, or is missing.” This guideline also applies to students caught cheating.
Educators are also asked to abandon a 0-100 grading scale and replace it with a 0-4 scale, which it stated is “more mathematically accurate.” Students’ grades will be weighted against their most recent performance instead of assessed over the entire semester.
To combat educators’ “implicit bias,” homework will not be graded. Teachers cannot penalize late work or provide extra credit. Students will be allowed the opportunity to retake tests and redo assignments. “Non-academic factors,” including attendance, performance, effort, attitude, and behavior, will also not be included in students’ grades.
The new guidelines are expected to be implemented districtwide by 2025.
Parents Defending Education’s outreach director Erika Sanzi told the Washington Free Beacon that the district’s framework would harm students. “These equitable grading policies, however well intended, are a disaster for the students who struggle most and for the students who need accelerated coursework,” Sanzi said.
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A Catholic school district in Massachusetts has ruled that its 5,000 students must use the names and pronouns they used at birth, in the latest clash between the church and radical gender ideology.
The ruling from the Diocese of Worcester and approved by Bishop Robert McManus is set to affect 21 schools in and around the central Massachusetts city and start when students got back to class for the fall semester.
Under the new guidelines, students must conduct themselves in a manner 'consistent with their biological sex,' including the bathrooms they use and the sports teams on which they compete.
David Perda, superintendent of Catholic Schools for the diocese, said some schools already had rules in place but that 'individual situations' had 'underscored a need for a single policy which clearly states church teaching.'
Whether students can change their name or identity in class has become a hot-button issue dividing progressives and conservatives. Massachusetts and other left-leaning states have been much more tolerant of gender fluidity.
Under the new guidelines, which were released on August 15, any bullying, harassment or violence directed against students because of their sex, sexual orientation or gender identify will 'not be tolerated.'
But, they continue, a student's biological sex takes precedence over any chosen identify.
That covers 'school athletics; school-sponsored dances; dress and uniform policies; the use of changing facilities, showers, locker rooms, and bathrooms, titles, names, and pronouns; and official school documents.'
For names and pronouns, there may be 'rare exceptions only on a limited, case-by-case basis,' to be decided by a school's principal.
The rules also call for 'modesty in language, appearance, dress, and behavior,' and also prohibit expressions of same-sex attraction that cause 'confusion or distraction' at school.
The policy is linked to Pope Francis, who has spoken repeatedly about the dangers of new-wave gender ideology and how it blurs the distinction between men and women.
It refers to statements from the pontiff that we should not 'accept ideologies that attempt to sunder what are inseparable aspects of reality.'
The pope has also said children who identify as trans should be helped to 'accept their own body as it was created.'
'We must always respect the sacred dignity of each individual person, but that does not mean the church must accept the confused notions of secular gender ideology,' says the statement from the diocese.
The policy comes as the Roman Catholic Church's stance on rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) has left some onlookers confused.
Pope Francis has said both that homosexuality is 'not a crime' but that also it is a 'sin.'
LGBT groups in Worcester have criticized the bishop's move.
Joshua Croke, who heads the nonprofit Love Your Labels, called it 'harmful' by encouraging students to 'stay in the closet' and feel ashamed.
Croke told The New York Times that he has a 'a long history of anti-LGBTQ. practices and positions.'
Last year, Bishop McManus courted controversy when he ordered a mostly black Catholic middle school in Worcester to take down its Black Lives Matter and Pride flags.
When the school refused, Bishop McManus declared that the school was no longer Catholic.
The row in Massachusetts comes ahead of the start of another school year in which teachers, parents, and students must navigate gender, identity, and sexuality at schools on the front lines of America's culture wars between liberals and conservatives.
Kansas, North Dakota and Wyoming have passed new laws that prevent transgender girls from playing on girls teams at their K-12 schools.
A Missouri law takes effect at the end of this month, bringing the number of states with restrictions to 23.
North Carolina could enact a ban later this month, and Ohio could follow in the fall.
A few laws, including ones in Arizona and West Virginia, are on hold because of federal lawsuits.
They're part of a larger wave of legislation across the US to limit transgender rights amid fears of rising numbers of young people, especially girls, coming out as trans, some of them opting for cross-sex hormones and even surgeries.
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Australia's schools are failing – this is why
Kevin Donnelly
The news earlier this year that the Labor government in Victoria will use schools to promote a ‘Yes’ case for the Voice to Parliament should not surprise. Neither should it surprise that some Australian school students, instead of saluting the Australian flag and taking the oath of allegiance, are told to memorise the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
There is nothing new or unusual about schools being used as vehicles to indoctrinate students with neo-Marxist-inspired cultural-left ideology. It’s been happening over the last 30 to 40 years. As I wrote in Why our schools are failing (2004), instead of viewing education as something objective and impartial, Australian schools have been pressured to adopt ‘an ideologically driven approach that defines education as an instrument to radically change society and turn students into politically correct, new-age warriors’.
While the expression ‘the long march through the institutions’ has become clichéd, it does not alter the fact the phrase, attributed to the German student radical Rudi Dutschke and before him to the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, very much describes what has occurred in education since the late 1970s.
At a Fabian Society meeting held in Melbourne in 1983, Joan Kirner, who later became Victoria’s Minister for Education and then Premier, argued education had to be reshaped as ‘part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation, and social change, rather than an instrument of the capitalist system’. In the same speech, Kirner argued schools must be used as ‘a catalyst for system change rather than the legitimisation of system maintenance’.
Kirner’s socialist beliefs explain her mantra of ‘equality of outcomes’ instead of ‘equality of opportunity’ and her campaign to replace the then Higher School Certificate with the Victorian Certificate of Education. Given its academic focus and competitive end-of-year examinations where students are ranked in terms of performance, Kirner argued the HSC unfairly favoured privileged students attending wealthy non-government schools.
The Australian Education Union (previously named the Australian Teachers Federation) has, over the last 40 years, argued that Australian society is riven with inequality and injustice and that teachers, in the words of a teacher training resource popular at the time, must decide whose side they are on.
The union’s 1985 curriculum policy paper condemns Australian society for its ‘pronounced inequality in the distribution of social, economic, cultural and political resources and power between social groups, which restricts the life development of many’. Teachers were told the purpose of education was to reveal to students ‘the role of the economy, the sexual division of labour, the dominant culture and the education system in reproducing inequality’.
In order to improve equity and overcome disadvantage, the Australian Education Union has consistently spoken against Year 12 certificates, standardised tests like the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), and what is described as the competitive, academic curriculum. This curriculum is apparently guilty of reinforcing capitalist hierarchies and disadvantaging at-risk, low socio-economic status (SES) students.
The Union’s 1998 curriculum policy paper states:
‘Reliance on competition is a primary cause of inequalities of educational outcome because students from certain social groups are advantaged by competitive selection methods. Competitive selection also sets students against each other rather than encouraging co-operative learning methods.’
Once again, the primary target are Catholic and Independent schools that generally achieve the strongest academic results as measured by the Year 12 Australian Tertiary Entrance Rank (ATAR).
Other examples illustrating the wider cultural-left’s ideology and opposition to the belief education should be impartial and unbiased include denouncing the Howard government’s involvement in the Iraqi war and suggesting students are entitled to strike in protest; arguing it’s okay for students to wag school to attend climate change demonstrations; telling teachers they must embrace a neo-Marxist inspired LGBTQ+ agenda, and arguing non-government schools should not be funded.
Given the AEU’s history of cultural-left activism, it should not surprise that the teacher union is a strong supporter of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. In its submission to the ‘Indigenous Voice Co-Design process’ the union argues:
‘The AEU strongly supports The Uluru Statement and Voice. Treaty. Truth. Specifically, the AEU wishes to emphasise the importance of Truth-telling in schools through and in the curriculum and in the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers.’
As I detail in the chapter on school education in Cancel Culture And The Left’s Long March, subject associations have also been instrumental in radically reshaping the curriculum and what happens in the classroom. Some of these groups also oppose standardised tests like NAPLAN (in relation to literacy) on the basis such tests stifle creativity by privileging correct grammar, spelling, punctuation, and standardised English instead of the language students bring to the classroom.
Drawing on the work of the Brazilian Marxist educator Paulo Freire, who toured Australia in 1974, and the concept of critical literacy, one teaching association argues that the purpose of teaching English is to liberate and empower students by enabling them to critique texts and to discover how language is employed to reinforce what Louis Althusser terms capitalist society’s ideological state apparatus.
In an editorial in the 2004 edition of English in Australia published by the AATE, it is argued that the re-election of the Howard-led government demonstrated teachers had failed to properly teach critical literacy and, as a result, they had to redouble their efforts as so many young people had voted the wrong way. ‘What does it mean for us and our ability to create a questioning, critical generation that those who brought us balaclava-clad security guards, Alsatians, and Patrick’s Stevedoring could declare themselves the representatives of the workers and be supported by the electorate?’
Critical literacy and a rainbow alliance of cultural-left theories including postmodernism, deconstructionism, radical feminist gender, and post-colonial theories have also had a profound impact on how literature is taught in the English classroom. Australia contains teaching associations that condemn the concept of a literary canon involving those enduring works that are well crafted and have something profound to say about the human condition. Instead of acknowledging the moral, emotional, and aesthetic value of literature students are made to deconstruct texts in terms of power relationships and how the voices of marginalised groups, including women, people of colour, and LGBQ+ people, are ignored and silenced.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/our-schools-are-failing-this-is-why/
******************************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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