Sunrise Park Middle School in Minnesota is not alone in abandoning failing grades

[dan_bgblue]

Is Minnesota fast becoming the new "Most Liberal State in the Nation"?

Groupthink is the enemy of rigor…what we define to be excellence has become captive to a certain political agenda," says Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury.

Yet, in the name of "eliminating systemic racism," Sunrise Park Middle School in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, near St. Paul, will no longer hand out "F" grades to students who turn in the lowest quality work. The school has simply lopped-off 0 – 49.9 percentiles in its grading system.

The new grading system will no longer reflect student behavior or tardiness, or whether an assignment was completed on time. Grading, the school’s website reads, perpetuates systemic racism.


I want to say, "you have to be kidding me"
, but I know they are not.

[Catonahottinroof]

I’m give this my best WTF? face reading this…..smh

[catmanjack]

Didn’t Portland adopt a similar concept by eliminating Math and reading as requirements to get a diploma?
Can tell you my wife is a teacher and the systems within the schools as teaching are changing drastically.
Democrats do not want the next generation to wake up and decide they want to get an education and be hard working Americans so they are eliminating testing and grading.
Need the next generation of mindless zombies to keep the downward spiral going and the social dictatorship in line with their agendas.

[Doc]

This is not a new concept. I recall in middle school, Jefferson County went to an Non-A-F grading where you got an EP (exceptional performance), AEP (above expected performance), AP (average performance), and BEP (below expected performance)...or something close to that. The expectation was teacher would grade subjectively based on the individual student, but they nixed it because teachers basically graded as before with an EP being 90% or above, AEP being 80-90%, etc. It was not race based but rather suppose to be based on the teachers expectations for each individual student. Likely minorities were given a lower expectation since this was the years of busing..... a novel idea to solve the racial inequity where suburban kids were sent to shitty inner city schools, and urban kids who could not care less about an education had the privilege of going to the suburbs.

[CitizenBBN]

This makes perfect sense. So long as you agree with the built in assumption that minorities cannot perform as well academically as whites and Asians, due to whatever factors (home life, more poverty, etc.) and thus the solution is NOT to try to change that outcome by trying to figure out how to help them do better, but to simply accept they won't do as well and excuse it on their behalf.

So as long as you are willing to accept what was the primary argument used in defense of slavery in the 1840s-1860s, that then slaves and now African Americans are simply not capable of functioning on their own and competing, so they must be cared for as children, then it all makes sense.

of course it requires you to be a racist to believe such a thing, and also requires you to accept African Americans as a permanent underclass in this country as you are systematically accepting they will have lower levels of formal education provided and thus have less opportunity to break the cycle of poverty.

Why even bother requiring minorities to go to school? If you're going to pass everyone whether they learn the material or not, and don't want to teach students the basic principles of being on time, turning in work on time, etc., things they will need to learn to hold down a decent job, then why even bother?

Between this notion, and you also saw it in the flyer put out by the African American Museum of all groups in DC, and the sudden re-discovery of "separate but equal" segregation of housing, graduation ceremonies, etc. among what are supposed to be institutions of learning, i'd say the American Left has turned back the racial clock to somewhere about the 1930s.

Well done.

[KeithKSR]

Under a principal about 15 years ago our middle school went through a phase of no zeroes. Students without zeroes or missing work were rewarded every so often and those with zeroes or missing work were pulled and required to do their work. The principal had folding tables set up for students who still had zeroes and they had to work on assignments as they ate lunch. It tales a lot of effort to get an F in middle school, the main reason is students not completing assignments. Our Fs went to nonexistent.

This was much different than some school policies that simply forbid teachers to give Fs. I did have another principal that set the minimum recorded grade for a 9 weeks at 40%, it was rare that I had students with a grade low enough to be impacted by the policy.