SAN DIEGO, Kalifornia (PNN) - December 22, 2020 - District officials in San Diego evidently believe that the practice of grading students based on average scores is racist.

K-12 students in large public school districts across the country spent much of the fall semester at home, a less-than-ideal result of the COVID-19 “pandemic”. But Zoom learning was hardly the only significant change to the education system. Some school districts are embracing trendy but dubious ideas about how to fight racism in the classroom.

For instance, the San Diego Unified School District moved this fall to abolish its traditional grading system. Students will still receive letter grades, but they won't reflect average scores on papers, quizzes and tests. Under the new system, pupils will not be penalized for failing to complete assignments or even show up for class, and teachers will give them extra opportunities to demonstrate their “mastery” of subjects. What constitutes mastery is not quite clear, but grades “shall not be influenced by behavior or factors that directly measure students’ knowledge and skills in the content area,” according to guidance from the district.

District officials evidently believe that the practice of grading students based on average scores is racist and that “anti-racism” demands 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% of whites received failing grades, compared to 23% of Native Americans, 23% of Hispanics, and 20% of black students.

“This is part of our honest reckoning as a school district,” said Vice President Richard Barrera. “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.”

These changes to San Diego schools’ grading system are an excellent example of a bureaucracy citing a noble-sounding goal (who could be against anti-racism?) to justify a policy that doesn’t address the issue whatsoever. After all, eliminating these kinds of grades won’t eliminate the underlying inequities that produced the disparate failure rates. It may actually cover up those inequities.

Given that grades are a tool for evaluating students’ progress, the district is essentially announcing that it will no longer gather as much evidence as it could about negative social phenomena it would presumably like to fix. Better grades do not mean students will suddenly have a better grasp of the material. They certainly won’t be better prepared for college, where traditional grades are very much still a thing.

Indeed, this is a lot like “addressing” poverty by no longer tallying the number of homeless people - or, to use a timely example, like President Donald Trump’s frustration that increasing COVID-19 testing makes the epidemic look worse. Coronavirus cases exist even if they go undetected; similarly, minority students who are falling behind their classmates will be falling behind even if their teachers aren't giving them Fs.

Getting rid of grades is an old idea. As far back as 1964, the Public Education Association urged high schools to stop using grades due to fears that students were deliberately choosing easier classes. “By eliminating percentage grading, students would no longer be tempted to obtain a more favorable final grade by enrolling in classes that are below their level of ability,” said the association. But in the past, the concern was that grades tell us too little. Today, the concern seems to be that grades tell us too much.