Paternalistic Racism

Happenings like this, while occurring more frequently, are still so shocking that they never fail to surprise me:

“This is part of our honest reckoning as a school district,” says SDUSD 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.”

Here's my favorite of the changes:

Academic grades will now focus on mastery of the material, not a yearly average, which board members say penalizes students who get a slow start, or who struggle at points throughout the year.

Mmhmm. 

I've always enjoyed that "slow start" argument.  Can anyone show me any data demonstrating that "slow starts" are the reason students fail?  I thought not.

I didn't do it this year, what with the distance teaching and all, but in other years I've always given my students the option of having the final exam be 100% of their semester grade.  That way, students who "take a little longer" will have the rest of the semester to master the material.  Don't do any homework?  No problem!  Didn't have time to prepare for a chapter test?  No problem!  Just be ready by December if it's first semester or June if it's second semester.  

This would be only about content knowledge, mastering the material.  Maybe you didn't know it in October for the quiz, but you know it now, that's what counts, right?

Never has a single student ever taken me up on this offer.  Do you wonder why that is?  Me either.  The "slow start" argument is a non-starter with me.

My favorite part of the article, though, pertains not to the changes being made but to the reason they're being made:

According to data presented by the district, under the old grading system, teachers fail minority students more than White students – a lot more.  (boldface mine--Darren)

During the first semester of last year, 30% of all D or F grades were given to English learners. One in four, 25%, of failing marks went to students with disabilities.

By ethnicity, 23% went to Native Americans. Another 23% of failing grades went to Hispanics. And 20% of D or F grades went to Black students.

By comparison, just 7% of failing marks went to White students.

Let's skip, for a minute, the racial makeup of this school district.  It doesn't matter to me if those numbers seem out-of-whack or not.  Look at what's boldfaced.

Teachers are failing students.  Teachers, so often referred to as "heroes" in other contexts, are blatantly racist.  These people to whom you entrust your children every day are racists.  They don't care about black- or brown-skinned kids (but for some unexplained reason they're OK with Asians), they fail these students.  Even more unexplained is that the teachers unions support this kind of thinking!  Why any teacher would pay a union that essentially calls them a racist is far beyond me.

We know that racial disparities in academic performance exist all across the country.  So, you can believe that all of America's teachers are ardent racists--teachers, who go into this profession to be "change agents" to "empower" students, who are some of the most soft-hearted people out there--or you can believe it's something besides teachers.  I go with Option B.

I support some of the changes San Diego made, but looking at their reasoning and their justifications, let's just call their reasoning what it truly is:  the soft bigotry of low expectations.  Rather than working to help the district's students to rise to what are probably low expectations anyway, the district has chosen to attack its teachers' morality and decency and to lower standards for students.  And why shouldn't they lower standards, right?  After all, those black and brown kids can't learn as much as white kids, right? 

The arguments used by these so-called anti-racist, so-called educators sound like they came right out of the KKK handbook.