LET LOGIC AND CONTENT CARRY THE DAY.

The school board in Oak Park and River Forest, two heterogeneous suburbs of Chicago, are coming to terms with an achievement gap among their students, and their deliberations (none of which are yet policy) provoked a rage-fest.  Kevin Downey of Pajamas Media headlined an article "Chicago-Area Liberals Fight to Keep Kids Uneducated by Implementing Extremely Low Standards" with predictable analysis.

The local school board is calling it “Transformative Education Professional Development & Grading” but it’s really just implementing lower expectations and robbing serious students of higher grades.

Thirty-eight percent of sophomores from the Oak Park, River Forest (OPRF) school system recently failed the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

The racial breakdown of those who failed the test: 77% of black students, 49% of Hispanic kids, 27% of Asians, and 25% of white students.

Rather than teaching kids to succeed, the OPRF school system is considering lowering the expectations and the odds of succeeding in life for students with measures such as eliminating zeros from grade books and measuring growth over time.

Power Line's Steven Hayward reacts in a similar vein, "This is sure to end well for the very people the left say they want to help."

Both of those posts reacted to a report from a source called West Cook News.  Twitchy's Sarah D. was also on the story, although she cautioned ... this is important, dear reader ... that the report was of deliberations, or "measures they are considering," not yet a policy position.

Today, the board issued that clarification.

As part of the Board of Education’s strategic plan, the OPRFHS Grading and Assessment Committee was formed to examine national research on objective, unbiased practices for determining whether students have mastered academic content. At the Board of Education’s May 26 meeting, the administration’s representative to the OPRFHS Grading and Assessment Committee provided an initial report that included a progress update on the committee’s examination of grading practices.

At no time were any statements made recommending that OPRF implement a race-based grading approach.

Prior to implementing grading changes, if any, recommendations will be made to the Board at a public meeting. Again, contrary to the title of the article, the district has not implemented, and has no intention of implementing, any grading and assessment policy based on race.

A Substack contributor named Don Moynihan calls out the populist feeding frenzy.  "This is the tale of a fake news story, widely shared by a lot of smart people who so badly wanted for it to be true that they didn’t care that it wasn’t. It is also the tale of the decline of local news in America, the wave of pink slime that is replacing it, feeding destructive partisan narratives about public institutions."  It's called "trust but verify," or perhaps it's an endorsement of the idea of sleeping on an idea before posting it.  Mr Moynihan phrases that in a different way.  "As Michael Hobbes has pointed out elsewhere, moral panic journalism frequently makes its claims based on draft or obscure documents rather than actual policies, because the actual policies are harder to mischaracterize."

Yes, actual polices properly ought to be harder to mischaracterize, in part because actual policies ought be subject to public comment, and whatever evolution from moral panic into citizen participation or turfing out the school board seems desirable.

In the case of the Oak Park grading reforms, if any, there is a lot that calls for public comment.  Let's start with an exhibit from Mr Moynihan's article.

The only direct evidence the report provided about the proposed policy change was a powerpoint deck presented at at a May 26 school board meeting. This is the most damning slide, which the piece quoted.

Nothing in the powerpoint slide or elsewhere in the article is there material that supports the claim laid out in the lede that a) policy change has taken place, and b) students “can no longer be docked for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in their assignments.”

Not yet, although that talk of "equitable grading practices" ought get interested parents and public officials paying attention to the possible adverse consequences that have come along with such changes elsewhere in the country.

In addition, school boards and interested citizens ought to be paying close attention to the ways in which school boards are rethinking grading.  The following is also from that West Cook article, although there's no evidence the Oak Park board considered these things.

Advocates for so-called "equity based" grading practices, which seek to raise the grade point averages of black students and lower scores of higher-achieving Asian, white and Hispanic ones, say new grading criteria are necessary to further school districts' mission of DEIJ, or "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice."

"By training teachers to remove the non-academic factors from their grading practices and recognize when personal biases manifest, districts can proactively signal a clear commitment toward DEIJ, "said Margaret Sullivan, associate director at the Education Advisory Board, which sells consulting services to colleges and universities.

Sullivan calls grading based on traditional classroom testing and homework performance “outdated practices” and foster "unconscious biases."

"Teachers may unintentionally let non-academic factors—like student behavior or whether a student showed up to virtual class—interfere with their final evaluation of students.," she said. “Traditional student grades include non-academic criteria that do not reflect student learning gains—including participation and on-time homework submission."

School districts across the U.S. are "experimenting with getting rid of zero-to-100 point scales and other strategies to keep missed assignments from dramatically bringing down overall grades," according to a March Associated Press report. "Others are allowing students to retake tests and turn work in late. Also coming under scrutiny are extra-credit assignments than can favor students with more advantages."

The report interviewed science teacher Brad Beadell of Santa Clara, Calif., who said he has "stopped giving zeros and deducting points for late work" as well as allowing students "unlimited retakes for quizzes and tests."

There are several different challenges at play there.  First, there used to be something called "conduct" grades in junior high and high school.  You could do well on tests and such and be a cut-up and the cutting up would show up in your conduct grades.  I don't know if anyone still does that.  Second, turning stuff in late might be better than not turning it in at all, but in any course where what comes later builds on what went on earlier, turning in that January assignment in April might not have much good to say about where you stand in April, and do you really expect to get credit for that April assignment in July?  You get rid of the zero, well, forty or fifty is your new zero.  The ordinal rankings are not changed.  On the other hand, getting rid of extra credit is a good idea.

I hope that somebody brings Sarah D.s observation before the school board.  "Where [too little attention to punctuality] will really set minorities up for failure is in the real world."  But, pace Mr Moynihan, who concludes, "Our looming crisis in education is not runaway wokeness, which local school boards can police, but the willingness of those who should know better to reflexively denigrate the teaching profession,"  there are practicing teachers and sitting school board members who do a pretty good job denigrating their enterprise without any catcalling from populist media.