Portland School District Issues “Equitable Grading Practices”

By 2025, all Portland, Oregon schools will be implementing what the school district calls “Equitable Grading Practices”.

This will require teachers to accept late work without penalty and disallow them from giving zeros, even if the student is caught cheating.

The Washington Free Beacon, which obtained the documents exposing this, goes into more detail saying:

The district’s initiative aims to address “racial disparities” and “inequities” in grading and instruction, a “journey” that the district began “during the pandemic,” a handout reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon says. “Grading for equity,” the handout states, includes eliminating “zeros” as a grade—even when a student cheats or fails to turn in a test or assignment. It also calls for no penalties for late work and no grades for both homework and “non-academic factors,” such as “participation, attendance, effort, attitude, [and] behavior.”

Addressing “racial disparities” and “inequities” by greatly reducing standards implies that minority students are not capable of succeeding in a merit-based system.

Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.

A perfect example of how the left does not believe in true “equality” or merit-based outcomes.

Not to mention that these types of policies never actually result in what they aim to or solve any problems.

The outreach director for a parental rights group called Parents Defending Education, Erika Sanzi, affirms this, stating, “These equitable grading policies, however well intended, are a disaster for the students who struggle most and for the students who need accelerated coursework.”

Some schools in Portland have already implemented these types of grading practices back during the pandemic, which the handout obtained by the Washington Free Beacon goes on to explain:

“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 handout goes on to justify the “equitable grading practices” by claiming the new grading system is more “mathematically accurate” explained further by The Blaze:

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.

If the grades are going to be weighted vs their most recent performance, rather than assessed over the entire semester, that means the grades are not objective and therefore implies that someone who scores consistently high will have a similar grade as someone who scores low but is improving.

Oregon as a whole already has seen its test scores plummet since Covid, with the passing rate on English exams falling from 53.4% in 2019 to 43.6% in 2022.

For Math, it’s even worse, with passing rates going from 39.4% to a mere 30.4%.

Expect that trend to continue, with these new bogus grading practices being implemented in the near future.