Equity Quackery
Quality-free education and racial bean counting are still with us.
While numerous changes are needed to improve our faltering education system, eliminating the concept of “equity” should perhaps be at the top of the list.
Grading for Equity, written by Joe Feldman, a former teacher, administrator, and “educational grading consultant,” made its arrival on the scene in 2018 and, sadly, is still used by many schools.
In the Grading for Equity regimen, teachers don’t consider homework, extra credit, or “soft-skill” behaviors, such as punctuality, attendance, timely submission of assignments, and class participation. Students are given additional time to complete tests and can retake them repeatedly to demonstrate mastery or raise their grade. Also, teacher quality is not essential. All that matters is that certain ethnicities are equally represented in various areas, making the group the focus instead of the individual.
The examples are myriad. In Buffalo, the state spent $500,000 on the Teacher Diversity Pipeline Pilot. The goal of this program is to help teacher aides become certified teachers. Eligibility, however, is based on whether the employee increases the diversity of the teaching staff, rather than on their ability to teach or their classroom experience.
In California, Palo Alto schools are eliminating honors classes. Beginning in September, first-year students will no longer have the option of taking a rigorous honors biology class. Proponents insist that removing different “lanes” for students or “de-laning,” based on achievement, will promote equity and encourage all kids to pursue science throughout their high school career.
In Illinois, state data show that only 41% of students in third through eighth grade could read at grade level in 2024, and just 31% in 11th grade. In math, 28% of third through eighth graders were proficient, and only 26% of 11th graders were.
What does State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders plan to do about the poor scores?
He wants to lower proficiency benchmarks on state assessments, claiming his plan will “right-size our benchmarks for proficiency on state assessments to provide us with more accurate data about student performance.”
In Massachusetts, the Newton school district decided to implement a “multilevel classroom” initiative at its two high schools. Previously, most classes at Newton’s high schools were designated as honors, advanced college prep, or college prep, with honors offering the most challenging content.
One teacher compared the challenge of meeting the varied needs of students to “teaching a class where half the students are learning colors for the first time and the other half are analyzing a Salvador Dali painting. There’s nothing wrong with learning either—but in one room, it’s impossible to teach both simultaneously.”
Long-time public education mainstay “social promotion” is a variant of equity whereby a student is moved to the next grade with no nod to acquired knowledge.
A stunning example of this kind of system is Aleysha Ortiz, 19, who claims she cannot read or write, yet graduated with honors from Hartford Public High School in Connecticut in 2024. She has since filed a lawsuit against the school board and city officials, accusing them of negligence in failing to provide adequate special education services throughout her schooling.
By the sixth grade, Ortiz said that she could only read at a kindergarten or first-grade level.
Instead of helping her, she said, “They would tell me to stay in a corner and sleep or draw pictures.”
Lance Izumi, senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute, notes, “When she was in the eleventh grade, Ortiz started to advocate for herself and told the school that she needed help. Eventually, the school tested her, and just one month before her graduation, the results came back showing that she had dyslexia and required instruction in phonics, fluency, and comprehension, i.e., the evidence-based science of reading that she should have received years earlier.”
At the other end of the equity spectrum is Stanley Zhong, who was a near-perfect college applicant. Out of two million students who take the SAT annually, he’s one of roughly 2,000 to score a 1590 or higher. (A perfect score is 1,600.)
Zhong’s high school GPA was a 4.42 on a 4.0 scale. He even had an offer in hand to work a PhD-level job at Google while still in high school, where he managed his startup, the e-document signature platform Rabbit-Sign.
But in our equity-plagued system, Zhong was the wrong minority. His applications were rejected by Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell University, Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin.
Only the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Maryland accepted him. Stanley’s father, Nan Zhong, was astounded, saying, “I did hear that Asians seem to be facing a higher bar when it comes to college admissions, but I thought maybe it’s an urban legend.”
What can be done about this abysmal state of affairs?
On April 23, President Trump signed “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” an executive order that asserts, “Disparate-impact liability is wholly inconsistent with the Constitution and threatens the commitment to merit and equality of opportunity that forms the foundation of the American Dream. Under my Administration, citizens will be treated equally before the law and as individuals, not consigned to a certain fate based on their immutable characteristics.”
However, since education is primarily a state and local issue, Trump’s directive is unlikely to make a significant difference.
There are some rumblings of pushback in various localities, however. Connecticut legislators have shown some backbone by questioning a policy in some districts that sets a minimum grade for assignments at 50 rather than zero, a common feature of equitable grading. In Kansas City, MO, the district dropped a no-zeroes policy after backlash.
Also, when Joe Feldman arrived in Schenectady, NY, to promote his ideas, many teachers weren’t convinced, complaining that they weren’t sure his approach was practical.
In San Francisco, an estimated 70 teachers in 14 high schools (approximately 10% of the educators in grades 9-12) were expected to participate in a Grading for Equity initiative, which aimed not to make students smarter but rather to raise their grades. The plan, for example, would award a C grade to scores as low as 41%. Additionally, students would have multiple opportunities to retake tests or rewrite essays.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Jill Tucker notes there are other ways for students to raise their grades, including bringing in cans for a food drive.
But school district officials say they have backed down on the proposal, following widespread backlash.
In a statement on May 28, Superintendent Maria Su said that no changes to grading practices had been adopted and that the plan is on hold. “It’s clear there are a lot of questions, concerns, and misinformation with this proposal. We want to make sure any changes benefit our students. I have decided not to pursue this strategy for next year to ensure we have time to meaningfully engage the community.”
I will exit with a question for the equity quacks:
The next time you are trying to find a surgeon, will you pick the one who was licensed because he is a member of the right minority group or the one who earned his position the old-fashioned way? Now substitute ‘auto mechanic’ and ‘electrician’ for ‘surgeon.’ How do you respond? Do you want your favorite basketball team to be comprised of players of various ethnicities and genders, or the team that had the best damned players money could buy?
I can’t wait for your response!