Woke vs. Reactionaries

A scourge known as "wokeification" is hitting American public schools harder than the COVID-19 pandemic. Racial puritans are flogging White teachers anti-racism rods. Textbooks are being re-written to say George Clinton and Funkadelic were founding fathers, and schools are handing out tightly wrapped blunts instead of number 2 pencils.

I jest, but my colleague Ian Rowe at the American Enterprise Institute warns we are going too Woke for our own good.

Case in point: the faithful leaders of the San Diego Unified School District who have decided an "honest reckoning" is needed to correct systemic inequality and structural racism.

Mr. Rowe isn't a fan. 

He's penned a piece for USA Today unbraiding San Diego and other districts that might also seek changes to remove barriers to learning for Black students specifically. Were Mr. Rowe's triggers calibrated to actual events on the ground in San Diego, I might join him in calling foul. But, as always, reading his piece side-by-side with local news accounts creates confusion. It seems as if from his very first line to last, he is telling a different story than the local people are suggesting.

That difference seems intentional from the outset. Mr. Rowe's first line says, "[i]n the first semester of the 2019-20 school year, the San Diego Unified school district board discovered that 20% of black students had received a D or F grade."

That's a bit misleading. The local media say:

"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."

For a visual, here's a slide from the school district's meeting notes:

Of course, the Black/White racism angle is spicier. It offers reactionary conservatives another opportunity to tsk-tsk those wacky snowflakes on the left, but sometimes the unsexy truth of pedagogues isn't meant to be entertaining.

With a dashboard like that, it would be fairer to say that district leaders are addressing the plight of disabled students, English language learners, and other nonwhites in addition to Black students.

Mr. Rowe continues, saying, "Rather than attempt to replicate the factors empowering the 80% of black students who achieved passing grades, the board's first action to "be an anti-racist school district" was to dumb down the grading system for all."

The words "dumb down" stand out like an honest lawyer on Trump's defense team. Again, by contrast, local media describes the proposed rules changes this way:

"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."

Call me late for dinner, but there is a rather sizable difference between dumbing down a school district's grading system and changing it to focus on mastery instead of whatever level of quality can be met before a deadline. Those of us who care about outcomes and learning could be more generous if school leaders get there by paths we wouldn't take.

Mr. Rowe says, "Under the new protocols, all 106,000 San Diego students are no longer required to hand in their homework on time. Moreover, teachers are now prohibited from factoring a student's classroom behavior when formulating an academic grade."

That plan sounds like genuine anarchy, no?

As you might expect by now, the locals counter Mr. Rowe by saying, "teachers can no longer consider non-material factors when grading. Things like turning work in on time and classroom behavior will now instead count towards a student's citizenship grade, not their academic grade."

Hmmm. So, teachers will grade students for mastering their work, and teachers will still grade for behavior but they will put that grade in a separate column? 

I'm good with that.

Mr. Rowe says, "Imagine how both black and white students and faculty will internalize the not-so-subtle message of this lowered standard." 

But, a fair read of the actual proposals seem to indicate he imagines the "lowered standard."

Grading Isn't Perfect

At times I've expressed support for standardized tests because I distrust the arbitrary unstandardized students will get in their absence. Just last week, I took heat for tweeting: "Standardized testing is no more biased or inefficient than the unstandardized tests constructed by a nation of teachers who harbor biases and low-expectations for children of color. When you get fat, don't blame the scale."

Give Mr. Rowe's experience running a network of rigorous charter schools, I suspect he would agree that standardized testing is an appropriate measurement tool in schools. Yet, he'd likely disagree with the second part: that teachers harbor bias (primarily white teachers with Black students).

He might trust the grades teachers give students more than I do, and more than the officials in San Diego do. 

Here's a good quote from the San Diego Union-Tribune about the issue:

If you're a high school student in San Diego County, it may appear your chances of getting a good grade are better or worse, depending on which teacher you have.

Some teachers will give you an A grade if you score a 90 percent for a course, while others will give you an A for 88 percent or 85 percent, a Union-Tribune review of more than 60 course syllabi from high schools around the county shows.

There are teachers who will give an F for 67 percent or below, some for 64 percent or below, others for 59 percent or below, 54 percent or below and even 19 percent or below.

Some teachers choose not to give any D grades at all. Morse High math teacher Alex Powell was one of a handful who indicated on their syllabi that they give no D's.

One of the killer quotes from that article that commanded my attention was "[r]esearch studies dating as far back as 1912 show that a single sample of student work can draw scores all over the map from different teachers. 

The problem with arbitrary grading older than any living person, so why pretend that a school district addressing the issue is a new form of bigotry?

Further, why pretend schools and schooling are so racism-free that they warrant no investigation? 

In my mind, that fig leaf is made of two factors that are every bit as dangerous as the Wokeification of public schools. Those two factors are cryptomnesia and Anglonesia. The former is the forgetfulness of thieves about what they've stolen from you, and the latter is the forgetfulness of white and white-serving people about white supremacy.

White people in America had an educational head start due to Slavery, Jim Crow, Segregation, and standard policies that invested more in white children than Black children. There were material consequences to that inequality. It's the gift that keeps on giving, what Dr. Gloria Landson-Billings might call the "educational debt." 

The debt is so large I don't blame its debtors for adopting cryptomnesia to avoid repayment of what they stole.

Finally, research has built toward an empirical truth about the bias in school systems. Even conservative think tankers have detected some of it. For instance, Education Next reported that assigning Black children to Black teachers has "a detectable impact on test scores, academic perceptions and attitudes, attendance and suspensions, gifted and talented referrals, and educational attainment." 

Said another way: keeping Black children out of the hands of white teachers improves their outcomes without need for preaching to them about single motherhood or other Black pathology fetishes.

Now, if you know that a Black teacher is good for a Black student, and you live in San Diego, pay attention to the fact that less than 5% of their teachers are Black. Seems like something you might want to attend to if outcomes matter.

In truth, San Diego school leaders are looking into all facets of their practices to counteract research-based problems. While observers from afar paint this as an ideological movement (which parts of it may be), that criticism seems more about useful projection rather than careful and thoughtful assessment.

Yes, I'm tired of insufferably overwoke people and their intellectually dense bumper stickers. Like Mr. Rowe, I don't buy into the bigotry of low expectations, and I don't think anyone should tell our children that their race and life circumstances are an impossible barrier to succeeding.

That said, the wigged-out people preaching that ill gospel takes second place in my irritation to the cryptomnesiacs and Anglonesiacs who attack any attempt to address historic and detestable racial, economic, or social bias as an end to merit and fair play. Just because you have forgotten what you stole or how it has powered your supremacy doesn't mean reality fades away.

Fair people of goodwill can do better for our kids and us, but only if they let the real research do the talking and keep the ideologues of all stripes at bay.

ADDENDUM:

Here is a draft copy of the policy regarding grading that SDUSD's board adopted in October 2020 (see the final version here):

AR 5121 Grades-Evaluation o... by Christopher Stewart

Here is a staff presentation made to the board at their October 13th board meeting regarding their anti-racism work:

Building Anti-Racist & Restorative School Communities by Christopher Stewart on Scribd