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The Education Establishment is Trying to Hide Its Own Failures by Lowering Standards for K-12 Students

WASHINGTON, D.C., January 10, 2022

The Education Establishment is Trying to Hide Its Own Failures by Lowering Standards for K-12 Students

Lowering expectations is one of the worst things we can do for students. Competition and the challenge to succeed pushes students to do their best. The left’s perverse push to get rid of a traditional grading scale in K-12 education will significantly handicap the next generation.

Students growing up in that system will not know how to deal with failure, will have significant learning gaps, and will miss out on the character formation that comes with being challenged. These malicious policies are little more than the education bureaucracy’s attempt to cover its own back for failing public schools. This isn’t about improving education; it is about the desperate attempt of teachers unions and education bureaucrats to maintain their monopolistic control of K-12 education.

We must resist this push by the left and fight for education. Instead of lowering standards, we must strategize new ways to help students meet them.

ICYMI via The Daily Signal, lowering education standards is a cover for failed public schools.


Why Eliminating D’s and F’s Does Students No Favors

By Brenda Lebsack

January 5, 2022

…[R]emoving D’s and F’s from the grading system is a horrible idea. 

Yet that’s exactly what Los Angeles, Santa Ana, Oakland Unified, Sacramento City Unified, and other California school districts have done.

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We do kids no favor by creating a utopian “no fail” bubble that cannot be sustained in the real world.

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Since California academic scores are so dismal, educational elites want to move the target and say they are doing it “for the kids,” when they are actually doing it for themselves to hide the fact that public education is failing.

It’s a pathetic tactic of self-preservation. California needs school choice. This union-controlled monopolization of education is not working. We need innovative competition in education, where parents can choose what type of school best fits their children, whether it be public, private, charter, military school, homeschool, or hybrid instruction.

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EdSource, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, sponsored an “expert” roundtable in December that advised teachers should not assign homework, that students should have an open-ended amount of time to turn in assignments and do make-up work, that more attention should be focused on mental health and social-emotional learning rather than on academics, and that removing D’s and F’s will increase attendance, remove pressure, and lower anxiety so students can learn, and will help more students of color get into college.

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Higher Expectations, Better Performance

Linda Gonzalez is a retired superintendent of a Los Angeles County school district…She noted, “Historically, lowering standards has never produced better results. Higher expectations have resulted in better performance, improved graduation rates, and college completion. Real improvement would be to give students vocational options that can be completed in shorter time and provide employment.”

‘Proficiency Numbers Are [a] Problem’

Lisa Davis, a school board member for the Capistrano Unified School District [in] San Clemente, California, said, “We have a problem in California schools. According to [the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress], which tests students’ proficiency in English and math, only 51% were proficient in English in the state, and 40% in math for the 2019 school year. Data is not available for 2020, and we can only assume with most of California consigned to remote learning that those numbers dropped. 

“These proficiency numbers are a problem, but the solutions proposed by the Department of Education in California are preposterous. At the heart of what they are proposing is eliminating testing standards and curbing the potential of those students who naturally excel. 

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“Standards matter, and if we’re failing at them, eliminating them entirely is asinine and will move us further away from helping students fulfill their fundamental right to an education.”  

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Why Not ‘Motivate Hard Work, Grit’?

Barbara Lesure, a black adjunct professor at California State University and a retired teacher of the Los Angeles Unified School District, said, “Removing a scoring system in education will result in an ignorant underclass. Why not focus on incentives that motivate hard work, grit, and intelligence? 

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D’s and F’s ‘in Your Career Get You Fired’

Rick Ledesma, a Hispanic school board member of Orange Unified School District for 25 years and an accountant of corporate finance, commented:

“Removing D’s and F’s from our grading system for high school students will definitely hurt students. It will hide serious deficiencies on important subject matter.

“In the real-world, a D and F performance in your career gets you fired, and then you struggle to gain the skills to improve your performance. 

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‘Education Helps Build’ Middle Class

Soo Yoo, the president of the ABC Unified School District of Cerritos, California, which has one of the highest academically achieving high schools in the state, said, “These educational ideologues are trying to advocate another policy to dumb down our education system and keep people of color at the bottom. 

“My experience as a college admission consultant for the past 25 years and running my own tutoring center for 25 years is that human nature (for all races) needs free competition to thrive. 

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‘Setting Them Up for … Dependence’

A mother of a senior in the Anaheim Union School District said, “School districts are removing our ability as parents to instill a strong work ethic and discipline in our children. They are undermining us by enabling our kids to take the ‘road of least resistance,’ which is setting them up for failure and possibly government dependence.

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This facade of “empathy” is dumbing down education, which will benefit the elites, but will hurt the common folks, like you, me, our children, and society as a whole. 

Read the full article here.

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