Melissa Grace and Karin De Jauregui, two mothers from San Diego, comment on the return of masks in their neighborhood schools.
NEW Fox News articles can now be heard on audio! Read this article. The San Diego Unified schools are experiencing a problem of mediocrity that is purposefully created.
The same flawed mentality driving its senior leaders is the cause of the urge to eliminate honors courses and reform traditional grading.
Marcia Gentry, director of the Gifted Education Resource Institute at Purdue, believes that a test is a reflection of their vision “not truly a test of pure aptitude. Otherwise, all racial and ethnic groupings would receive an equal number of results.” According to this line of reasoning, exams are obviously racist because there are currently racial outcome discrepancies.
Richard Barrera, a trustee for the San Diego Unified School District, said in a recent piece in the San Diego Union Tribune that judging a student’s intelligence through a test is “silly.” According to the paper’s paraphrase, he called the tests “outdated and founded in prejudice.”
Barrera contends that suggestions from parents and instructors are a more reliable indicator of a student’s aptitude for schooling than examinations themselves. Barrera is pushing the district toward a pass-fail grading system, where no one is allowed to fail because no one is allowed to excel, and away from advanced honors classes.
If nothing is done about it, it will turn out badly. The claim that academic testing was developed to establish a racial hierarchy is an outright fabrication. It’s a clumsy fix that will lead us down the risky path of failing to adequately educate our pupils for the rigors of the real world.
Recently, several honors courses weren’t offered to kids anymore, shocking parents at Patrick Henry High. After widespread criticism, this was changed, and it has now seemed to be rectified.
I firmly believe that district leaders will attempt this once more and everywhere, though. I don’t think they regret doing it. I think they regret getting discovered and misbranding the agenda.
Yes, these terrible concepts will be repackaged as “advanced courses for all” when they reappearance, but in reality, they will be a one-size-fits-all deliberately planned mediocrity. Since students are in different places at different times, not everyone can enroll in an advanced course. Unfortunately, compassion, the primary driver of the equal outcome goal now referred to as “equity,” is frequently shown in response to these foolish, course-altering concepts.
In actuality, these justifications that rely on empathy and kindness are anything but. The two characteristics that are most commonly linked to educational outcomes—familial bonds and economic disparities—are completely ignored in this worldview.
They have turned their attention away from the family and toward the new radical chic, which is biological determinism based on race. To the school’s harm, this new trend in discriminatory racism is currently being practiced.
The necessary money, which is dependent on average daily attendance, disappears as parents withdraw their children from school in San Diego by the tens of thousands. In San Diego Unified, almost everything is moving in the wrong direction, which is something that all Americans should be concerned about. From a distance, making fun of California’s failures is a self-defeating pastime. Real children are being neglected, and a once-magnificent location is deteriorating.
Someone needs to cut off the flow of faulty ideas. If students aren’t permitted to rise as high as they can, regardless of their race, San Diego won’t produce the next great scientist, architect, writer, or engineer.
Leaders in San Diego don’t appear to be conscious that they function in a space where discriminating, individualistic, and anti-excellence ideas are amplified. They would be wise to warmly welcome someone who genuinely supports academic brilliance instead of cruelly subjecting kids to social experimentation.
In addition to being a mother and a teacher, Rebecca Williams is also a co-founder of the Valor charter schools, an athlete, and a candidate for the San Diego Unified School District.
