Grading Black Students
my experience
Two weeks ago Stanford University and the University of Southern California (USC) both issued a list of forbidden terms. Among the long lists of words now verboten is the term ‘African-American’ which the word police deem racist. We must use the term ‘black’ in order to be compliant with the California university elites. ‘Brave’ is another nixed term as well as ‘Hispanic’ but I digress.
GRADING BLACK STUDENTS
My readers will know that I taught high school in California for 24 years, the schools where I taught had majority Latino populations: very few white, black, or Asian students.
At any rate, many years ago I came up against a dilemma: if I assigned a grade that a black student earned and it was less than an A or B, I was accused of racism. It was not just one time that I was accused, it was often and apparently scripted. After being reported by the black student I would be called into the administrator’s office for ‘a talk’ without delay.
The erroneous accusation of racism is incredibly damaging to one’s professional reputation and profoundly painful for one who is absolutely open to all races without prejudice. C’est moi.
Sadly, this pattern persisted and I eventually capitulated to their pressure techniques. From the time I decided to capitulate, thereafter I assigned As to all of my black students whether they performed at the A-level or did absolutely nothing. My rationale was my mental health; I reasoned that one student’s grade was not worth the personal frustrations that I experienced in the evenings and weekends, often losing sleep.
PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS
With time I became bold and ‘came out’ to other teachers about my scheme to avoid the wrath of black students, their parents who also screamed ‘racism,’ and the school administrators who pressured me to lower my expectations for black students.
Time after time, teaching colleagues admitted to me that they also went easy on black students and one teacher labeled himself a ‘push over.’ All of them were ashamed but described it as a survival mechanism in order to serve the interests of diversity.
As the years passed, I began to realize that I was this approach was the norm, not an outlier.
DODGING FALSE ACCUSATIONS
When administrators called me in for ‘the talk,’ they would say something to the effect that black students are disadvantaged and deserved a leg up. Some invoked the word equity which has a specific meaning but is often used by educators to mean do whatever ya gotta do to elevate their grades.
In my experience, no administrator would ever call a teacher a racist but it was clearly insinuated. Tragically, the opposite is true. Holding black students to much lower expectations or no expectations at all based on the complexion of their skin is the bigotry of low expectations.
No matter, this is where we are in America now. The dominant, politically-correct, intersectional, woke culture has reversed the sentiment of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., not by the color of their skin but the content of their character.