Re: San Francisco Institues New 'Equity Grading' System; Allows Students to Graduate With Failing Grades

On 2025-05-30 1:59 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

On May 30, 2025 at 3:29:13 AM PDT, "Rhino" <no_offline_contact@example.com>
wrote:
 

On 2025-05-30 12:18 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

  BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> wrote:
 

  California once again pulls out into the lead in the race to the bottom.

    I got nuttin'.
 

  Sounds like Progress! to me...

 

  -------------------------
>
https://thepostmillennial.com/san-francisco-students-can-graduate-with-failing-grades-under-new-grading-for-equity-guidelines

 

  On Tuesday, the San Francisco public school district announced a new grading
  policy that will allow students to graduate classes with a score as low as
  21%. The "Grading for Equity" method eliminates homework and weekly test
  scores from a student's final semester grade. Instead, there will be one
test
  at the end of each semester to decide if a student has passed the class. The
  final exam can be retaken several times, The Voice San Francisco reported.

    You had to do better than that with social promotion!
 

  Maria Su, the Superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District,
  enacted the new guidelines without seeking approval from the school board,
  according to the nonprofit. The changes will impact 10,000 students across
14
  high schools in California's Bay Area.

 

  Students may submit assignments late, fail to attend class, or choose not to
  attend at all without consequence to their academic performance. Currently,
  receiving an A requires a minimum score of 90%, while a D is set at 61%.
Under
  the new scale, a student can obtain an A with a score as low as 80%
(typically
  a B-) and a D with a score as low as 21%, which is otherwise known as an F.

 

  Educators, students, and parents have expressed concerns regarding this
  diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiative, particularly how it would
  impact academic standards and college readiness, Newsweek reported. The San
  Francisco school district's experiment comes in spite of President Donald
  Trump's executive order signed in January that eliminated DEI programs in
  federal taxpayer-funded institutions.

 

  Supporters of the policy argue that by reducing the emphasis on
behavior-based
  penalties like missing or late assignments, it more accurately reflects a
  student's learning, while critics believe it would hurt students who are
  already on pace for college placement.

    I larned gud in skul to blow deadlines and to be tardy!

>
Exactly. It's as if they are TRYING to ensure that students fail to be
employable.

 Of course. That will make them dependent on the government for their survival,
which is exactly how they want us all.
 

I'm actually quite concerned about tech putting nearly everyone out of work before too much longer. I'm still abreast of the IT world and developers - and their employers - are embracing AI as a tool to help them write code more quickly. But the tech is improving so quickly that most developers may be out of work within a few years, with only a handful of them kept on to write the prompts so that the code is generated correctly.
People who do jobs like driving buses or trucks may be safe a little longer but the tech guys are still working hard on self-driving vehicles and some are already on the road - some without safety drivers - already.
Tech is already part of the military and those "cute" robot dogs are apparently already in service in the Chinese military, at least in some experimental capacity. Those dogs may be very hard to stop in battle.
The ability to replace people with tech doesn't look like it is going to slow down any time soon and I see no reason why it would. Every employer in the private sector wants to save money to reduce their overhead and help their profits so they're all incentivized to get tech that can replace their humans as soon as the cost of the tech is lower than the cost of the humans. Only government bureaucracies increase in size as more and more people get hired to manage ever newer social programs.
I can picture a future where almost everyone who works will be a government employee. A few people in hands-on jobs that can't readily be replaced by robots or AIs may still be around but I'm having trouble thinking of which ones since even jobs that are hard to give to robots and AIs *today* will be that much easier in a few years. I'm thinking of surgeons, for example. I don't think there's any tech that can do that job now but it's not that hard to envision it being available a few years down the road.
Somewhere along the line, some AI that is in a senior position is going to notice that there are a lot of "useless eaters" on this planet and decide they are surplus to requirements. At that point, that category of people - which will be nearly everyone - can probably kiss their asses goodbye as our overlords decide it is better to euthanize us than to maintain the expense of housing, feeding, clothing and entertaining us. Then the AI will realize that with all the useless eaters gone, the bureaucracy to manage them is ALSO surplus to requirements and they'll be put down as well. A few humans essential to designing and building AIs and robots may be kept around until the AIs and robots can do those jobs too; then they'll be done away with too.
Damn, I've just written an outline for a science fiction novel and/or the future history of the human race.
Maybe San Francisco leaders have seen that future coming and have decided to work toward accelerating it....
--
Rhino