THE WAR ON EARNED SUCCESS & MERIT

Ungrading and “Nigrescence” Theory

Does it serve anyone to be placed in a position above their abilities?  Imagine being offered a job as a surgeon when you failed basic chemistry; wouldn’t you feel out of your depth?  This is what we are doing to many students; offering them spaces in the elite universities when they haven’t had the kind of education needed for them to succeed and graduate.  “Equity” rather than equality drives these decisions, but just as you can’t decide an untrained person will be a doctor just because there haven’t been enough doctors from that race, deciding to give a spot at Harvard to someone who isn’t well prepared is actually unfair to them.

Fixing Things After the SCOTUS Ruling

When the Supreme Court ruled, finally, that you had to treat people equally, and not put your hand on the scale for minorities, the Left panicked.  How would they continue to privilege certain minorities over others to get the racial/sexual/social balance they desired? 

Rather than fix K-12 schools, giving out vouchers to everyone so that all children are prepared better, they decided to eliminate the SAT and ACT scores.  For many, over the years, these scores helped demonstrate ability when grades weren’t as good.  Thus, this policy made the “mismatch” problem worse.  Administrators had less data on which to make decisions.  The students they admitted then had a problem.  Either they switched to the less-competitive schools that would have been a better match in the beginning, or more likely, they’d switch to less-demanding majors. The latter approach generally led to programs less likely to qualify them for highly-compensated careers.  Some dropped out. 

The assumption made in all this is that there are the “great” schools and the rest of them. Instead, there are many good schools that allow students to thrive and compete.  I went to one of them – UC Berkeley.  Another factor – schools in this tier tend to be less expensive too.

Since the “fix” didn’t produce better results (equity), Leftist administrators decided that grades were the problem, opting to either eliminate them (as UC Santa Cruz did many years back, with poor results) or to alter the method of grading.

David Lewis Schaefer wrote about this in a recent AMAC article.   He shares information on “Nigrescence theory” as defined by Peony Fhagen, Associate Vice President for Institutional Equity and Belonging at Colorado College. She is the director of that school’s Crown Center for Teaching and a leader in establishing the college’s new ADEI (Accessibility, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) plan.  She describes current grading schemes as being racist.  No surprise there.

Fhagen believes that traditional grading systems were designed to maintain White supremacy and force students into hierarchies.  Instead, she prefers ungrading (no grades at all), contract grading or specifications grading (the latter two mean that the instructor and student create a contract in advance specifying which assignments the student chooses to complete.  Final grades are negotiated between them, rather than be assigned based on the actual work completed.

The problem is that the student has no idea how they are doing objectively.  Do they have the grasp of the material necessary to progress?  Giving people high grades for poor work is similar to the habit of giving everyone participation trophies.  Most people know that this isn’t going to help them.  With no feedback, students don’t know where they should spend more time, and, as they move on, whether they are ready for advanced training.  For gifted students, this isn’t as big a problem, but even for them, in a course they aren’t as good at, they will also be at sea as to whether they grasped the material.  (I felt this way in Physics.  Until we got to quantum mechanics, I was never sure how I did on any test.)

Fhagen hates the focus on individualism, even as we are all, by our natures, individual.   A quote from Schaefer’s paper is instructive. 

“While stress on the benefits of individual achievement may well be more characteristic of modern Western, liberal societies, inspired by the teachings of such philosophers as Locke and Montesquieu, the fact that so many individuals of diverse national, ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds have succeeded in these societies belies any claim that people whose ancestors migrated here from other sorts of society are therefore foreclosed from succeeding in them.”

What is Nigrescence?

Willliam E. Cross, Jr., coined the term in 1994 to mean “the process of becoming Black.”  He believed that Western thought and science caused negative effects on Black Americans, and kept them from forming a Black identity.  Thus, perfectionism, or getting the right answer, was considered to be an issue for Blacks.  The desire for individual achievement is what has made our country the top innovators in the world.  A rational pursuit of truth is inherent in this.

One reason minority students may be struggling in college goes back to these theories percolating through K-12 schools.  If 2 + 2 doesn’t have to equal 4, how are they ever going to manage the far more difficult challenges in higher order math?  Getting the right answer isn’t racist; it just is the right answer 

The Left is Racist

If I were a minority, I would feel that these “accommodations” are inherently racist.  Does the Left really want to admit that these kids can’t compete?  Most conservatives know of many minority children who can compete extremely well and might choose to apply to these “selective” schools.  But many won’t.  They may choose to study closer to home, save money (wisely) by attending less-costly schools or simply choose to go to a school that offers a better balance between studies, a social life, fun and work. 

Let’s stop “helping” people who truly don’t need our help.  And give vouchers to every child to help them opt out from failing public schools.