Ungrading: Students Allowed to Fail Without Consequence

One of the most maddening aspects of engaging in discussion with a woke liberal is their inability to understand a complex issue beyond the superficial level. Even more maddening is how woke elitists foster this intelligence deficit so their adult constituents blindly follow their psychotic perversions without question.

It’s all About the Schools

In instances where parents are not directly involved, Republicans have largely lost the battle for the minds of our nation’s youth without much of a fight. Yeah, they’re all for school vouchers, but that’s about where their interest in education begins and ends. Instead, they fight to change minds that have been indoctrinated to embrace increasingly radical ideologies for a couple of decades, and so the battle has proven to be largely futile.

Slowly, over time, the teacher’s unions have eroded competency, and any attempt to hold them accountable for their failure is fiercely resisted by the union and other left leaning groups who are perfectly happy with the status quo.

The Woeful State of Inner-City Schools

One need only look at the subpar performance of inner-city schools to find the origin of the crime, poverty, drug use and hopelessness that has gripped these areas seemingly forever. For generations, liberal Democrats have spent trillions of dollars on welfare checks, free rent, subsidies, Medicaid, free school lunches and a myriad of other programs ostensibly designed to produce more educated people from poor neighborhoods.

Yet, as the map below demonstrates, it isn’t working. Chicago is a typical liberal, Democrat-controlled big city, where underperforming schools (in blue) dominate the landscape. While the educational failures in these areas are well-understood, practical solutions remain elusive, as those who benefit from the engineering of intellectually deficient children have no motivation to change.

Instead, they double down by using the same maddening gaslighting tactics employed in defense of mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, men playing women’s sports and illegal immigration.

Ungrading: Failing Without Consequence

You see, according to these “educators,” the issue with failing grades in inner cities isn’t teaching deficits, it’s the system itself. Naturally, it always starts with money. There isn’t enough of it, especially for teacher’s salaries. While funding for most school districts comes from property taxes, many state legislatures have revised funding mechanisms to address property tax disparities without a significant change in results.

Recently, we’ve seen a new explanation for academic failure that has risen to the top of the list of teachers union excuses.

It seems that after centuries of employing a system that produced great innovators like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, academia has discovered that grades are the problem.

Yep, that’s right, grades are now under assault by Big Education, and it makes perfect sense. If grades are eliminated, then there really isn’t any objective measure to gauge student performance. As a result, teacher accountability evaporates, and we’re left with totally subjective evaluations from the people who stand to gain the most from the change. Plus, it’s a lot of work to grade those tests and papers. Ask any teacher how much they would like to eliminate that part of their job.

The movement is called “ungrading,” and it was started by Jesse Stommel, who is a faculty member at the University of Denver. Here, Stommel explains his approach to gauging student development:

“My assessment approach centers around self-evaluation and metacognition. I ask students to write process letters about their work, and I ask them to reflect frequently on their own progress and learning. The most authentic assessment approaches, in my view, are ones that engage students directly as experts in their own learning.

“Students in my classes give themselves a grade at the end of the term. I say, ‘I reserve the right to change grades as appropriate,’ but over 20 years, I’ve seen students grade themselves incredibly fairly.”

Where was this guy when I was going to school? I would have loved the concept of grading myself. Imagine the stress relief in knowing there would be no real consequences to a subpar effort as long as I was focusing on my “metacognition.” Stommel has his students do a “midterm reflection” where they discuss what aspects of the course have proven most successful to them. For me, as a student, the answer would have been simple: lack of accountability. As long as I’m stroking this guy’s ego, I can ace the class without breaking a sweat.

Utter nonsense.

To be fair, Stommel is a college professor, so at least his adult students might exhibit some degree of self-motivation, but the ungrading movement is filtering down into the primary school system. Using excuses like privilege, equity, socio economics and undue stress, teachers at all levels are raving about the benefits of dropping grades. Still, there is no way to really measure the effectiveness of the ungrading holistic approach without a test of some kind, and of course, they’re against testing because that’s just another form of grading, right?

Now do you get it?

Gaslighting and False Flags

In Woke’s bizarro world, abandoning grades will lead to more intelligent students, just like ballot harvesting will lead to clean elections, defunding the police will lead to less crime, spending more borrowed money will lead to lower inflation and open borders will lead to greater prosperity.

Unless and until a foolish idea like ungrading is overwhelmingly rejected, and the self-serving, lazy teachers who are advancing it are purged from the system, continue to expect uneducated and poorly prepared young adults to reach voting age in ever greater numbers.

I know it kind of sucks, but if you’re a parent of a school-age child, you have no choice but to get involved and help stop this madness that is damaging our youth and destroying our great nation.