Really. It’s true.
You may have heard differently, but if so, what you’ve heard is not correct.
Here’s what LAUSD did do: they voted not to let a raise in graduation requirements take effect, so the status quo remained in place; no change happened.
The confusion arises because since the status quo is lower than the change that would have occurred, all this has been spun as a “lowering” of graduation requirements.
Capisce? No?
A full explanation requires gazing back a dozen years or more, and thinking about simple things like the meaning of Education. (… not; pondering the meaning of Education, how you get it, how you impart it, how you measure the acquisition of something you can’t even define – this is transcendental stuff).
A dozen years ago folks were merrily chugging along in high school, where a mix of vocational and academic courses were offered to interest kids of varying backgrounds and aspirations.
Meanwhile qualitative letter grades were awarded, as per usual, but in no way as per any standard. The history of grading is as disparate as anything across time, place, countries – you may have grown up with some system or other and think that what you know is what must be. But it’s not so, there have always been myriad ways to assign grades, between classes even within a school.
And it turns out that what’s considered a passing grade often increases with age. So older, specialized graduate students are expected to demonstrate higher grades to be considered “passing”, because their specialty is presumed of particular interest, and therefore better grades are expected than for a generalized mish-mash of everything. This practice rolls back continuously through the school types; passing in college is harder than in high school, grade school frequently doesn’t even consider “passing” a sensible concept.
But this imposes a problem at the transition between high school and college in California, which has a strong state college system with well-defined requirements. Admissions to CSU and UC colleges requires a “C” grade in a set of prerequisite courses. Meanwhile, to graduate from high school “D” has long been considered passing and adequate to earn a high school diploma. There is a disconnect between graduation and admissions.
There is another prerequisite to higher education in California, a set of fifteen courses known collectively as “A-G”. These are typically “academic” classes and not “vocational” (e.g. Math, English, not auto-mechanics). And accordingly they are sometimes considered more “rigorous” in the sense that there is a core body of knowledge to be mastered in order to demonstrate “proficiency”.
Now demonstrating these quantitative measures of proficiency is a hallmark of our modern, computer society. Because we can measure it among millions of people relatively easily nowadays, there are powerful forces urging us to believe that we must.
Therefore several factors coincided resulting in a different landscape for the courses offered at LAUSD.
While kids were focusing on a vocational-track of courses, they progressed through LAUSD’s requirements successfully, graduated, and families discovered that without the prerequisite “A-G” classes they were ineligible to matriculate at a state college.
This disconnect between graduation requirements and subsequent ability to proceed to the next educational level upset many. It came to light that some schools, typically composed of poorer children, did not even offer to their students those courses necessary to become eligible for higher education. This was understood – rightfully! – to be terribly inequitable.
To make these courses available to all students at all high schools was expensive in terms of money and also kids’ schedules. It required rearrangement of curricular priorities and graduation requirements; course schedules became filled with academic classes that squeezed out the vocational. Many vocational classes were closed in favor of providing sufficient “A-G” classes to enroll the entire student body.
So now that these more academic courses were available to one and all, the district faced a new problem: encouraging formerly vocational students to sign on to the new, more rigorous course of instruction. A stick approach was adopted whereby all students were required to take “A-G” courses in order to graduate from LAUSD. The curriculum became more rigorous for one and all.
Meanwhile, the grading discontinuity remained; while a “D” grade was adequate for passing high school and receiving a diploma, this still resulted in a certain subset of students who even though they took and passed “A-G” classes, were yet not eligible for college with its higher level of “passing”.
It was considered unfair to impose the change of “C” to be passing on kids who were mid-stride in their K12 career. So the board imposed a prospective rule for the year 2016, when what LAUSD considered “passing” would rise to be in line with college admissions requirements; the disconnect would be eliminated. If you graduated from LAUSD, you would be eligible for admissions to a CSU or UC school.
However this imposed a double-whammy of increased rigor on our high schoolers, harder courses coupled with the higher designation of “passing”. Suddenly a whole subpopulation of students was ineligible for graduation and disenfranchised; they met the challenge of enrolling in the more rigorous “A-G” courses, but having received what once was considered a passing grade, they were now denied a diploma. They rose to the challenge and followed the rules without reciprocal academic recognition.
And so the prospective rule-change was understood also to be inequitable; it clearly impacted disadvantaged students disproportionately.
In 2015 the board voted not to implement the graduation standards change imposed over a decade earlier. Moreover LAUSD students had been returning and staying in school at ever-higher rates, and ever-higher college-eligible rates:
To rebrand a whole subset of diligent students as “failures” was inappropriate and improper as it denied them their diploma, well-earned under conventional standards.
Thus the rule-change was not implemented and the traditional “D” standard of passing in high school remained. Graduation requirements were never lowered, to the contrary they were in fact raised and the student population met this challenge: by staying in school and graduating at ever-increasing rates, even in the face of these more rigorous requirements.
****Why is it necessary to draw out this explanation in such gorey detail?
Because the CCSA’s candidate for board district four has exploited this slightly complicated and obscure history by misleading parents into fearing some great social injustice is being maliciously foisted on our students. His supporters have absorbed a narrative of outrage surrounding a spurious injustice that never was, buttressed by fake statistics that are not.
Writing in the DeVos Foundation-supported LA School Report, a parent suggests that
… In 2015, some of our school board members voted to lower the student requirements for A-G college prep coursework from a C grade to a D. As a result, more than half of LAUSD’s 2016 graduates were not eligible for CSU or UC universities. Our own elected officials failed our children….
None of this confused tangle of claims is true. There was no vote to lower student graduation requirements. More than half our graduates are not ineligible to continue in the California college state system (see chart), the school board’s nonexistent vote did not effect anyone’s eligibility, but the imminent, and unfair, ineligibility of dozens was stopped. Our elected officials did not “fail” our children: far from it, they acted to increase equitability and prevent cruel and unfair disenfranchisement.
Melvoin’s message assuages educational jingoism by offering outrage for a grand social injustice that simply didn’t happen. This is not a tale of quality or standards diminished. There is no story of statistics fiddled. There is no yarn here of a vulnerable population done wrong.
In reality, LAUSD met the mandate of providing more rigorous schooling for one and all, and it has met the challenge of engaging its greater access equitably, with a dramatically increasing rate of graduates, even.
It can be argued this has come at a cost to important vocational and even science training, as well as widespread, fully activated arts programming. The budget for public schools is insufficient, but if only Melvoin’s corporate supporters would redirect their seemingly infinite resources into district schools rather than swamping a private campaign coffer, the equations governing our kids could change overnight.