Here’s something you won’t read in YSDA every day: the Madison School Board is right.
Well, okay, so not the whole board. Just one and a half of the seven members. Those members are Nicki Vander Meulen and Martha Siravo. The issue is weighted grading. The state of Wisconsin has set up a system that guarantees admission to the highly sought after Madison campus to high school students who rank in the top 5% of their class. Those in the top 10% are automatically admitted to other schools in the system.
That has made class ranking more important than ever, so the question now arises how fair those rankings are. If a student leans on easier courses and pulls a 4.0, she can rank above another student who takes the most rigorous courses and earns a 3.9. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?
Well, that’s what Vander Meulen thinks. Siravo says she’s not sure, but she’s justifiably unhappy that the administration of Superintendent Joe Gothard made that decision without consulting the board and has been slow to answer her questions about the policy.
The official administration answer is: “Our decision to keep what’s currently in place reflects our belief in the importance of a system that supports equity, maintains transparency and reflects our community’s values,”
That statement, filled with mushy pablum, also contains a bunch of red flags. The most egregious word in it is “equity.” If this had been written in English the statement would read: “We think if we weight the grades fewer Black kids will score high.”
As for “community values,” well, what the hell does that mean? In our highly educated college town, doesn’t this community value rigor in education? Doesn’t this community want to reward the kids who challenge themselves and have proven that they have the stuff to make at the UW?
This actually goes a lot deeper than just a dispute over who gets into the UW Madison. One of the biggest problems in higher education is that it has been taken over by the corrosive concept of “equity.” The idea is that we’re so concerned about the skin color of the student body that we’ll hedge, do ends around and generally lower standards so that we won’t offend fashionable liberal ideas about “privilege.”
But that just cheats everybody. It’s obviously unfair to the kids who worked harder. But it’s also doing no favors to the kids who get a pass. If too many Black kids can’t compete at a high level, then the answer is to improve the education they get long before they are high school seniors.
What this is really about is administrators covering for their own lack of success by pretending that a 4.0 is a 4.0, regardless of the courses behind the number. Rather than work harder and do better by Black students, Gothard and company simply want to pretend that everything’s just fine.
Well, that’s it for our first week back. I’m headed up to Door County to play some golf and do some bike riding. See you back here come Monday.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
Not too worried about it. I imagine it’s a defacto guaranteed admission for sportsball players as well. I also assume anyone on the bubble can still get in with placement exam scores. Additionally even with weighted grading the teachers have leeway to grade higher for the sake of “equity”.
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The issue of affirmative action etc at elite colleges is not even close to the most important educational issue facing this country, but it sucks up all the attention because it’s the thing that is most important to anxious elites.
You correctly point out the growing political divide between college and non-college grads … well, why don’t we start trying to repair by recognizing that there are other forms of success besides acceptance to a selective university?
The education reformers say they want to focus on outcomes, but the only outcomes they tend to care about are test scores and college acceptance.
If a C student graduates from high school and joins a gang, that’s a bad outcome. If a C student graduates from high school and becomes a plumber, that’s a good outcome. But the metrics that both the educational establishment and the self-styled reformers focus on treat those two outcomes as the same.
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If the outrage is by parents of high performing students, this whole thing is being overblown. The majority of the top 5% of MMSD students are not attending UW Madison anyway. Students are already taking AP or honors courses and getting As and admissions counselors at top schools know the difference between an easy course and a difficult course.
But agree that if this way to cover up the still yawning achievement gap, then it is disingenuous.
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