Are Leftists Intentionally Harming the Very People They Claim to Intend to Help?

This perhaps fits in the @drbastiat category of “I don’t understand liberals (leftists).”

It has gotten so much (conservative) media coverage, I assume Ricochetti are probably aware that the San Francisco School District briefly planned to institute “Grading for Equity” in which the only thing that would matter for high school grades was a semester final exam, which the student could take multiple times. Weekly or other periodic exams wouldn’t count toward the semester grade. Completion of homework wouldn’t count toward the semester grade. Attendance and tardiness wouldn’t count toward the semester grade. The numeric scores to convert to letter grades were to be lowered.

The “Grading for Equity” plan has now been abandoned (or at least paused) after a bunch of parent and community feedback. But I wonder about the mindset that would even propose such a plan. To me, the proposed plan would only hurt the students. And so do many similar plans.

OK, first, I am a person who often does not test well. I would hate for my competence to be measured solely by one test. My willingness to show up, to show up on time, to put in some effort were among the important factors to several of my career employers (and to me when I was hiring people).

More broadly, I think like a prospective employer.

Why would a prospective employer consider hiring a graduate of schools like San Francisco’s with a “Grading for Equity” policy? With a policy like the “Grading for Equity” program, the prospective employer has no idea whether the graduate knows how to show up, how to show up on time, how to complete or even put in effort on day-in-day-out tasks, etc. An acquaintance who dealt with high school students explained to me how rare it was in certain parts of the city for students to even understand the concept of showing up at a particular time.

So how does a policy like San Francisco’s proposed “Grading for Equity” plan help the students it purports to help?

I have heard that policies like “Grading for Equity” are supposedly based on “compassion” for “disadvantaged” students. I guess the “Grading for Equity” plan was based on assumptions that certain ethnic or racial groups aren’t capable of completing assignments, showing up on time, or showing up at all. But policies like “Grading for Equity” are most likely to harm the very people the designers claim to be trying to help.

Even forty years ago my then-retired university professor father documented (but did not widely publish) data about the issue of “academic mismatch” (when “affirmative action” places academically unprepared or inadequately prepared high school graduates into colleges and universities for which they are not prepared, those students flunk out or drop out, never to return, rather than have the achievement by graduating from a “lesser” institution for which they were better prepared academically).

Artificially inflating grades for certain categories of students only reduces the confidence prospective employers (and I suppose college admissions administrators) might have in the student’s capabilities. That is only going to hurt the students.

Is this harming of the very people they purport to help an unintentional side effect of leftist policy? Or is it by design?