Help students go beyond passing
As the omicron wave continues to wreak havoc on California’s education system, there’s another issue that continues to challenge state high school students’ ability to succeed. And it’s one that precedes the pandemic by over two decades.
Students are being misinformed about what counts as a passing grade to gain admission to a University of California or California State University campus.
UC and CSU, two of the largest university systems in the nation, require that high schoolers achieve a passing grade on each of their core academic courses, known as “A-G courses.” These courses include subjects that are foundational to a high school education, including history, English, mathematics, science and foreign languages. Since the mid-1990s, UC and CSU have designated a passing grade to be a C or above.
However, many districts, including Oakland Unified School District, continue to count a D as passing. That means a student can get what the school tells them and what they think are passing grades in core courses across four years of high school, only to find out when college admissions season comes along that they had one, two, three or more grades that disqualified them from getting into UC or CSU.
Just 35% of Black students and 47% of Latinx students in Oakland completed the A-G requirements needed for admission to the state’s four-year public universities, according to publicly available data. Meanwhile, 80% of white students meet the A-G standard in Oakland. As Black and brown students comprise some 90% of total enrollment in Oakland, there’s a glaring inconsistency with these figures and the district’s graduation rate being north of 70%. With so much talk about building bridges to college and careers, this inconsistency means that many students are unwittingly walking the plank as they exit high school.
How do we know students aren’t aware of this discrepancy? We asked them.
Last summer, student leaders from the organization I founded, Energy Convertors, launched the “Dump the D” campaign. They surveyed 446 Oakland students to assess their understanding of the A-G requirements, their own learning progress and their perspective on a host of other education issues.
Of the students surveyed, just 37% knew if they had fully completed their A-G requirements, known as A-G eligible, and fully half of students didn’t know what A-G eligible even meant. What’s more, kids aren’t hearing this essential information from the adults in their lives — just 45% said that an adult has explained the A-G process.
We see the impact of these dynamics in high schools across Oakland.
For example, Oakland Tech, one of the city’s six comprehensive high schools and often most sought after, had the most Black high school seniors in the district in the 2019-2020 school year. According to the California Department of Education, of the 127 Black seniors, 114 graduated on time from high school — a laudable 90% graduation rate. However, out of the 114 graduates, just half were eligible for the UC or CSU systems, meaning just 47% of the school’s Black seniors completed A-G requirements. It’s the same story at Castlemont High, home of the largest Latinx graduate population in 20192020. Of its 91 Latinx graduates, just 40 were A-G eligible.
Thanks to the advocacy of Oakland student and parent leaders, the district is now considering changes to the grading system. These changes may include moving a passing grade to what is now a C — up from 65 to 70 on a scale of 100 — lowering a C to a 65 or giving students who get between a 65 and 70 — what would have been a D — a grade of “incomplete.”
Some schools in Oakland are proving that you don’t need to lower standards to get kids on track for college eligibility. These schools, like Coliseum College Prep Academy, MetWest High School and those in the Lighthouse Community Public Schools network, give students a “not passing” grade if they fall below a C. But the communication doesn’t stop there. They provide counseling about the A-G requirements and learning support to get those students on track.
The Oakland school district is beginning discussions with parents, students and educators on these issues, which is a good place to start. Honest and candid conversation would be a big and needed reversal on this issue. But, as our Energy Convertor student leaders have proposed, we can and should do more. Rather than lowering the bar for students by making a 65 a passing grade, we should raise the bar for the entire system by requiring more of our public schools when students fall short of a C. That means more academic support when students need it and tailored, ongoing learning interventions to get them back on track and make sure they stay there.
In addition to “Dumping the D,” the school system should implement an easy-to-understand early warning system that communicates to students if they’re on track with their A-G requirements. A red, yellow, green color-coded system on report cards would be easily understood and effective. This warning system should then be coupled with parental notification and support from school staff for any student receiving a yellow or red warning.
More than anything, we need to provide students with the respect of honesty and truth about how they’re doing. We cannot hope to build student agency, resilience and success if we’re not candid about issues as big as their futures outside of the classroom.