Unleveling is the flat-earth phalanx of the education apologocracy. At an outpost of equity, it schemes behind a palisade of circumlocutions. Plumes of verbiage and virtue adumbrate a Bureaucrats Crusade: raze the citadels of merit. Grades 10 -12 face calls for penitential rehabilitation. Even math has sinned. Grade 9 capitulated after besiegement. The trumpets of victory whisper: “The unleveled course has not caused learning loss.” Not one syllable resounds of learning improvement.
More fissures perforate the logic of unleveling. Eighth grade “teachers are…not positioned” to recommend levels to not-yet ninth graders. This indicts the teachers. “Re-position” them! The heartwood of the movement is spongy: “The pilot aims to address racial inequities.” Leveled content smiles on white and Asian students (the district created these obscenities of taxonomy, not me) and frown on Blacks and Hispanics. Et sequitur, boost the levels by removing the levels. Overnight redemption; free delivery. The perspicacity “students who start in lower-level classes are more likely to stay in lower-level classes” undertakes to sharpen the crusader’s polemic and reinforces instead the correctness of level assignments. Talent transpires through teaching conventions.
Keep levels. Create a mechanism for mobility. Eschew the infecundity of “re-imagining.”