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In May 2022, a website purporting to be a local news site for the western portion of Illinois' Cook County, the state's most populous county that covers the Chicago metro, published an article falsely claiming that Oak Park and River Forest High School (OPRF) officials were set to implement a race-based grading system. The article alleged that administrators would make it mandatory for teachers next school year to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students. The website was called West Cook News, and the article featured a cropped version of OPRF Administrator Laurie Fiorenza's Twitter profile photo. The contents of the article stemmed from a presentation that she gave during a recent school board meeting (a video of it posted on May 26 and is displayed below). In the presentation, she discussed research around grading students more fairly, known as equitable grading, and shared findings with school board members for their consideration. Neither she nor any other member of the board announced policy changes that would require teachers to change how they grade students, much less make it mandatory for them to assess students based on their race or ethnicity. For these reasons, we're marking this claim False. The school said in a statement published to its website: At the above-mentioned school board meeting, Fiorenza gave a brief presentation about the progress of a board committee that researches professional development strategies for teachers, called the Transformative Education Leadership Team (TELT). Fiorenza noted that during the school year, teachers had read several books about equitable grading, or strategies to assess students on a non-biased basis. That said, Fiorenza did not say that teachers were required to implement equitable grading (which is not race-based grading). Here's a video of the meeting: We reached out to Karin Sullivan, the executive director of communications at OPRF, who told us that there are no changes being proposed. This was a report on the committee’s research of best practices. The rumor that OPRF was implementing a race-based grading system appeared to largely stem from a misunderstanding of the term equitable grading. Ralph Matire, secretary of the OPRF School Board, said during the meeting: Margaret Sullivan, an associate director at EAB, a consulting firm specializing in education institutions, wrote about equitable grading in November 2021: One of the goals of equable grading is to focus on whether students understand course material, no matter their timeline for doing so, as opposed to testing them for points on specific dates. For example, supporters say, to achieve more equitable grades, teachers should drop zeroes on assignments from grade books when students demonstrate that they know the material from those assignments. During the presentation, Matire talked about how the latter change could give teachers a better assessment of a student's performance, saying: Karin Sullivan told us that there had been no school-wide recommendation or implementation of equitable grading at OPRF, and that this presentation was just a discussion of research-based best practices. If a teacher does implement equitable grading into their instruction plan, Sullivan said, any teachers using such practices would have to use them across the board for all students, regardless of race. West Cook News' article carried the sensational and false title OPRF to implement race-based grading system in 2022-23 school year. As noted above, the school simply was not implementing a new grading system, and the grading strategies that officials discussed at a recent school board meeting (equitable grading) had nothing to do with students' race or ethnicity. Despite (or perhaps because of) the inaccuracy of this headline, screenshots of West Cook News' article spread widely on social media. When Libs of Tiktok, a social media account that has gained a massive following thanks to its ability to stir up conservative outrage with claims that are often misleading, false, or stripped of context (no, litter boxes haven't been installed at schools because kids identify as cats), spread this rumor, they added screenshots from the presentation that highlighted specific passages: Neither of these highlighted passages stated that OPRF officials were implementing a race-based grading system. What these passages refer to, again, is equitable grading, or an attempt to remove bias from the classroom so that teachers can grade students purely on their mastery of a given subject. The school explained in their statement: Again, the presentation slides do not state that teachers at OPRF will implement a race-based grading system. Rather, the slides note that teachers had read books about how take non-academic factors (such as attendance) out of the equation could give them a more objective view of a student's mastery of a subject. West Cook News is part of a so-called pink slime news network, a network of websites purporting to be local news outlets (despite having few or no local reporters) that publish politically biased content. The website is run by Local Government Information Services (LGIS), which is part of the Metric Media Foundation, a pink slime network that operates more than 1,200 local news outlets. A 2019 investigation by the New York Times found that these networks received at least $1.7 million from Republican political campaigns and conservative groups. A disclaimer on the site about its funding read: Funding for this news site is provided, in part, by advocacy groups who share our beliefs in limited government. While West Cook News presented itself as a local news outlet covering the suburban area west of Chicago, the majority of the stories published by this website were written with an algorithm, according to co-founder Brian Timpone. The Columbia Journalism Review reported in 2018: The story about race-based grading carried no author byline. Instead, the article stated it came from the LGIS News Service. The Times reported that this network also publishes pay-for-play content. Or, in other words, clients can pay to have stories written and published on this network of sites. While reputable news websites would either label this type of content as paid content (or, more likely, simply avoid it altogether), these paid advertisements were published by the Metric Media Foundation as if they were regular news stories. The New York Times reported: No. This rumor can be traced back to an article published on a pink slime news network in May 2022 that mischaracterized a presentation slide about equitable grading. School officials did not say they were preparing to implement any changes to their grading system, much less adjustments that would force teachers to account for a student's race or ethnicity. Furthermore, any potential future changes to how students are graded would apply to all students, not just students of a specific race. OPRF said in a statement: OPRFHS does not, nor has it ever had a plan to, grade any students differently based on race. We reached out to West Cook News with questions about the article, but did not receive a reply by publication time. [From the Snopes archives: Did Oregon Officials Say ‘Showing Work’ in Math Class Is White Supremacism?]
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