ASU dean writes book alleging that grading students’ writing is 'white supremacy'

Asao Inoue — who teaches first-year writing courses and serves as associate dean for Academic Affairs, Equity, and Inclusion — wrote Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom, in which he advocates for a system of grading that circumvents merit.

Inoue — whose “research focuses on antiracist and social justice theory” — explains that his book discusses “grading literacy performances more broadly” — namely, by judging “final course grades purely by the labor students complete, not by any judgments of the quality of their writing.”

“While the qualities of student writing is still at the center of the classroom and feedback, it has no bearing on the course grade,” he explains. “Why take our judgments of quality out of the tabulation of course grades and progress in a course? Because all grading and assessment exist within systems that uphold singular, dominant standards that are racist, and White supremacist when used uniformly.”

“Grading, because it requires a single, dominant standard, is a racist and White supremacist practice,” he adds.

Inoue describes his labor-based system as a tool to enact his “social justice agenda” in his “classroom’s antiracist writing assessment ecologies.”

'College degree as participation trophy' sounds like a great reason to defund higher ed. Fuck it, defund higher ed, defund secondary ed, defund Mister Ed.