Equity in California Public School Grading

know if it's reporting. I think he's just saying it. Elon Musk is actually very is disappointed by the House passage of the BBB, the Big Beautiful Bill. He says it undermines the work he has done as head of his little Doge agency. I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the Doge

team is doing, Musk told Cbsunday morning. While the bill aims to cut one point five trillion dollars in government spending, it also increases the debt limit by four trillion dollars. The US government is more than thirty six trillion in debt. The bill would extend the twenty seventeen tax cuts, introduce new tax cuts such as Trump's signature no tax on tips policy, and add work requirements to medicaid, among other provisions.

I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, said Musk, which is actually a very accurate way of describing it. The bill can be big or it can be beautiful. The bigger it is, the more compromise is needed. I think that's actually a fairly insightful comment, said Musk, who recently stepped down as the head of DOGE. I don't know if it could be both, he added, my personal opinion, So this is an interesting little dynamic.

Elon Musk jumping into the twenty twenty four presidential race wound up being one of the more consequential things that happened him jumping in and throwing his weight behind Donald Trump and his money. A lot of people were sort of wondering, well, is Elon Musk now going to be like a major Republican fundraiser going forward? Is he going

to be a huge contributor? And over the last two weeks it seems like he has decided, no, he is not going to He had a public statement that he was going to be less involved in elections going forward. He stepped down from his position with Doge. So I don't know if there's some disillusionment going on now that Trump's actually president. Maybe Musk is not having quite the level of impact he thought he would have. Maybe the

negative pr hits he's taken. I mean, he kind of positioned himself very much with the right, and people on the left now really despise him even more so than they did prior to the election. Maybe he's sort of disillusioned with that stuff a little. I don't know. Anyway, I thought that was interesting. Anyway, what stuff is there that's good in the BBBB, the big beautiful bill, and what stuff is there that's bad? Well, I want to

talk about some of the bad. One of the things to kind of note is that the numbers game that gets thrown around, so Democrats are taking this very large number of how much the OBBB adds to the deficit. The problem is that the numbers they're throwing around are numbers that would assume the sun setting of the twenty seventeen Trump tax cuts. So after Trump was elected in twenty seventeen. After Trump was elected the first time in

twenty seventeen, he passed around of tax cuts. Those tax cuts had a ten year sunset to them, so by twenty twenty seven, unless something happens, those tax cuts were going to go away. The One Big Beautiful Bill one of the things it does is it locks in place the twenty seventeen Trump tax cuts to ensure that they won't go away. Now, I find it hard to believe that any president was going to let taxes increase. I'm not sure that even Kamala Harris would have allowed taxes

to increase. Just tax increases are not popular and they are damaging to the economy, and I think so. I think one of the ways in which the fiscal impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill is made to look worse is this assumption that you're starting at the baseline of the Trump tax cuts from twenty seventeen are going

to go away. So if those tax cuts are now made permanent, all of a sudden, well, the deficits bigger because we were planning on getting more revenue in because the tax rate was going to go up in twenty twenty seven. Well, realistically, I don't know that that was ever going to happen. Now, it's still a fiscal mess.

And one of the ways in which it's a fiscal mess, honestly, are some of the tax cuts that some of the new tax cuts that are being put in place for the one big beautiful bill, I think the most irresponsible, of which, yes, there are tax cuts that are irresponsible. Yes, not all tax increases are bad. Not all tax cuts are good, sorry, Grover Norquist and other libertarian thinkers. The most irresponsible was increasing the deduction amount for state and

local taxes. All right, So why is that? All right? Republican members of the House from New York especially, we're pushing this whole time to increase what's called the salt deduction and in the state and local tax deduction. In fact, basically politicians from every high tax blue state have been pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing to increase the state and local tax deduction. Chuck Schumer has been pushing and pushing and pushing for the state and local tax deduction.

It's this thing that unites both moderate Republicans and boot licking the rich Democrats. So the Bernie Sanders is of the world hate it, and genuine conservatives also hate it. Why Well, the idea is, when you're paying your federal taxes, if you increase, you create a deduction for state and local taxes, Meaning if you already have to pay a bunch of money in state and local taxes, you can deduct some of that from the amount you're paying in

federal taxes. Which, ultimately, what does that mean. It means basically that it gives greater leeway for blue states to increase their taxes irresponsibly, because well, at the end of the day, it won't actually matter to the taxpayer. If Blue states increase their taxes, they can just deduct that amount from their federal taxes, so it doesn't actually change the tax burden for people who live in blue states.

And so basically increasing the salt deduction is it's basically a way to irresponsibly give Blue states to get out of jail free card for their improvident tax policies. Also, it winds up moving aside the burden of paying federal income tax revenue from people who live in blue states to people who live in red states, So people in Florida don't have a high tax burden, why should they be paying all their federal income taxes? But people in

Blue states therefore have to pay less. I mean, the same person similarly situated in Florida and New York, they might pay the same overall in tax or similar amount overall in taxes, but the New Yorker is paying way less federal tax because they can deduct all their state and local taxes than the Floridian So it's unfair. It's a way to allow Blue states to have high tax regimes. Blue states like California, like New York, to have high

tax regimes, especially high property taxes. And this is a big Basically, a lot of the people pushing for this seemed to be a lot of the people who pushed for it in the One Big Beautiful Bill were Republican members of the House from states like New York. And it seemingly is being pushed because these Republican House members have donors with big houses that they pay a lot in property taxes on, and so as you increase the salt deduction, it allows those donors to pay ultimately less

in taxes. So basically it's an increasing of the deduction limit for state and local taxes. The Trump tax cuts in twenty seventeen actually set the deduction rate at a fairly low level. I think you could only deduct like the first ten thousand dollars, and now I think it's getting bumped way up. So I don't like that, and that's going to result in less revenue into the federal coffers.

And it's basically, again, it's offloading the federal tax burden, the tax revenue burden off of blue state taxpayers onto red state taxpayers and letting blue states off the hook for their stupid policies. So that's one thing about the one big beautiful bill that I don't like. But let's I mean, let's remember the politics at play here. Mike Johnson got the bill passed literally by a vote of two hundred and fifteen to two hundred and fourteen. That's

how narrow the margins are. Okay, Republicans only have like a three vote majority in the whole House of Representatives. That's it, like three votes. So Johnson just could not afford to lose I think he was basically he could only afford to lose like three Republican votes, so he had Thomas Massey didn't vote for it because Thomas Massey is a true believer in fiscal responsibility and just said, I'm not going to vote for this. It's going to increase the deficit too much, it's going to lead to

too much deficit, spending too much debt. Not going to vote for it. So he lost Thomas Massey. He couldn't afford to lose those New York Republicans who want, you know, and increased salt deduction. So he had to put it in or else it just didn't pass. And Trump wants a thing passed. That's clearly Trump's priority. So often that's Trump's priority is get something passed, get a win on the board. That seems to be the Trump priority. And I will say this for Trump, he did demonstrate I think,

real leadership on this. You know, he went and sat down with members of the House. Apparently he told some of these Republicans from New York who were pushing for the salt deduction, like, this is what you're getting, that's it. Drop it, just forget it, and you're going to vote for this. So and he's really the only Republican who can do that. He's really the only Republican who can talk to these guys and tell them in those kinds of blunt terms and have them listen to him because

he's got so much political weight within with Republican voters. Now, one of the good things in the bill is the defunding of abortion providers. And when we return, I want to and I will say, I want to give a lot of credit to Mike Johnson for this, and I guess ultimately to President Trump because there were a lot of there was a lot of hand ringing over this and a lot of liberal leaning Republicans who did not want to defund abortion providers, and they got it done anyway,

all right. So when we were and I want to talk about that, what it means to quote defund planned parently, what it means to quote defund abortion and actually it might even be more important is defunding abortion providing health insurance plans. That is next on the John Girardi Show.

There's a lot to dislike in the One Big, Beautiful Bill, but there's a couple of things to really like, and a lot of things that social conservatives have been cheering, particularly defunding federal reimbursement for various kinds of transgender interventions and not just transgender interventions for children. That was one of the debates, apparently, was our federal health insurance program is going to fund transgender interventions, all transgender inventions, no

transgender inventions, just transgender interventions for adults. Apparently the funal version of the House bill landed at no transgender interventions are going to be funded. So that's a great win. And I want to turn just quickly given that it's kind of my subject matter area about how the One Big Beautiful Bill defunds playing parented. So again, for those who don't know, the One Big Beautiful Bill is the

so called Reconciliation Bill. It's a budgetary bill. Presidents I think only get a shot at doing it once every two years. So realistically, given that Republicans I think are likely to lose the House in twenty twenty six, they only get one shot at this, and so Trump is trying to pack as much of his agenda into this bill as possible. One of the benefits of the Reconciliation Bill, it's kind of tied to budgetary stuff, is that it does not require a sixty vote majority in the Senate

in order to pass. Most things require a sixty vote majority in the Senate to pass most normal pieces of legislation. This does not so that that is a massive procedural hurdle that Republicans don't have to worry about. They have fifty three votes in the Senate, so they can. It'll actually be easier to pass stuff in the Senate than there is than it is to pass stuff in the House, given how razor thin the majority is for Republicans in

the House. Now, defunding Planned Parenthood, what does that mean? Chiefly, what it means is abortion providers like Planned Parenthood, and Planned Parenthood's kind of the biggest of these nationally, but there are others. Okay, there's, for example, in California, there's this entity called Family Planning Associates. It's kind of like the rc Cola to Planned Parenthood being Coca Cola. It's just California based. They have I think it's something like

twenty clinics, but it's just based in California. So these kinds of providers are going to be quote defunded. How most of the federal funding that abortion providers get they get through Medicaid. Medicaid is the federal health insurance program that was originally designed for certain kinds of groups who are sort of more knee groups like disabled people, disabled adults. Eventually that those categories got expanded to include pregnant women.

To now in this post Obamacare world, Medicaid is basically just health insurance for lower income people. If you're at or under I think in California it's one hundred and thirty eight percent of the federal poverty line you qualify

for Medicaid. That's it. A ton of Planned Parenthood's patients therefore are Medicaid beneficiaries, and in California that's medical So a lot of the revenue Planned Parenthood gets nationally, and it's probably at this point it's well over half a billion dollars per year comes from they provide a service to someone who has Medicaid, they get reimbursed for that service,

So that's the federal funding that they get. Now, federal dollars don't go to Planned Parenthood directly for their abortion services,

which is their chief revenue generating service. But so Planned Parenti's not getting federal money for abortions that they do, except for abortions in instances of rape or incest, although there are also some pretty serious lingering questions from when the House investigated this about nine years ago about whether Planned Parenthood engages in various kinds of medicaid fraud to try to get abortions paid for by federal medicaid that are not instances of rape or incest. And at the

end of the day, money is fungible. If you know, if I've got twenty dollars in my pocket and my mom hands me a twenty dollars bill and says, don't use this twenty dollars bill to go to the movies, well, okay, I can use the twenty dollars. I now have the leeway because my mom gave me that twenty dollar bill. I can use the twenty dollar bill that's currently in my pocket to go to the movies. Money is fungible. If you get a bunch of money in this pot over here for this, it frees up money that you

could use for other stuff over here. The fact that Planned Parenthood's getting five hundred million, excuse me, at least five hundred million dollars per year, and I don't want to just focus on Planned parent All these different abortion providers are getting tons and tons of money for non abortion services. It frees up money for them to provide abortion services. And I think, at the end of the day, I don't want my tax dollars to fund entities whose

chief business is providing abortions. I don't want to subsidize their loss leaders so that they can focus more time, money, resources, donor funding on their chief revenue generating service of abortion. And that's exactly what's happening. Planned Parenthood's non abortion services

are often loss leaders to help their abortion business. If Planned Parenthood gives out contraceptives to ten nineteen year olds, the contraceptives they give out, any contraceptive has a certain built in failure rate to it if you use it perfectly. They also know that nineteen year olds are unreliable and won't use birth control perfectly, leading to the effectiveness going down. So if they give out birth control a kind of loss leader service, but hey, they get a little federal

reimbursement for providing it. If they give out contraceptives to ten nineteen year olds who are lower income, at least one or two of them are coming back for abortions, and then they make up whatever they lost with the other eight. Okay, that's that's the mo that's the game plan, and your federal tax payer dollars are paying for it. And in California, your California tax payer dollars are paying for the abortion itself. So what the One Big Beautiful

bill does is it defunds Planned Parent. It basically says entities like Planned Parenthood are not eligible for federal reimbursement under Medicaid. Entities like Planned Parenthood that are providing abortions are not eligible to receive reimbursement as part of the Medicaid program. That's a huge deal, and I don't know how Planned Parenthood is going to necessarily survive from it. They have a lot of donor support, it's true, but I don't know that they've got enough donor support year

over year. That's five hundred million, five hundred million, five hundred million, five hundred million year over year over year to sustain the loss of federal revenue, especially at a time when Planned parent it's not doing so hot. So I think it is a huge deal if this is retained in the Senate, And I really commend Mike Johnson and Donald Trump for keeping this in when there were a bunch of wobbly liberal leaning Republicans in the House who were like, oh, we don't want to do a

defunding of planned parenthood. Here they stood firm. So, you know, I deeply appreciate Mike Johnson kind of holding the line on that front. As well as taking out federal funding for Obamacare subsidized health insurance plants that cover abortion. That's also going to be huge. A ton of Obamacare subsidized plants, not Medicaid, but health insurance plans through the Obamacare exchange

ranges that are subsidized by the federal government. Our federal dollars were subsidizing tons of tons of health insurance plans that included abortion coverage. That's going to get cut off by the one big beautiful bill, and that might be maybe an even more significant thing than just cutting off funding for planned parenthood. So those are huge, huge pro

life accomplishments in the OBBB as we call it. All right, when we return a new plan for how to grade students in San Francisco Unified School District, this is sure to be a massive success grading for equity. Next on the John Girardi Show, there's a fascinating story about San Francisco schools. San Francisco public schools, that it's highlighting the worst examples of staff. That is, it's going to be more intensely in San Francisco, less intensely across the whole

state of California, I think is ultimately what's happening. One of the things we're seeing is the application of the equity concept to education. And what is equity? Okay, equity the actual dictionary definition word equity is nothing bad. It means something close to equality, fairness of treatment, et cetera. The way the word which, by the way, that's the annoying thing when people say you conservative the pose dei, So which part of DEI do you oppose? Diversity, equity

or inclusion? You don't think people should be treated equitably? And I would respond to such a critique equity is the thing I object to the modern twenty first century, twenty twenties political use of the term equity. That is what I oppose. I don't mind diversity, I don't mind inclusion. Those words sort of don't have like really precise meanings at this point and can mean things that are fine.

But equity in the modern sense has a very specific kind of meaning that I disagree with equity is basically an equality of outcomes. Mandating forcing brute forcing, an equality of outcomes if the outcomes don't reflect whatever kind of categorization you are looking at, the breakdown based on race, or sexuality, or gender whatever. If say, the end results don't match the breakdown on the basis of race, gender, whatever,

then something inequitable happened. If African Americans constitute twelve percent of the population of a city and police arrests involve fifteen percent African Americans rather than twelve percent, inequity, there is racism in the system somewhere. The only reason why your arrest percentage would be higher than the breakdown of the actual population as a whole is racism. It's because

cops are persecuting black people inequity. If black kids are performing lower on SATs than the average, well, racism is in the system somewhere, the historical lingering effects of slavery, or the historical lingering effects of this, that or the other, and therefore equity means taking artificial steps to flatten out those results. That's the idea. So that's the idea of equity.

How is this being applied to California? Well, One of the ways we're starting to see it applied at a statewide level is through the elimination of higher track math courses for high performing students. So instead of having like a gifted kid track for math, we're going to just not offer those. And why are we doing that? Because those gifted track math sort of pipelines, we're being dominated by Asian kids than White kids, with a disproportionately low

representation of Latino kids and Black kids. That's the rub Okay, that's the problem. That's the problem, as California public educators saw it. So their solution was not, gosh, how do we help African American kids to perform better? What are we doing in inner city schools that are predominantly African American? Okay? Are there certain kinds of cultural difficulties that we're dealing with,

you know? And maybe some of it And by the way, I'm not denying that some of the social ills that you see within African American communities are I'm not denying that many of them are probably in various ways, in various capacities, partly the lingering effects of racism. Why are African Americans predominantly concentrated in Fresno. In Southwest Fresno, well, it was because of redlining. It was because banks would not offer African American perkins loans for houses in any

neighborhoods other than Southwest Fresno. They wouldn't let them get homes in North Fresno. So they were sort of secluded into more industrial concentrated areas, places where it was not as nice to live, and African Americans did lose out

on certain kinds of generational wealth creation. Now, a lot of that redlining stuff and banks not allowing people to buy homes in nicer parts of town, that stuff ended in you know, after some of the Civil Rights Acts were passed by the sixties and seventies, such legal restrictions were no longer such kinds of legal discrimination was no longer technically allowed. Was it still practiced privately? Maybe? I don't know, but I do think there are reasons why

to this day, African you know, they're lingering bad effects. Now. I would say also though, that at various kinds of liberal programs that led to various incentives that led to the breakdown of the African American family probably had have more to do with present day bad socioeconomic conditions for a lot of African Americans than redlining practices of you know, over over sixty years ago at this point. Nonetheless, so California statewide, we're going with this idea of we're just

flattening things out. Don't allow smarter kids to be smarter, don't even give them the opportunity to be smarter, because too many Asian kids are doing too well, too many white kids are doing too well. Which, by the way, Latanos keep getting treated as a disadvantaged minority. Just want to talk about this, Honestly, Latinos have not always been treated well in this country. Totally agree, But after a couple of generations, Latinos seem to integrate into have integrated

into American culture quite well. I think there's more. I guess I don't have a ton of stats about this, but I think there's more intermarriage between Latinos and whites. Latinos don't have the history of racism or the same kinds of like segregated disadvantages that African Americans had. I guess I don't understand why there is. And I say

this basically as comparing Latinos to say the Chinese. I don't know that there's too much different between the as far as being treated disadvantageously and being singled out for racial characteristics. There's not too much difference between the Chinese and Latinos. Yes, their experiences are different, Yes, their immigrant

experiences are different. There's a lot of differences. But I don't know that the Chinese were, Like, it's not like the Trent and Chinese were welcomed into the United States with wide open, loving arms, or the Japanese or other

kinds of East Asians. Yet basically all these equity programs that we see, they basically have taken the posture of oh, Asians aren't Asians were never treated badly that there's no historic legacy of racism that we have to account for with Asians that have to be corrected in uh, you know equity stuff. In fact, we can actively discriminate against Asians. I'm just saying, like, like, I think Latinos had a very hard time. Many Latinos at a very hard time

integrating into America. Asians did also, all right, Remember in World War Two where we shoved basically every Japanese person into you know, camps because we were afraid that every person of Japanese descent in the United States was like a sleeper cell agent for the emperor or something was gonna aid the Japanese invasion of the West Coast, so we shoved everybody into internment camps. It's not like Asians

had the easiest time of it. Like the rationale, the equity rationale for giving advantageous treatment to African Americans, to various kinds of minorities, is that we treated that, We disadvantaged them in the past, and therefore the way to correct that is to advantageously favor them in the present. Past discrimination has to be corrected by present day positive discrimination. That's the theory. That's the anti racist equity theory. I don't know why Asians don't get to be the beneficiaries

of that anyway. Here is how equity is coming to San Francisco. This is from the Voice of San Francisco. Without seeking approval of the San Francisco Board of Education. Superintendent of School's Maria Sue plans to unveil a new grading for Equity plan on Tuesday that will go into effect this fall at fourteen high schools and cover over ten thousand students. The school district is already negotiating with

an outside consultant to train teachers in August. In a system that awards a passing C grade to a score as low as forty one on a one hundred point exam, not for an intrepid school board member, the drastic change in grading, with implications for college admissions and career readiness, would have gone unnoticed and unexplained. It is buried in a three word phrase on the last page of a PowerPoint presentation embedded in the school board meeting's twenty five

page agenda. The plan comes during the last week of the spring semester, well parents are assessing the impact of over one hundred million dollars in budget reductions and deciding whether to remain in the public schools this fall. While the school district acknowledges that parent aversion to this grading approach is typically high and understands the need for quote vigilant communication outreached parents has been minimal and maybe nonexistent.

The school district's Office of Equity homepage does not mention it, and a page containing the f you San Francisco Unified School District definition of equity has not been updated in almost three years. So basically, this is what this is what they're gonna do. They're gonna just change all let's see. Okay, I got it, I got it here, all right. It eliminates homework and weekly tests from counting towards semester grades. So you don't get graded for homework, you don't get

graded for weekly tests. Okay, so why do homework? Why study for weekly tests? It allows students to take their final exam multiple times? Okay, so why study for it the first time? You know you're gonna get a Gimme take it the first time, get a sense of what you're supposed to study, and then go again. It will convert all B grades into a's and all f's into c's. So if this is the other thing, if this policy passes,

First of all, the goal of this is equity. Clearly it's a flattening of results so that there's no to the school district embarrassing breakdown between minority students and non minorities, well, I should say certain minorities and certain other minorities. They don't want the Asian kids to be dominating everybody else, so they the point of this grading system seems to be, we want a flattening. Really, what it's doing is it's gonna punish and lessen the weight of the accomplishments of

the high performing kids at their expense. They're gonna benefit the low performing kids. And it makes me wonder if a kid from San Francisco Unified School District is applying for colleges and so, oh I got a four point oh GPA, what's the college gonna say anymore? Oh, that's nice. Any dumb dumb can get a four point zero in San Francisco Unified. If you get a B, you get an A. I mean, the impact of this is going

to be terrible. Really, it's just going to hurt all the high performing kids, and the beneficiary is going to be liberals to make them feel better that other minority groups are not doing as worse as they actually are. When we return, a storm is brewing in California an at Buchanan High School for the statewide track meet where a boy is going to be competing against girls next

on the John Girardi Show. So this weekend, the CIF, the California Interscholastic Federation rather which governs high school sports in California, is having their big track and field meet. It's going to be at Buchanan High School, and there is a biological boy who is competing in a bunch of the events and kicking all the girls butts. It has now gotten to the point where the Trump administration is actively threatening Gavin Newsom threatening the state of California

if they allow this boy to participate. The CIF has responded by basically saying, girls who got bumped from qualifying by this person will be allowed to participate. But I'm going to be covering this quite a bit for the rest of this week. That'll do it, John, girladies show see you next time on Power Talk