> I just don't understand how this plan promotes equity.
Well, it can turn every one into a bad pupil :-)
I wish people would take a look at what happened in other countries which followed a somehow similar path of dumbing down courses and lowering requirements.
Here is what 25 years of dumbing down achieved in France:
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xHQ532qyiek/XJ8kH-PnVTI/AAAAAAAAH...
This extremely telling graph about the level in the end of primary school is taken from an official note from the Ministry of Education itself: https://www.education.gouv.fr/media/22373/download
It is about maths (calculus) but we have somewhat similar drops in other matters, notably in French language.
You can easily see on the graph how the above average pupils from now perform as bas as the below average pupils from 30 years ago. Only a small part of pupils perform as the average pupil used to perform. You can also note that the 'excellent' pupils have basically disappeared: there is no bump (and no long tail) on the right of the curve any more.
Furthermore, every social category performs much worse: http://centre-alain-savary.ens-lyon.fr/CAS/documents/documen...
Not a single category got something positive about it. The lower social classes for which this dumbing down was intended actually suffer badly from it; the upper classes didn't find ways to escape it either.
It is estimated that when they reach the end of high school, pupils' level is late by 1 or 2 years (depending on the matter) compared to what it was in the last two decades of the XXth century (when high school access was already expanded massively, we're not talking about the 50s-60s-70s). And yet the high-school pupils are basically automatically all given the degree: 95% success rate compared to 75% in the 90s (and in those days that was after many had repeated 1 or more years, which they don't any more, they almost all pass all classes automatically, even though they didn't assimilate the necessary knowledge and understanding to follow next classes ).
Another troublesome consequence is that it propagates. Very recently, universities, which for a long time tried to keep the same level as before, started to dumb down their courses an lower their requirements for passing years too, because the first years of university had become a slaughterhouse for a mass of students who were coming with a completely insufficient level (the high-school graduation serves as an automatic entry ticket for universities, there is no entrance exam). So the same effect as in primary and secondary education is about to happen, and selection is pushed to the Master level, but that last barrier will probably very soon break too (we already hear complaints about it).