Can states do anything about grade inflation?
Happy Friday, folks. This week, just about every elite outlet ran an opinion piece on education: Jorge Elorza in the New York Times, NAGB chair Mark White in the Washington Post, Daniel Lipinski in the Wall Street Journal, and Jessica Winter in the New Yorker. We round ‘em all up here, along with takes from Freddie deBoer, David Wakelyn, and Robin Lake. But first: the perennial yet compelling matter of grade inflation.
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Grade inflation is having a bit of a moment. The most recent round of recriminations came via the scandal at the University of California-San Diego, when the math department reported that one in eight incoming students needed remediation—sometimes at the grade school level—even though those students got A’s in their high school math classes.
Then, a few weeks ago, Jeff Denning published a new study, featured in the Hechinger Report, showing the negative long-term consequences of low grading standards. As grading got easier, students learned less, they graduated at lower rates, and even earned less as adults.
None of this is news to those of us at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, as grade inflation is a topic with which we’ve been obsessed for many years. Way back in the pre-Covid days, we commissioned a couple of great studies from academic superstar Seth Gershenson. One looked at high school grade inflation trends over a ten-year period, and another looked at the relationship between teachers’ grading standards and student achievement.
What Seth found, in line with other studies, is that grading is indeed getting easier over time, and that teachers who are tougher graders help their students learn more—not just in their own classes, but even when those students move on to the next grade level.
(This, by the way, points to two different definitions of grade inflation. Once is about changes over time—how it’s gotten easier to get, say, an A than before. The other is about low grading standards in general—that it’s simply too easy to get an A.)
And Seth’s studies were before the Covid-era craze around “grading reform,” a.k.a. “grading for equity,” which brought some bonkers practices to thousands of American schools, like the “no zeros” policy (giving students 50 out of 100 even if they didn’t turn in an assignment or show up for a test), or eliminating points for homework or class discussion, or giving kids unlimited exam retakes. All of which can easily lead to inflated grades unless implemented with (rare) countervailing reforms to keep grading standards high.
None of this is good for kids. If it’s super easy to get an A, most students won’t put in much effort (despite what the ridiculously naïve “intrinsic motivation” people might tell you). And if it’s too easy to get at least a D, some students won’t put in any effort at all. And effort is most of the ball game when it comes to student learning. During class, when doing homework, and when studying for tests, kids have to actually try and exert intellectual muscle. It’s a cliché to say that learning doesn’t happen by osmosis, but it happens to be true.
Nor is this a happy situation for teachers. Those who become known as tough graders are rarely rewarded for it. If anything, they will hear complaints from students and parents, which might lead to complaints from administrators. We don’t want to hurt our snowflakes’ chances at getting into top colleges! Or, at the other end of the academic spectrum, we don’t want to keep marginal students from graduating from high school at all. “Just go ahead and give the kid an A, just go ahead and pass the kid”—so teachers say they hear too often from their principals.
Is this a solvable problem?
We know from Seth’s analyses that the big variation in grading standards is not school to school, but teacher to teacher. It’s akin to variations in teacher effectiveness writ large, with the greatest disparities happening in classrooms right next to each other, rather than across schools or across the state.
What that means, then, is that school and district leaders are well positioned to do something about this issue. They can set very clear standards for how grading should work schoolwide and districtwide. They can have teachers grade papers and tests and assignments of their peers’ students, and vice versa, to encourage more honest, accurate, and tougher grading. They could look at data from teacher to teacher and school to school to see if grading standards are being applied evenly and consistently (by comparing student scores on external test with student grades).
But if you are a governor, a state superintendent, or a legislator and you want to do something about this problem, what levers do YOU tug?
Honestly: This gets a lot harder.
Of course, there’s testing. Many of us reformers believe that test scores are the antidote to grade inflation because at least those scores can be trusted and are less susceptible to inflation. (Unless states decide to make their own tests easier or give most schools an A or B in their accountability system, which, unfortunately, is also becoming common. So states should start by not doing that!)
But test scores are not as effective as we’d like to believe when it comes to communicating to parents how well their children are learning. Years of research by Learning Heroes demonstrates that parents simply trust grades more than test scores. So even if the state reports that their child is not proficient, parents tend to think their son or daughter is doing fine as long as they are getting good grades from teachers. And most parents don’t know that, because of grade inflation, a B is no longer all that high a grade—or a sign that their kid is on grade level or on track.
So what else might states do about grade inflation?
One idea is to get rid of any incentives in state policy that might encourage inflated grades. I’m thinking about college scholarships that are based primarily on student GPAs, as happens in Florida and Georgia. Or direct admission policies that admit students directly into state universities based only on their high school GPAs. These are undoubtedly well intended, but they create clear disincentives for schools and teachers to be tough graders.
Another idea would be to ensure that teacher evaluation systems, where they still exist, credit teachers for being tough graders.
There’s also transparency. Cincinnati Public Schools recently adopted a policy, for example, that will show students’ test scores next to their grades on their report cards. Maybe this will at least help parents know about and notice discrepancies. Perhaps states could mandate that all districts do this or offer incentives to systems to try it.
States might do the same thing for teachers, sending them data showing how tough a grader they are compared to other teachers teaching at the same level or teaching the same courses at the school, district, and state level. I bet a lot of teachers aren’t even aware that they are easy graders.
And states could try to ban “no zeros” policies and the like, though I’m not really sure how that would work. But at minimum, they could put out guidance to schools districts about the importance of high grading standards. And when intervening in chronically-low-performing schools, such as the bottom 5 percent of schools identified under ESSA, they could make sure that the school’s grading standards are something their teams look at.
Those are my ideas. I’d love to hear yours. Because grade inflation is a large and growing problem, one that’s readily understandable by parents and the public but needs attention and effort if we’re going to turn it around. Please send me your suggestions by replying to this newsletter or emailing me at SCHOOLED [at] fordhaminstitute [dot] org.
Jorge Elorza makes a full-throated case that Democrats should embrace school choice, in all its varieties, in the New York Times. Which is great, except that the op-ed could also have been written by any choice-supporting Republican, which might kill DFER’s potential to have sway within the Democratic Party. At the least, IMO, Jorge should draw some lines, such as prioritizing choice for disadvantaged kids and demanding academic accountability. He hints at those policies when he writes about setting “guardrails to ensure access and standards.” But to bring more Dems along, he’s going to have to get a lot more explicit and attack Republicans who aren’t putting such guardrails in place for the program’s they’re enacting.
Meanwhile, Daniel Lipinski takes to the Wall Street Journal to attack “Governors Who Refuse Education Dollars.” He’s right that it’s disappointing—and politically dumb—that a handful of Democrats have already said no to Trump’s education tax credit scholarship initiative, even before the Treasury Department has published the final regulations.
Continuing with the education op-eds: NAGB chair and GOP state legislator Mark White writes in the Washington Post on the impact of Tennessee raising its standards—way back in 2007! Still, I’m here for it.
In 2007, after poor results revealed we were failing our kids, state legislators got busy and raised Tennessee’s K–12 standards, aligned classroom practices to those standards, and overhauled our state tests to make them more rigorous.
The result? It took time, but between 2011 and 2015, Tennessee was the fastest-improving state in the nation on NAEP assessments. And for the first time in 2024, Tennessee ranked in the top 25 states for proficiency in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading.
Who says you need a timely hook to get published in a national newspaper?
Next up: Jessica Winter examines “New York City’s Gifted Problem” in the New Yorker. “Four mayors in a row have inflamed the debate over gifted-and-talented programs,” reads her sub-head. “Why does G & T stir such strong emotions?” That’s a great, interesting question, but unfortunately (if predictably) she gives a very New Yorker-y, mainstream-lefty answer. Reference the gifted-ed field’s connection to eugenics? Check. Describe G & T as a tool of racial segregation? Yup. Still, she’s right that New York’s program suffers from a “scarcity mindset.” She also ends on the right note:
“I think we should forget about labelling kids as gifted,” [Teachers College professor James] Borland told me. “It’s become meaningless. Our field has been existential rather than educational, in that we ask the question, Is this child gifted? That’s the wrong question. We should be asking, What does this child need?”
Freddie deBoer wasn’t happy with the New Yorker piece, either, but for a different reason. Namely, he thinks Jessica mischaracterized the research on gifted and talented programs:
In the context of exam schools specifically, which is what the piece largely concerns, the evidence is very strong: once you correct for pre-entry ability, such schools do not offer any quantitative advantage over regular high schools from the same cities or districts…
The most obvious citation here is Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Joshua Angrist, and Parag Pathak’s NBER paper “The Elite illusion: Achievement Effects at Boston and New York Exam Schools.” They find that, looking at the famed selective high schools in both cities, “there is little effect of an exam school education on achievement even for the highest-ability marginal applicants and for applicants to the right of admissions cutoffs… the intense competition for exam school seats does not appear to be justified by improved learning for a broad set of students.”
A follow up from the same researchers focused on students further from the cut point, which means there’s more statistical adjustment and more noise. Still, the result was consistent: there’s no quantitative reason to believe that the students who go to exam schools are seeing any systematic advantage for doing so.
Freddie is right about the existence of those studies, but he’s wrong to conclude that they settle the matter. The effect on marginal students says little for the effect on everyone else. And the study on students further from the admissions cutoff isn’t definitive. Even the authors acknowledge that it rests on assumptions that might be reasonable, but might also be wrong.
More importantly, the research on other advanced education programs is much stronger. The most obvious citation here is David Card’s and Laura Giuliano’s NBER paper, “Does Gifted Education Work? For Which Students?” From David’s and Laura’s abstract:
We use data from a large urban school district to study the impacts of assignment to separate gifted classrooms on three distinct groups of fourth grade students: non-disadvantaged students with IQ scores ≥130; subsidized lunch participants and English language learners with IQ scores ≥116; and students who miss the IQ thresholds but scored highest among their school/grade cohort in state-wide achievement tests in the previous year. Regression discontinuity estimates based on the IQ thresholds for the first two groups show no effects on reading or math achievement at the end of fourth grade.
In contrast, estimates based on test score ranks for the third group show significant gains in reading and math, concentrated among lower-income and black and Hispanic students. The math gains persist to fifth grade and are also reflected in fifth grade science scores. Our findings suggest that a separate classroom environment is more effective for students selected on past achievement - particularly disadvantaged students who are often excluded from gifted and talented programs.
Take that, Freddie!
Perhaps the best part of Freddie’s post, though, is the following digression, which acknowledges that WE REFORMERS ARE WINNING AGAIN.
Right now, after a half decade or so of a fallow period, the neoliberal ed reform movement is furiously fighting back, and because our system has no ability to provide for those who don’t have monetizable skills or abilities under late capitalism, they’re finding a receptive audience in elite publications. The new Substack “The Argument” is a reflection of this retrenchment; so are a mountain of recent opinion pieces like [Jorge Elorza’s New York Times op-ed]. They’re throwing their back behind the effort to take us back to 2012 and the height of the failed bipartisan reform consensus.
Ignore the mean words. The tide is starting to turn!
Granted, none of that may matter if AI wipes us all out—or turns us into unemployed serfs. Robin Lake is sounding the alarm again, urging that we pay more attention to the dramatic recent advancements in the major LLMs.
For those of us in education, the temptation is either to panic or to shrug. Both would be mistakes.
Higher education, K–12, and industry will need to move more quickly and more deliberately to help people navigate disrupted career pathways. In the “Big Blur” piece that Joel Vargas wrote for our Phoenix Rising series and in CRPE’s 25th Anniversary papers, we argued that the boundaries between high school, college, and career are dissolving. That was before agentic AI entered the mainstream.
If entry-level white-collar jobs begin to contract—if internships, junior coding roles, entry-level analysts, and other traditional on-ramps to desirable careers shrink—then our entire talent pipeline is affected. Where will young people build experience? How will they signal competence? How will they learn by doing?
Robin doesn’t pretend to know how exactly we should respond, but suggests, among other ideas, that:
CTE and pathways designers ask themselves whether they are preparing students for jobs that are going to be automated out of existence.
High school teachers and leaders talk to students about what they’re seeing.
College and career advisors get a lot more aggressive about using AI to give helpful, accurate, and personalized direction to kids.
Finally, in an opinion piece in The 74, David Wakelyn writes one helluva lede:
On January, 28, 2025, the U.S. Department of Education released 2024 NAEP results, showing that 41 percent of fourth graders read below Basic. That’s 95,000 more than in 2022, bringing the total to 1.6 million who struggle to make simple inferences from the text as they read. For elementary students from low-income families in ten states, the news was especially bad: They were reading 1.5 grade levels lower than similar students a decade ago.
The following day, an Army helicopter collided with an airliner in the skies over Washington, D.C., killing 67 people—the first mass fatality aviation accident in the U.S. in nearly 16 years. The rarity of such disasters reflects aviation’s remarkable safety record: Flying at 30,000 feet is safer than driving or walking.
What separates these two disasters is how differently aviation and education learn from failure.
So true! David suggests three lessons we could learn from the aviation field:
1. Create forums for deeply analyzing what went wrong.
2. Build a culture of psychological safety.
3. Encourage school leaders to think in systems.
“The National Labor Relations Board found that a 2024 state law means that Lycee Francais teachers and their union no longer fall under its jurisdiction. The decision could impact all charter schools in New Orleans and across the state.” —Safura Syed, Verite News
Veteran teachers report disturbing increases in student misbehavior, including among very young children. Despite consensus that the problems are widespread, teachers and school leaders diverge when it comes to solutions, with some focusing on affirmation and restorative practices instead of giving teachers control over their own classrooms. “I’m just one person,” a first-grade teacher tells Jackie Mader. “My real purpose is to teach them content… I’m not trained in psychology. I’m not trained in social work.” —Hechinger Report
Relatedly, in a recent survey, a large share of kindergarten teachers report that today’s young students—babies during the pandemic—are behind in literacy and less socially and emotionally ready for school. Nick Gaehde calls for “a new literacy ecosystem” that prioritizes family and home engagement. —The 74
Education Freedom Accounts are among the most generous education savings accounts in the country. Jessica Ma reports on why many of Dallas-Fort Worth’s top private schools—where autonomy is a priority and tuition far exceeds the $10,500 ESA—are hesitant to accept the funds. —The Dallas Morning News
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Does incentivizing top teachers to move to struggling schools raise student achievement? Matt Barnum speaks with Matthew Kraft, co-author of a new paper reexamining how the “Talent Transfer Initiative,” a federal program paying large bonuses to teachers who moved, impacted teacher performance over time. Student test scores did rise, but the transferring teachers were less effective than in their prior schools. Matt Kraft calls on policymakers to “move beyond thinking about teacher effectiveness as a fixed characteristic,” and instead think about teaching as “a team sport.” —Chalkbeat
Teacher effectiveness as a fixed characteristic is on Meredith Coffey’s mind as well, sharing her reflections on teacher improvement over time for the Fordham Flypaper blog. She draws from Fordham and Learning Policy Institute’s recent brief, which looks at whether the returns to teacher experience fizzle out.
Robert Pondiscio
Glad to see Jordan Adams write about the frankly insane thumb-on-the-scale advantage school districts give to friendly candidates when elections (and here in New York, budget votes) are held exclusively on school grounds. It’s like making Mar-a-Lago the only polling place on election day. I wrote about this after my own failed run for my local school board.
I'm a fan of banning the "no zeros” policies. Not sure what that would look like practically either, but my intuition says thats a winner. I vote the worst performing states try it first, *cough cough* Oklahoma, because Lord knows doing anything is better than what they are doing now.