Fixing grade inflation through incentives and transparency
Hi, friends. Those of us in the northeast are digging out again. At this rate, my ninth grader might still be in school on the Fourth of July.
Today we round up some of the great comments y’all sent in about how to curb grade inflation, including thoughts from Doug Lemov, Robert Pondiscio, Vlad Kogan, Meredith Coffey, and Tim Daly; discuss what the U.S. can learn from England’s super-successful reforms; and catch up on recent takes by Jessica Baghian, Harry Patrinos, Jill Barshay, and more.
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Last week I asked “Can states do anything about grade inflation?” Lots of you said, “Oh yes.”
Today and again on Friday, I’ll print some of the best responses, in which I find four big ideas:
Remove the incentives that encourage easy A’s (and D’s).
Promote transparency so parents can perceive the grade inflation for themselves.
Address grade inflation directly through state and/or district policy.
Use the bully pulpit to change the culture around grading.
I’ll cover the first two today, the others on Friday.
1. Remove the incentives that encourage easy A’s
Let’s start with incentives—and disincentives. Robert Pondiscio says it well: There are few reasons today for teachers to be tough graders:
Forgive me if this sounds cynical, but if you spend 30-odd years shifting the accountability for bad grades from mostly on students to mostly on teachers, I don’t think we have the right—or the credibility—to wring our hands over grade inflation. Functionally, we demanded it. Perhaps there are professional benefits to teachers to do something other than to give an easy A. But if so, I cannot conceive of one.
Vlad Kogan agrees and says “the first step to addressing grade inflation is not making it worse!”
My perspective on grade inflation is heavily influenced by my experience in higher ed. At this level, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that heavy (indeed, almost exclusive) reliance on student surveys to evaluate teaching is a major driver of grade inflation. I’ve written before that the push to use student surveys in schools, as is done under the much-celebrated Dallas teacher evaluation system, risks bringing the same dynamics to the K–12 level.
Evaluating teachers based on student feedback is an obvious way to discourage tough grading, but there are other more subtle incentives at play. So argues my colleague Meredith Coffey:
Perhaps a small point, but I think an important one: There are a number of intra- and interdistrict enrollment systems that require students to attain and maintain a certain minimum GPA. One consequence is that teachers at the receiving schools are incentivized to inflate grades.
For example: I taught at a traditional public school with a massive IB program. Students were permitted to transfer from elsewhere in the district, but they had to maintain a B average. I taught IB Language & Literature to 11th graders, and there was enormous pressure to make sure their grades met the minimum threshold, so that they wouldn’t effectively get kicked out of school. And honestly, it was a tough call: Do I give Aidan the C+ he has earned, or do I tweak the numbers so that he gets the B-, doesn’t have to transfer schools just for senior year, and can stay on our lacrosse team and hopefully get that college scholarship?
It’s typically districts that establish any GPA requirements for transfer, but I would think that states could prohibit or at least discourage this practice as part of their regulations around intra- and/or interdistrict enrollment. But I don’t know how politically palatable that would be. It seems that a lot of the rationale for these GPA requirements is about protecting school performance metrics and families concerned about who’s coming into their kids’ school.
2. Promote transparency so parents can perceive the grade inflation for themselves
Another way to fight grade inflation is through data. I mentioned last week a policy in Cincinnati to print student test scores next to their grades on report cards. Bibb Hubbard informed me that Tennessee recently adopted a similar policy that is rolling out this school year. Others also thought data reporting could be helpful. Let’s start with Tim Daly:
One of the big challenges with grade inflation is that schools have many incentives to be lenient and very few reasons to be rigorous. We can change that. States could report, for each high school, the average GPA for students with an SAT score of 1000, which is approximately average. If that GPA is particularly high, it would signal to the public—and colleges—that the school assigns higher grades. I find this approach appealing because it does not prescribe any particular grading policies to schools. It’s just transparency. Students at schools with less grade inflation could easily point to this fact in their college applications.
Jon Valant would go further, applying that kind of transparency to course grades:
Here’s another strategy to consider (probably at the local level, not state level):
How about next to every letter grade on your kid’s report card is the collective GPA of kids in that class, for that class? So, if I see that my kid has an A (4.0) in math, I get to see if that teacher is giving easy A’s (e.g., a class-wide GPA of 3.9) or my kid is standing out (e.g., a class-wide average of 2.7). That’d probably be a pain to implement, but I’ve found myself wanting it as a parent!
And Doug Lemov would go further still, providing comparative data for each individual assignment:
The first thing to me is to inform parents so they can parent accordingly. My greatest wish was always that when I saw my kids’ grades on an assignment, the teacher was also required to tell me the median grade on the assignment and what the 25th and 75th percentile scores were. Some teachers do this now, and it’s super easy in all of the platforms where teachers grade. Similarly, it would be good to know the curve in a given class. Then I could parent accordingly: Is 92 good or bad? There’s a lot more you could do, but empowering parents to with more honest information would be a good first step.
Some of these ideas might be hard to implement at the state level, but David Wakelyn thinks statewide end-of-course exams could be a lever for transparency:
Arkansas in the late aughts published an annual report on the spread between end-of-course exam scores in the high school math classes and student grades. Leadership turnover ended the effort, but in the states still giving those exams, it may be worth trying again.
I’m intrigued that one of the stable findings in the latest 50CAN survey of parents is that, across every state, ~88 percent of parents think their kids are reading at or above grade level. That’s true in Iowa (ridiculously low standards) and Alaska and Massachusetts (with very rigorous standards). So let’s try a variety of new approaches in how districts and states report to parents.
But as Vlad Kogan points out, comparing grades to test scores only works in a limited number of grades and subjects:
I’m skeptical about trying to reward tough grading because it’s impossible to separate “tough grading” from “bad teaching.” Unless we have external measures of learning, such as standardized tests against which to benchmark grades, we have no idea if students in one class get lower grades than students in another because the teachers have different grading standards or because they have identical standards but are just different in their effectiveness in teaching students to those standards. And as we learned during the Obama-era “Race to the Top” push, most teachers don’t teach exclusively in a tested grade and subject, so this kind of anchoring is not going to be possible in any kind of real teacher evaluation system that is supposed to apply to everyone. And without anchoring to external tests, I don’t think there is actually a way to identify and reward tougher graders. Efforts to do so without external anchoring will almost certainly backfire and reward ineffective instruction instead.
More on Friday!
It’s true that Helen Baxendale’s banger in Education Next is a book review. But trust me, it’s so much more—a call to arms for E.D. Hirsch–style reform on both sides of the Atlantic. The book is Reforming Lessons: Why English Schools Have Improved Since 2010 and How This Was Achieved by Sir Nick Gibb and Robert Peal. As Helen explains, while test scores in the U.S. and many other advanced nations were treading water or worse in the 2010s, England’s were going up, up, up. This despite the fact that, in Helen’s words:
Contemporary Britain is a grim place and getting grimmer. The economy is stagnant, joblessness and welfare dependency are surging, and the population is increasingly despondent and restive. Shabbiness and disorder are the default settings. It’s even raining more. But there is one indicator of national vitality that has risen in recent times: the quality of England’s schools.
While Helen acknowledges the challenge of discerning “best practices” to apply elsewhere, she’s convinced that Gibb and his conservative colleagues succeeded in boosting achievement by adopting a strategy that put curricular reform ahead of structural change. Phonics checks, Core Knowledge–style content mastery, and teacher-directed instruction won out over a “Rousseauian ideology of progressive education.”
As Helen writes, Gibb and company stole many of America’s best ideas:
The lessons of Reforming Lessons are highly generalizable—especially at the level of U.S. state governments. The Gibb–Gove playbook is essentially the same one that’s fueled the recent “Southern Surge” in the U.S. Moreover, there’s a piquant irony that many of the convictions and methods that underpinned the reforms of Gibb et al. were derived from American research. As Gibb recently recounted to Greg Toppo of The 74, “[E.D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them] just explained everything I was instinctively feeling about our school system.... [It] really formed the basis of our reform programming from 2010 onwards.” Daniel Willingham, the University of Virginia psychologist and leading proponent of “cognitive load theory” was also a major influence, along with Doug Lemov, of Teach Like a Champion fame.
Here’s hoping more states steal these ideas back!
So if curriculum reform is a strategy that has worked well in England and some of the schools in the American South, why aren’t more states embracing it? Jessica Baghian puts her finger on it—and politely calls B.S.
Last week, I was having a conversation with a state leader I respect about why adoption of high-quality curriculum materials has been slow in their state. “Why not use the muscle of the state agency to speed things up?” I asked.
“Because my state isn’t like Louisiana,” they said. “We’re a local-control state. I can’t just tell districts what to do.”
I’ve heard versions of that sentence many times over the years, and it comes from a very real place. Our education system is structured around local control. School boards run their districts; they decide how they spend their money, and they make decisions about curriculum and staffing.
But somewhere along the way, “local control” has become shorthand for “there’s not much the state can do.” And when that happens, it can unintentionally limit a state’s ability to drive change at the classroom level.
Ding ding ding. Jessica goes on to describe the “levers, not mandates” that she and her colleagues used in Louisiana, driving change via the state’s accountability system, its teacher-leader PD, and its constant and consistent messaging.
None of those efforts overrode local control. Districts still made decisions, principals still led their buildings, and teachers still taught their classrooms. We did not have authority other state leaders don’t have. We had a clear vision, and we leaned on all the levers of the state.
Meanwhile, Harry Patrinos digs into the details of Arkansas’s science of reading law and its 3rd grade retention policy, which is about to hit the real world of classrooms and kids. His main argument is that “retention is not enough”:
As Arkansas moves to implement its version of the Mississippi law and other states look to emulate it, policymakers would be wise to consider what the research says about retention. In short, like everything else in education, there is no panacea for increasing student learning. Retention in and of itself is not going to singlehandedly raise literacy rates. The key to success in Mississippi was the supports the state provided before and after students were retained.
I buy that. But it’s equally important to stress that supports without retention are also not enough. I hope policymakers in Ohio, who went weak-kneed when the rubber hit the road on reading retention in the Buckeye State, would listen up.
Marty Lueken and Nathan Sanders are disappointed that Georgia recently awarded education savings accounts to only 7,700 students, when the state budgeted enough money for 20,000. They blame what they view as overly restrictive eligibility rules:
Two rules do most of the restricting. First, eligibility is tied to the state’s “low-performing” school list, meaning access depends on whether a child is assigned to (or attends) a school that lands in the bottom tier. That creates a geographic, bureaucratic gate: Families a few streets away can face totally different eligibility, and a school’s label can change from year to year. It also forces parents into a narrow box, where if they’re seeking a different school for safety, services, culture, or academic fit but their assigned school isn’t on the list, the program is simply off-limits.
Second, the 400 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) income cap filters out thousands of middle-class families and creates an eligibility “cliff.” A family can be strongly interested, apply in good faith, and still be ruled out because their income is just above the cutoff, or kicked out of the program if annual income grows just enough to exceed the cutoff. Even for families under the cap, the need to document income adds administrative friction that can reduce follow-through, especially for households with irregular earnings or complicated tax situations.
I agree that it’s problematic to grant eligibility only to low-income and working-class families whose public schools land on the low-performing campuses list. That can get super complicated, as the list itself changes every year, and it means that poor families assigned to merely mediocre schools are needlessly excluded.
But IMO Georgia should be lauded for keeping state subsidies out of the hands of its richest residents. And if policymakers want to solve the eligibility cliff issue, they should look to Ohio’s sliding scale for inspiration.
In 2010, Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein partnered with IBM to design a dual-enrollment program that let students earn a high school diploma and associate degree concurrently, with mentorship and paid internship opportunities that led to jobs in high-demand fields. Stanley Litow reflects on the success of P-TECH schools and calls for replication across the country. —The 74
“Undocumented students can attend public schools for free thanks to the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe, which held that denying children an education based on immigration status violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause. That ruling remains binding federal law” …yet the Heritage Foundation “published a policy document on February 17 calling on states to intentionally enact laws or rules restricting free public education for undocumented students and calling on the highest court to overturn the landmark decision.” —Ileana Najarro, Education Week
“In a unanimous decision, the Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s ruling that charter schools, as structured under HB 9, fall outside Kentucky’s constitutionally defined ‘common school’ system. Because of that, justices said, the General Assembly cannot direct public tax dollars to charter schools without first obtaining voter approval.” —Kelsey Souto, WKYT
“More than 70 percent of the parents said they trust grades more than tests for making decisions about their own child, and fewer than 9 percent said they had more confidence in tests,” writes Jill Barshay, examining results from a new study that looks at how parents respond to grades and test scores, in a review that’s well-timed to our ongoing conversation about grade inflation (above). —The Hechinger Report
Sam Bowman argues against social media bans, suggesting the internet is more like books, magazines, and TV than alcohol or tobacco, and particularly helpful for curious students around the world. —The Washington Post
See you Friday.
Mike