Fixing grade inflation via clear policies and cultural change

Today we continue our look at how states and districts can tamp down the rampant grade inflation in our schools, with suggestions from Bibb Hubbard, Mike Goldstein, Dale Chu, Thibaut Delloue, David Nitkin, Kevin Teasley, Alicia Anderson, and David Griffith. Plus, we round up the week’s takes from Marguerite Roza, Matt Barnum, Marty Lueken, Kelsey Piper, and Marc Porter Magee, among others.

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On Tuesday we explored how incentives and transparency could help to address America’s grade inflation problem. Today we take up two more sets of ideas: setting clear (and tough) grading policies at the state or local level, and working to change the culture of grading through support to teachers and the bully pulpit.

Setting clear state and/or district grading policies to curb inflation

Let’s start with Dale Chu, who is ready for some tough love:

Grade inflation isn’t just a large and growing problem—it’s become the default. So here’s a controversial idea straight out of a Mike Miles–inspired playbook: what if districts forced a curve on grades? Not optional guidance or suggestive language—a structural requirement that only a set share of A’s, B’s, C’s, etc., can be awarded, similar to hard calibrations used in Houston’s educator evaluation system.

It wouldn’t be popular. Just ask Mike about the legal and political blowback when you tie evaluations to rigid performance standards, but grade inflation won’t be unwound by nudges alone. Years of incremental ratcheting may require something closer to a cold-turkey reset.

To be clear, I see a forced curve as a short-term shock, not a permanent end state… a way to realign report card grades with actual mastery. Without a longer-term plan to embed high-fidelity grading practices—clear standards, cross-grading norms, external benchmarking, and some of the other ideas you suggested—a curve may prove to be a temporary bandage. Future leaders could easily roll it back if the underlying culture and incentives remain unchanged.

And while this is a district-level reform, the state could still play a supporting role. For example, it could require a district to implement a curve (along with other reforms) if it’s low-performing for several consecutive years… or use a carrot approach, attaching funding to districts interested in piloting. So the exact design could vary depending on context, but the key point is that districts are the natural locus for the hard reset, with the state nudging, incentivizing, or mandating in specific circumstances.

Okay, cue the tomatoes.

My colleague David Griffith suggests some additional ways states can encourage tougher grading:

Previous columns have discussed the need for multiple high school diplomas/standards. To me, that discussion is inextricable from the grading discussion. After all, if you create a “higher” diploma/standard, it has to be grounded in something (e.g., performance on AP/IB tests). Which gives teachers in these classrooms some leverage, even if the de facto end-of course exam isn’t part of the letter grade.

I also think banning the adoption of district and/or school level “no zeros” policies at the state level is a good, workable, and politically defensible idea, even if some of the cultural residue persists. Stuff like participation and retakes may not be doable at the state level. But it’s also less important than no zeroes, which is really terrible.

David might be right about the feasibility of a statewide no-zeros ban. A subscriber writes to say:

I read last week’s SCHOOLED on grade inflation with great interest in light of some policy action taking place in South Carolina. Last year, state Senator Jeff Zell sparked legislative interest in grade inflation when he introduced S. 537, a bill that would prohibit the use of “grade floor” policies in South Carolina K–12 [a.k.a., “no zeros” policies]. Rep. Fawn Pedalino then filed a companion bill in the House.

Earlier this year, Rep. Pedalino filed a new bill—H. 5073—that expands on the original “grade floor” prohibition through a more comprehensive approach to grading policy. That bill has been reported from a House subcommittee and is scheduled for full committee review tomorrow. You can find a pretty solid report on the subcommittee review of the bill here.

Thibaut Delloue believes we’re not thinking big enough:

The most radical solution to the grade inflation problem—but in my opinion the only sensible one—is to completely remake the American grading system, which is utterly nonsensical, with or without inflation. I went to French public school through the third grade, where grading is based on a scale from 0 to 20. Most importantly, a 10, or 50 percent, is considered an average score. Anything beyond that is above average, and 15 (75 percent) or above enters the territory of excellent or exceptional. For many American parents, a 75 percent—the dreaded C—would be unacceptable for their children. I’ve written about my experience in French schools and how, among the many other measures that made my education there immeasurably more rigorous than in the New Hampshire public school I entered in fourth grade, an intelligently-designed grading system makes grades more equivalent to test scores. In other words, they reflect what students actually know or can do. This is analogous to mastery-based grading in the U.S., which has made some inroads.

I think most people would agree that the French system is more intuitive than the idiosyncratic American A–F system (can any educator actually explain how a B- in a school in one district compares to an A- in another district in their same state?). Yet the obstacle to implementing such a system is our deeply ingrained belief that school should not be too rigorous; that schooling in America is a system to be navigated and exploited by individual families, not a place where students must meet objective standards of learning. Sadly, as an operations director at a charter school during the 2021–22 school year, I watched as our school’s academic leadership made grades completely arbitrary in the name of equity. Now we are paying the price. But in truth, grading across so much of American public education has always been arbitrary.

David Nitkin is ready for a moonshot, too:

I want to offer a reaction to the “what do we do about grade inflation” question: Pilot the use of AI to support scoring of student work. If implemented poorly, AI can of course introduce bias and disempower educators. But we have more and more examples of AI being used to support assessment in ways that minimize bias, ensure a high rigor bar, and free teacher time that can be repurposed for planning instruction or working directly with students.

For example, Bellwether recently published a great case study of how DREAM Charter Schools in NYC use AI to score student written responses based on a rubric and provide individualized feedback, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars of teacher time (more background info here). When I visited DREAM earlier this month, an administrator told me that using AI to support scoring made her realize that she had sometimes been rounding up when grading student work because “she knew what [the student] meant,” or because she had seen them get the right answer in other contexts, or just because she was (understandably and admirably) rooting for them; she appreciated how the AI ensured a consistently high rigor bar. EdLight, CourseMojo, and Quill are a few other examples of promising tools.

Are AI scoring tools ready to be rolled out today at scale? Of course not. It’s early days, and much more piloting, R & D, and validation are necessary. But should state leaders be investing in R & D and encouraging districts to launch pilots? Absolutely.

And Kevin Teasley thinks early-college programs can circumvent the high school grade inflation problem entirely:

Great thoughts today regarding grade inflation and what to do about it. GEO Academies address this through our college and career expectation lens.

One reason I started partnerships with our college friends is my lack of trust in high school grades. In our early years, I remember observing a popular high school science class where the class was learning a fourth-grade standard. They were singing the same song as my fourth-grade-aged children were learning in their elementary school. Lots of problems here. The fourth-grade standard was obviously inappropriate for high school students. Where was the oversight by school leadership? Who checked lesson plans? Truth is, no matter how much oversight, things like this happen every day in every high school. My schools are small. Imagine what happens in large high schools.

So, I started thinking about the goal of a high school. Sure, our goal is to have educated students. But by what measure? College entrance/college success is our goal. Thus, we researched how to get our students tested and ready to take college courses. The entrance exam to community colleges measures college readiness. If our students can pass that test, we enroll them in college courses. If they fail the test, we remediate until they pass.

This approach addresses the UCSD issue of students needing remediation. We did the remediation. It also addresses the grade inflation, standards, and graduation rates issue.

Our students don’t take college courses unless they’ve earned the right to do so—pass the college entrance exam. Our high school graduation rate has soared, too. Students like the college rigor, they see that they can do college work, thus they see the connection between high school graduation and continued education in college. Our high school graduation rate in Gary, Indiana, is 97 percent compared to 57 percent at the local traditional high school. And, more important, 91 percent of our graduates earn at least one year of college, an associate degree and/or career certificate—among the best in the state. That substantiates our high school graduation rate.

Our model started out with a goal of addressing rigor. Today, our approach addresses so many other issues—high school graduation, college enrollment, college persistence, college completion, college debt. Our model is comprehensive and addresses many of these concerns.

Work to change the culture around grading

Another approach is to work to change grade inflation where it happens—in the classroom. Bibb Hubbard has come to see support for teachers as the key:

After more than ten years of our data consistently showing that parents predominantly rely on report card grades and teacher feedback to know how their child is performing, we believe the most sustainable and durable approach to addressing grade inflation is to invest in teachers. This includes building teacher capacity to share multiple measures of student progress and develop deeper relationships with families which gives way for more candid conversations about student progress. Currently, parents and teachers both report student behavior—not academic performance—as the #1 reason teachers contact families. But parents tell us they want to hear from teachers early and often when it comes to how their children are learning.

Effective teacher training starts at the top. We’ve been privileged to work alongside state, district, and school leaders who value family partnerships, viewing them through the lens of their broad instructional goals. These are systems delivering positive outcomes for their learners and educators. In fact, building on the robust evidence base around family engagement as a key strategy in school success, in partnership with TNTP, we are releasing a new report on March 5. The Family Engagement Impact Study will provide a roadmap for leaders to turn this mindset into action—demonstrating that engaging families as partners is essential to improving student and school outcomes.

Mike Goldstein thinks celebrating teachers with high grading standards could help:

Let’s start with the legitimately-tough-grading high school teacher. At my local school, it was the 9th grade physics teacher. Lots of typically A kids were pulling C’s. Parent conference line out the door after report cards. I felt the grading was tough but fair. The guy showed up an hour early every morning and would help kids hit the bar. Seemed to get nudged towards early retirement.

We should valorize those authentically tough teachers. TNTP once ran awards for high VAM teachers. Maybe we could do something along those lines.

David Griffith wants to try to change the culture writ large:

Grades are socially constructed. So, the problem isn’t that they are “inaccurate” in any absolute sense. The problem is more like the politics that surround the actual inflation problem. Stuff isn’t really more expensive, but people are angry because it feels like it is. Similarly, kids aren’t really doing well, but parents and students are complacent because getting A’s makes it feel like they must be. Anyway, people do adjust to inflation over time. So presumably, a B+ will eventually signal mediocrity to students and parents. But we could try to accelerate that process. For example, we could try to write Atlantic articles with titles like “B is the new F,” with the goal of making an 85 unacceptable in the way that 65 used to be.

Finally, my colleague Alicia Anderson reminds us that honest grading will only matter if parents actually see their kids’ report cards, which can’t be taken as a given:

For all the talk about what should be on report cards, we should probably also talk more about making sure they make it to caregivers. Perhaps not an issue with the parents dreaming about elite colleges (schools probably prefer if those parents check grades less!). Rather, accurately communicating with parents whose kids need extra help, are at risk of retention, etc. In my experience, mostly thinking about Title I family engagement at the elementary and middle school levels, teachers who go out of their way to make parents aware that a child is struggling or even just underperforming are often met with support (for example, signing a child up for afterschool tutoring).

Putting more user-friendly metrics on report cards only helps if they are seen. I receive insane amounts of random information from our school district via robocalls, texts, emails. Yet I don’t think we’ve received a paper report card or even something prompting us to check grades for any child past elementary school, and accessing grades is not straightforward. Sometimes simple things like that get lost.

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In the New York Times, Nicholas Bagley and Robert Gordon call on blue-state governors and mayors to push back against public employee unions, including teachers unions:

In American public education’s dismal last decade, it is red states with weak unions and stronger centralized control—states like Mississippi and Louisiana—that offer good news. Fourth graders in these states now read slightly better than students in California and New York, which spend far more per pupil and have lower child poverty rates. Another positive outlier is the District of Columbia, which offers $27,000 raises to help retain great teachers.

New York City could have a program like D.C.’s. Instead, it has a union-backed class size reduction law that will spend billions to hire thousands of teachers.

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Marguerite Roza also calls on school boards and superintendents to toughen up when negotiating with teachers unions. Needless to say, that’s not happening:

The San Francisco teacher strike was a harbinger. As school budgets tighten, the gap between union demands and what districts can responsibly afford is widening. How leaders respond in moments like this matters—not just for their districts’ long-term fiscal health, but for children they serve today, and for years to come.

As in San Francisco, unions will make demands that benefit their members. District leaders, wanting to avoid a high-profile labor conflict, will fold.

The consequences come later.

And those consequences will be a parade of horribles. Among them: laying off junior staff, who are more likely to be serving in high-poverty schools; cutting Advanced Placement programs and other “extras”; and watching families leave the district as services are cut, exacerbating the “financial downward spiral.” Marguerite wants district leaders to stiffen their spines and make their case to the public about why the union’s demands are unreasonable. But as my Nonnie used to say: “Fatta chance.”

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Speaking of Marguerite, she answers Matt Barnum’s question here in the affirmative: “Schools are adding adults even as they lose students. Is that a problem?“ It’s not that the staffing surge is necessarily “unsustainable,” as Matt illustrates. After all, we’ve been sustaining that trend for decades by shoveling more and more money into our schools’ coffers. But there’s definitely the issue of trade-offs. Cue Marguerite:

What if instead [of adding more staff], we had really spectacular teachers in the classroom who are paid really, really well? If so, maybe we wouldn’t need so many specialists.

Amen!

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You know what else might be “sustainable” but not necessarily smart? Universal private school choice. Marty Lueken demonstrates that the programs enacted over the past few years are hardly “bankrupting” their states.

Zooming in on FY 2026 (see chart below) shows $9.0 billion in choice expenditures compared to $688.2 billion in total state expenditures on all public services. Put another way, the state invests $1.30 for every $100 it spends on public services.

Props to Marty for an awesome (and kinda hilarious) chart, but it’s still not a good idea to make these programs truly universal. Rich parents don’t need the windfall.

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And speaking of school choice, Marc Porter Magee says that reformers should embrace it, along with tutoring, as the route to better education. The latest iteration of the (enormous) 50CAN poll found that more parents, including low-income and working-class ones, are taking advantage of educational options, and are more satisfied because of it.

Now it’s up to education advocates and policymakers to look past the gloom in the daily headlines and recognize the opportunity this moment represents. We have emerged from the pandemic with a stronger sense of purpose around the ways education needs to change. We have seen those changes taking root in states around the country. And it is clear that parents of all political stripes want us to go further to make these initial steps a permanent part of the American educational landscape.

To which I say: Yes…but. Parental satisfaction is important but not enough. We need to see student achievement moving in the right direction again, too. Otherwise, the gloomy headlines will continue, and appropriately so.

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Clinics run by Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus are screening young children for reading struggles starting at age 3, part of a growing recognition that early literacy intervention can’t wait for kindergarten. —Makiya Seminera, The Associated Press

States are increasingly mandating cursive instruction, even though the claimed benefits don’t hold up to scrutiny. “As everyone who has ever written by hand knows, cursive is not the only way to do it. The other way, of course, is print writing. It seems cursive’s proponents are taking a general research claim—that writing by hand is better for learning than typing—and conflating it with the more specific claim that writing in cursive is better.” —Greg Fournier, Education Next

Kelsey Piper looks at the unfulfilled promise of 1:1 computing in schools and asks whether AI is headed down the same path. “If we don’t address what went wrong with ed tech version 1.0, there’s no real reason to think version 2.0 will go any differently.” That’s true, though as Harry Patrinos told me, her read on the international evidence on ed tech is overly cautious, with online tutoring in particular showing lots of promise. —The Argument

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See ya next week!

Mike