Friday, June 22, 2007
Opinion

06/24/07 LEFT/RIGHT: Grade inflation

Grade inflation By Bob Zaslavsky Recent reports from Pennsylvania and Maryland have brought into the spotlight another of the many deleterious phenomena that characterize our schools.

Grade inflation
By Bob Zaslavsky

Recent reports from Pennsylvania and Maryland have brought into the spotlight another of the many deleterious phenomena that characterize our schools.

The particular phenomenon at issue in these reports is the undeniable increase in high school averages over the past 40 years and the concurrent decrease in scores on nationally standardized tests, especially the one known as “the nation’s report card,” namely the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This phenomenon is known as grade inflation. It is perhaps the single most pervasive illusory mechanism for obscuring the emptiness of our curriculum, the lack of student achievement and the weakness of our teachers and administrators.

Teachers know this all too well. As Julie Greenberg, a mathematics teacher at a Silver Spring, Md., high school, told the Washington Post earlier this year, “If a teacher were to grade students on their true level of mastery, there would be such extraordinary levels of failure that it could not be tolerated, so most teachers do not do that.” She added that she keeps two sets of books, one containing the grades that the students genuinely earn, the other containing the grades that she puts on their report cards. In business, such a practice is regarded as criminal; in our schools, it is business as usual.

I experienced this myself in my teaching career (in private as well as in public schools).

I have known high school seniors in good standing who could neither read nor write.

If I had graded my students in the last decade of my career as I did at its beginning in 1964, no more than 10 percent would have passed.

I made the fewest accommodations with which I could live, but my failure rates were still the highest in every school where I taught. Teaching Latin gave me a certain (unjustified) protection. It must have seemed to administrators that there would be a higher failure rate in Latin. Still, I could never be certain from year to year whether I would be punished by transfer or worse. Fortunately, the worst rarely happens, and I made it to early retirement.

Students are given credit in academic courses for nonacademic work. According to Daniel Taormina, a western Pennsylvania high school principal quoted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on June 3, “A lot of our grading is teacher-pleasing behavior—anything done on time in the right format ... Should a senior be doing a collage in academic classes? I think not … you’re not going to see too many collages in college.”

The academic code for passing students who do not deserve to pass is “extra credit.” Extra credit is a disease, and a paradoxical one at that. If students are doing regular work properly, they do not need extra credit; if they are not, anything extra that they turn in will also be substandard. Yet, in our system, “extra-ness” itself is credit-worthy.

This is true also of honors and advanced placement classes, which are weighted more heavily in the calculation of class averages. This has led to increasing numbers of students graduating with class averages beyond what would have been the cap when I was in school, namely a 4.0. One Pennsylvania high school enacted a policy that all students with an average above 4.0 would be named valedictorians. Therefore, at its graduation ceremony this year, there were 16 valedictorians. Two years ago, one California high school had 59 valedictorians (although, thankfully, only a handful of them actually spoke).

The chief victims of this system are students, all students, but especially ethnic minority and economically disadvantaged students. They are led to believe that they
are performing at a certain level even though the actuality is that they are performing far below that level, if they are performing at all. As Prince George’s County (Md.) Superintendent John E. Deasy has said, “This is the civil rights issue of our time.”

The gap between local assessment—like Georgia’s Criterion Reference Competency Test—and more objective assessment is manifest wherever one looks. This year, for example, 89 percent of Mississippi fourth-graders passed the state’s own reading test, but only 18 percent of them passed the NAEP test, a ratio of roughly five to one. Those who blame tests or who cling to local control of schools are like ostriches with their heads and bodies in the sand.

I have said before—and I will keep saying until I gasp my last—that we must act now to ameliorate this situation. How can we do it?

We can implement a strong national curriculum and strong academic qualifications for educators.

We can eradicate the two most destructive beliefs that rule our system: 1. that education should be fun; and 2. that education should promote self-esteem.

In short, we must breathe academic rigor back into our schools. If we do not, the only rigor left in our system will be rigor mortis. SP

Bob Zaslavsky is a retired teacher of our much-neglected humanities.