Column: Grade inflation and the cost of low expectations
Retired superintendent Curt Dubost.
– In 2020, the UC Board of Regents, against the advice of many, chose to eliminate standardized test scores such as the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) as criteria for admissions decisions. Although the justifications were several, there is no doubt that it was an attempt to increase the enrollment of students with high grades but low scores, many of whom had graduated from “underrepresented” high schools.
In 2024, over 11 percent of incoming freshmen at UCSD were forced to take a remedial math class covering basic arithmetic skills and math concepts that should have been mastered in middle school, if not sooner. Of this 11 percent, over 25 percent had a 4.0 or higher overall high school GPA. This could have been due to weighted grades for advanced classes, but it implies straight A’s in Math on their high school transcripts.
Either way, they couldn’t solve eighth-grade math problems.
Grade inflation, which is defined as the practice of assigning higher academic grades than mastery of the course content would warrant, is nothing new. Typically, it involves giving credit for attendance, good conduct, and effort to award a higher grade point average than was deserved based on mastery of the curriculum.
It can also be easier for teachers to be “generous” graders rather than to hold onto high standards, especially without school or parent support. It usually means fewer student papers to grade and fewer parental complaints.
I, for example, had straight A’s in three years of High School German and was president of the German Club. I was thoroughly embarrassed when my college entrance test placed me in first-year German. My teacher had done me no favors by letting a group of us who were “top students” with “heavily invested” parents play chess and/or study for another class daily in German class. How often are teachers pressured by overly zealous parents or complaining students to allow “extra credit” to artificially inflate grades and /or maintain grade eligibility?
I remember a veteran teacher at a school in San Diego, at which I was a young administrator, who taught a required semester-long course called DEEP, which was an acronym for Drivers Ed and Emergency Preparedness. Its course description included just about everything imaginable, all tossed together into one semester to fulfill a bunch of state mandates. He taught five periods a day of the same class( how mind-numbingly boring that had to be), and showed every movie imaginable, able always in some often obscure way to connect it to driving or emergencies. He was loved by the students and community and was a really nice man.
In a “play on words” on his last name, the faculty annually awarded the “Cecil B. De Moomaw “ trophy to the teacher who showed the most movies in class for that year. He always won. He also never failed a single student, and most got As. When challenged on never failing a single student in all the years he’d taught, he answered that he was the only teacher of DEEP, so if he failed anybody, he just got them back the next semester, so what was the point?
Grade Inflation is objective evidence of the general decline of academic standards and is prevalent in most American elementary, but especially secondary schools. Standardized test scores are down all over, including here in the North County. Nationally and internationally, our state and nation fare poorly on both norm and criterion-referenced tests of academic achievement despite ever-higher student grade point averages.
Overall grade point averages are up just about everywhere, and without any evidence whatsoever that many if not most of the students with As and Bs are actually mastering the curriculum to a degree of excellence or even above average grade level expectations.
I propose the following three pretty common-sense solutions. Some I had intended to implement at Paso before COVID, the Culture Wars, a seismic anomaly, and a labor dispute with the teachers that complicated school more than a bit.
At a minimum, we all need to strongly support the many teachers who DO maintain and teach to very high standards. When they come under fire for insisting that an A means excellent, we must applaud and support, not attack them. It means exceptional mastery of the curriculum, while a B means above-average grade-level mastery, and a C means the student mastered enough of the curriculum to be at grade-level standards. This is called maintaining rigor, and almost all students I’ve known respect the teachers most who do make the class challenging and award grades as deserved, not entitled.
I remember one of my favorite all-time teachers, Ann Granados, who taught sixth grade in San Miguel before her untimely passing. A mural above the school stage by internationally acclaimed San Miguel artist Steve Kalar honors her legacy. Ann would tell the kids, “This is Pablum! You’re way too smart for this! You don’t want baby food; you want high school food!” She showed them, many with English as a second language and some with difficult home lives, that they could achieve way more and that she wanted them to be their very best.
All of the very best teachers maintain rigor. They explain to their students clearly the relevance to their future of knowing the material; when will I need this?
They also establish a relationship with the students where they trust their teacher to be fair but to be hard. Ann considered assigning class work below grade level to be an insult to the kids’ ability to learn and her ability to teach. She actively combatted what President George W. Bush called the “soft racism of low expectations”.
Ann and other middle school core academic teachers at Lillian Larsen, like Paul DiMateo, Melissa Cooper, Maria Cedillo, and others, demanded much of their San Miguel students, which directly led to the many Paso High honors students from Lillian Larsen who have gone on to prestigious universities.
So first we must make it a priority to get the laws and contracts changed so we can reward financially our very best teachers and encourage more talented college graduates to choose teaching as a career. These master teachers deserve some kind of significant merit pay, but based largely on evidence of objective student achievement, not simply subjective evaluations.
Pay raises cannot continue to be across the board on a uniform salary schedule. We must better pay our master classroom academic teachers who get from students truly increased academic progress.
Second, County Offices of Education can be engaged to complete what is called an Instructional Curriculum Audit. Teams of veteran teachers, often retirees, are hired over the span of a week or two to sit for one full period of instruction for every different course taught by every secondary academic teacher at a school. They log data to gauge how much of the instructional time is spent teaching the prescribed curriculum, and if it is at or above grade level. They also make sure the instructional goals and their relevance are made known to the students daily.
Third, any student’s coursework not at grade level should be graded as a C at best. Since it is not at grade level, it literally cannot logically be above average, let alone excellent.
No one ever rose to low expectations.
-By Retired Paso Robles Joint Unified School District Superintendent Curt Dubost
