Let me acknowledge up front that I may be grasping at straws or (to shift analogies for the second time) forgetting the ancient maxim that sighting one or two swallows doesn’t necessarily mean summer has arrived.
But recent weeks have brought a few encouraging signs that the decades-long effort to kill academic standards in the name of equity has wreaked enough havoc and that something of a counter-movement can be glimpsed.
Most recently, hundreds of University of California faculty, mostly math professors, have pleaded with the administration to bring back SAT-ACT testing requirements, at least for applicants to STEM fields within the UC system. This in the wake of a UC-San Diego report that sizable numbers of first-year students can’t handle even middle-school math.
Just days earlier, the Harvard faculty took a small step toward curing grade inflation by placing a limit on the percentage of straight A’s that can be conferred in undergraduate courses, starting in 2027. (But note that there’s no cap on A-minuses.)
A few weeks before that, Yale’s “Committee on Trust in Higher Education” came forth with a thoughtful discussion of faltering public faith in U.S. higher education, citing many reasons. These include:
Colleges and universities cannot expect the public to trust or value the classroom if they do not fully value it themselves…. Over the past several decades, grading across many institutions has steadily lost its meaning. In 1963, 10 percent of grades in Yale College were an A or A-. In 2022–23, that number was seventy-nine percent. Today, the median student at Yale receives an A. Peer institutions are similar.
The committee went on to include (among many recommendations) several thoughtful moves to arrest and reverse grade inflation, including “that the Yale University Registrar compute course percentiles, or devise a similar mechanism that reflects the context for each grade, and include them on transcripts.”
At the K–12 level, the latest Harvard-Stanford “Education Scorecard” reported bleak achievement results pretty much across the board. As Tom Kane explained in introducing it, “The pandemic was the mudslide that followed seven years of erosion in student achievement. The ‘learning recession’ started a decade ago, after policymakers switched off the early warning system of test-based accountability and social media took over children’s lives.”
And as the New York Times summarized it:
Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago, according to new, district-level test score data released Wednesday by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford. Compared with a decade earlier, reading scores were down last year in 83 percent of school districts where data was available. Math scores were down in 70 percent. The declines have affected both rich and poor districts, and crossed racial and geographic divides.
True, we’ve had plenty of “Sputnik moments” before. And we’ve learned—sadly—that, in and of themselves, they don’t foreshadow a renaissance in academic standards and accountability. This kind of publicity does, however, at least signal widening awareness of the cost of their erosion.
Turning awareness into action requires sustained high-level leadership, such as once came from presidents, Congressional leaders, governors, business executives, and more. That’s hard to find nowadays, particularly in Washington, where I doubt we’ll see it again for many moons. (It should be noted, though, that Rahm Emanuel has been terrific on this issue, for whatever that may turn out to be worth.)
Hence the states will remain the center of action—or inaction. That’s why it matters that NAEP’s governing board recently moved to beef up 12th grade assessments and the reporting of state-level results in core subjects, particular end-of-high-school results. Yes, viewed in isolation, this just means more data. But it has the potential to jar—and equip—state leaders into taking action to strengthen their expectations from kindergarten readiness all the way through high school graduation. Whether they will we cannot know.
States (and districts) can combat grade inflation and standards-lowering in many ways. Legislators could mandate admissions tests—even minimum scores—for state colleges and universities. They could ensure that student scores on state achievement tests are sent—in timely fashion—to parents in forms they can comprehend. School report cards, too, can be made far more transparent and accessible than most are today. Teacher preparation and certification requirements can include obligatory training in assessment and grading. As at Harvard, schools could be limited in the percentage of A-range grades they can award, and (at least in high school) the difficulty of various courses can be factored in. “Credit recovery”—if done at all—can be made rigorous and third-grade “reading guarantees” can come with teeth.
There’s more. But it takes guts and sustained leadership, which calls for leaders who sustain a push for excellence and to defy mediocrity. We know it makes a difference when they do: Consider the gains of the past decade in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi, rivaling what we once called the “Massachusetts miracle.” But we also know—Massachusetts, sadly, is now the most visible evidence for this—that without sustained reformist leadership and political oomph, the forces of resistance end up prevailing.
That’s too depressing a note on which to end, so allow me, instead, at least to grasp at a few hopeful straws!
