Do we want our kids to value learning?
There's energy building around "grade inflation" in the media. Let's take the bait and talk about it.
Since I began teaching nine years ago, each faculty of which I’ve been a part has gingerly, momentarily exposed the “elephant in the room” of education: what most of us would call “grade inflation.” The issue hovers at the edge of all kinds of other discussions of school mission, assessment design, adolescent psychology, and admissions practices: it’s a concern at every level of a school. Busy people that we are, we tend to gesture toward it and then avert our collective gaze.
My school’s self-study this year, which is part of the every-decade accreditation process for all independent schools, has provided us a chance to really talk about it. Like most elephants in proverbial rooms, this one is big, and like in the George Orwell short story, the longer you look at it, the more complicated and charged it becomes. One of my favorite education writers, Jessica Grose, published this piece last week and blasted the issue into The New York Times. This collision of zeitgeist and my own professional world prompts me to write.
Grade inflation matters, but not for the reasons most people think.
Grose focuses, in her article, on the impact of current grading practices on teachers. Her description of the impossible trap most teachers face in grading certainly rings true for me and my colleagues; current grading policy norms in the United States undeniably rob us of time and attention we could put toward educating children. Few people are interested in being “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” for $60,000 per year.
More than losing valuable time and energy to explain grades to students and their parents, more than fixating myself on the justifications I provide for a point taken off for a weak argument, the part of inflated grades that bothers me most is actually more of a moral question. It bothers me, on a profound level, that the status quo of grading requires me to be dishonest with my students about their skill level and development.
Incidentally, I myself am a person who fears negative feedback. I have a history of taking criticism personally; as Ms. Kindleberger, my second grade teacher, put it, I need to work on accepting constructive criticism. A consummate millenial high-achiever, I’m part of the great generation whose anxiety, obsessive desire to please, and achievement-focused parents normalized grade inflation. To quote our generation’s queen, Taylor Swift, “it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”
It’s for that reason – that my own development, personality, and career have been so defined by anxiety over feedback – that I feel so bothered by my own and my colleagues’ inability to give kids feedback that accurately gauges their mastery of material. I don’t want the kids with whom I work to be as stunted as I’ve been. It shouldn’t take thirty years to realize that learning matters more than achievement. Like any historical pattern, if we don’t want to replicate it, then we have to be part of changing it.
Some of my favorite of my colleagues have worked at this school for almost as long as I’ve been alive, and I trust their wisdom even as I often take issue with it. Recently, some of these more experienced colleagues told me that the word “rigor” used to appear in our school’s mission statement, but that in 2019, a revision removed that word. Certainly, the reasons for reformulating a mission are complex, and I’m not interested in debating any school’s mission publicly. What’s interesting to me is that the more that we delete the word from our vocabulary, the more we seem to crave it. It’s a dirty word, or it’s a salacious word, or it’s a sacred word, depending on who and when you ask. I’ve had full discussions with leaders and thinkers who are trying to “rebrand” the term, as if we all really understood what it meant in the first place.
For me, the word “rigor” has become just a signifier for our emotions about learning. I wrote about this idea back in 2022. Like “grade inflation,” it’s a shadow at the edge of our conversations, just waiting to leap out into the open. I love how writers like Grose are trying to eradicate the shadow. I think what we’ll find as we talk more about these concepts is that they’re just placeholders for much greater, deeper fears – and delights.
What’s the societal fear about lack of accountability? The idea that moral relativism will reign, that injustice will go unpunished, that the next generation will not know respect or loyalty. What’s the political fear about lack of accountability? That our citizens will be less intelligent and have bigger egos than they need to have to preserve America’s role in the global social order. What’s the school fear about lack of accountability? That lying to students about how much they’ve learned also means lying to them about their role as people in a community and in the world, deluding them into thinking that each person must be a star or else. (Anecdotally, this week’s episode of the comedic podcast Ride details the increasingly common experience of having a conversation with such a narcissistic person, someone who never asks a question of another person, and it is as chilling as it is funny).
For me, though, the burden of facing down all of the fears and anxieties behind these buzzwords matters. I’m a teacher because I want people to learn; I’m writing about this because I think, more broadly in society, we’re confused about whether we want kids to learn or not. This is because we ourselves are confused about whether we want to learn or not. No matter how many books Adam Grant writes about the value of learning, we still seem unsure. Certainly, this ambivalence is older than the United States itself; is the meaning of life to matter, or to find what matters? Is individuality about achieving praise or standing apart from it? We’ve never actually had the same answer. If we want to change the status quo of grade inflation, though, we should try.
Since I started this job over four years ago, I’m more proud of what I’ve learned than what I’ve accomplished. This moment, however, is the first time I’ve ever felt that way about my work. More often, I’ve defined my life based on the presence or lack of material, resume-bound “accomplishment.” For someone whose entire professional life centers on learning, there’s a deep irony in this admission. I couldn’t have heard, five years ago, that I was only sixty percent of the way to knowing what productive collaboration means; the feedback, absolutely accurate, would have destroyed me. From the vantage point of someone who’s eighty percent of the way to mastery, though, I have to say: sixty feels like a fair, even a generous, grade for fall 2019.
I have to say that the mindset shift feels great. The barely-B-minus of today feels good, and the work it took to get there felt even better. I want my students to know how good it can feel to fall short of the top.