Inflation in the news
Is that term copyrighted?
Scores for the nation’s ACT tests came out the other day, and all of the states had their grades posted. Like that mean math teacher in the fifth grade who put everybody’s test scores on the bulletin board. (Math class is a great way to separate future engineers from future journalists.) It turns out that Arkansas didn’t do so well.
Cynthia Howell, our reporter in the schoolhouse bureau, writes that Arkansas’ class of 2023 got a composite 18.6 on its ACT college entrance exam. Which was down 0.2 points from the class of 2022 score.
And just to put too fine a point on it, 18.6 is “the lowest in at least 10 years.”
(For the record, the nation’s 19.5 for the class of
2023 is also down from the year before, and it’s been as high as 21 in the past.)
The ACT tut-tutted.
“This is the sixth consecutive year of declines in average scores, with average scores declining in every academic subject,” said Janet Godwin, ACT chief executive officer. “We are also continuing to see a rise in the number of seniors leaving high school without meeting any of the college readiness benchmarks, even as student GPAs continue to rise and students report that they feel prepared to be successful in college.”
Even as GPAs rise . . . .
Even as they feel prepared . . . . This is called Grade Inflation, and it’s worse than the other kind. Because the other kind is only monetary. And money isn’t everything.
You know about Grade Inflation. Don’t deny that you once thought that washing the blackboard would get that C to a B. Such inflation is still around, but it’s more complicated. These days you have parents who demand explanations when Ds come home—but they demand explanations from the principals and teachers, not Precious Baby.
Or maybe coaches apply pressure to academics to pass the starting tailback. (Nothing new there.) Or maybe, just maybe, teachers are much too interested in the feelings of their charges rather than their educations. We’d suspicion that is a smaller matter than helicopter parents or football records, but it’s probably not nothing.
We can remember in years past when a significant number of high schools in Arkansas would have a significant percentage of kids on the A-B honor roll every year, but those same kids somehow couldn’t pass the Proficient level when given standardized tests. Apparently it continues. Which means we aren’t doing the kids any favors.
They’ll get to college one day, many of them, and find out that academically they aren’t all that. All those As and Bs they got back home didn’t prepare them for university coursework. Or maybe they don’t go to college at all, but find themselves not prepared for the Real World—or not as prepared for it as their high school diplomas (and transcripts) told them they would be.
Grade Inflation isn’t a harmless favor. It harms. It can cripple a child’s future.
Even worse to wake up one day and figure out that you’ve been duped all along. Like when you show your parents the ACT score, and they were expecting something in the 30s.