Teacher-assigned grades and standardized test scores usually signal to parents how well a student is grasping reading, writing and math skills, but the two measures “often conflict,” the report said. 

While trends across the country show , an online survey of more than 2,000 parents by researchers at the University of Chicago and Oregon State University found parents are less likely to invest in academic support when a child has high grades and low test scores. Similarly, parents are more likely to intervene when grades are low, even if a student is scoring proficient in standardized tests.

Many parents surveyed voiced resistance to standardized test results as a measure of how their child is doing in school because of cultural bias and appropriateness. Given the options to answer agree, disagree or neither agree nor disagree, nearly 40% said they believe tests “are biased against certain groups,” and 27% “see tests as reflecting a family’s income.”

Grade inflation may make families think a student is performing better than they are; along with a distrust of standardized testing may mean “there’s skills that we’re leaving on the table,” said co-author Derek Rury, assistant economics professor at Oregon State University. 

“If it’s true that parents place more weight on information contained in grades rather than test scores, that has very big implications for the economy and the growth of skills [in students],” Rury said.

The responses around testing confirmed previous research studies around parental skepticism of  standardized testing, including how test questions often lean into and in later grades, wealthier students often performing better on the SAT and ACT because of access to better opportunities. 

In the survey, parents responded more positively to grades, with 71% saying grades are more important than tests in their decision making for their children.

found parents believe that grades “incorporate effort, behavior and compliance in addition to mastery,” the report said. But Rury’s study found parents also likely trust grading because it’s reported regularly throughout the school year and is more understandable.

Grades make performance comparisons relative to classmates, the report said, while test scores are reported annually – usually a year after they’re taken – and make national comparisons, which can be hard to understand.

Standardized test scores are presented with “histograms and numbers, and there’s multiple comparison groups, like my kid in the school district versus my kid nationally, and we’re talking about percentiles and ranks,” said Ariel Kalil, co-author of the study and public policy professor at the University of Chicago. “This is all very confusing to parents.”

Parents are more likely to accept a “familiar, frequently received signal” like grading instead of a “less familiar signal,” like test scores, the report said, “regardless of relative accuracy.”

An emphasis on good grades, “may systematically mislead parents about true standing,” the report said. Grades can mask academic struggles and how well a student fully grasps skills – leading to an underinvestment in resources, according to the report.

Rury also called grades subjective and that “you don’t know what you’re getting.”

“Test scores, for all their flaws, are objective and the same for people who are in that testing regime, which gives us so many advantages,” Rury said.

Other studies have found similar results, including one in 2024 that found don’t match student test scores and newly-released earlier this month that reported grade inflation can reduce a student’s future test scores, graduation rate, college enrollment and lifetime earnings. 

Grade inflation is also being addressed at the higher education level, where instructors at Harvard University would only be able to under a new proposal. 

“The real downstream effect of [grade inflation] is that you have people who are leaving school unprepared for the labor force. … That is a policy failure in the United States,” Rury said. “A big part of what school should do is prepare people with the skills they need to at least figure out how they’re going to be productive later on.”

Part of better equipping students for the future involves reframing the importance of standardized testing, Kalil added.

“In a world in which we know that grades are inflated, and in a world in which we know that on average, test scores are highly valuable predictors of future outcomes, then we’re trying to get to the parents who are just missing the signal,” Kalil said. 

If test scores were made more accessible to parents, the measure could be another trigger to encourage academic intervention. Further investment from parents could help level a playing field for all students when it comes to measuring the full extent of their proficiency, Rury said. 

“For any kind of policymaker, it’s in their best interest to help parents kind of shift the weight from grades to test scores,” Rury said. “We want everyone to succeed, particularly low income kids, who I think are the population that’s really hurt by these test optional policies. Those high-grade, low test scores, kids could really benefit from interventions from their parents.”

But new data suggests that’s changing. 

In a recent of 20,000 parents, respondents said they trust communication from their children’s teachers more than any other source of information to judge whether their kids are on track. That was the case regardless of whether parents thought their children performed on grade level. 

The finding came as a surprise to Bibb Hubbard, president of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit that helps parents understand student achievement data. In , including surveys her own organization has conducted since , parents have listed grades as the primary indicator of student performance. 

“For the first time, grades are not the number one factor,” she said. “Teachers really are on the front lines in terms of communicating to families about where their kids are.”

As one who urges schools to level with families about student progress, Hubbard zeroed in on that point among the trove of data that 50CAN, a national education advocacy organization, released in October. 

One reason for the shift, she said, is the falling importance of grades as a dependable measure of learning. Long before COVID, and news reports pointed to examples of : While grade-point averages have steadily increased, objective measures of performance like remained flat. States and districts further relaxed grading standards during the pandemic, and parents took notice. The growth of online communication apps that allow teachers to update parents throughout the year on children’s progress have also lessened report cards’ influence, Hubbard said.

“Just putting the grade in the portal is not going to be sufficient for any parent right now,” she added. “They want that connection. They want that relationship.”

At Kickapoo High School in Springfield, Missouri, Algebra teacher Cicely Woodard said she tries to be as specific as possible when grading assignments by labeling tests with the skills students are learning — like exponents — so parents don’t have to guess. But she also leans on parents to understand why students might be struggling.

“I’ll say, ‘This is what I’m observing.’ Then I’ll be quiet and listen,” she said “I can learn so much from parents who know their children really well.”

Almost 30% of parents in the 50CAN survey said they rely on that type of communication from teachers more than any other source of information. Report card grades were second, with 20%. 

Parents who believe their children are performing below grade level value that interaction with teachers even more than those who think their kids are at or above grade level, the data shows — 36 to 28%. During the 2023-24 school year, parents who thought their children weren’t meeting expectations were more likely than others to communicate with teachers outside of parent-teacher conferences, talk to their school’s principal and consult with their child’s guidance counselor.

They also want their kids to get additional instruction. If they had the time or money, parents who think their children are below grade level would choose tutoring over organized sports and art, dance or music lessons, the survey showed. But a higher percentage of those parents also said tutoring was too expensive or wasn’t available in their community.

“They are engaged. They care about their kids, and they are not getting the support that they necessarily need,” Hubbard said.

Melony Watson, a mom of six in Fort Worth, Texas, said she’s barely looked at report cards in two years. She felt misled when one of her daughters kept making the honor roll even though she couldn’t read. 

“I’m a proud parent, sitting there clapping and jumping up and down because my baby’s walking across the stage, getting certificate after certificate,” Watson said. But by third grade, she told her daughter’s teacher that she saw signs of a learning disability. Her daughter wrote letters and numbers backwards and out of order. “They’re like, ‘No, no, she’s just a COVID baby. She’s going to be a little behind.’ ”

Watson ultimately quit her job as a substitute teacher and homeschooled her daughter for a year before enrolling her in a different school. Now, with her children in third through 12th grade, she is in frequent contact with their teachers, especially in eighth grade algebra and ninth grade social studies. 

“I get weekly updates to know what test my child has failed,” she said. “I have made myself known. If those teachers think that you don’t care, they’re not going to go the extra mile.”

‘Tipping point’

Parents aren’t the only ones who think grades provide a less-reliable predictor of success than standardized tests. Several universities, mostly Ivy league institutions, have reinstated for admissions after dropping them during the pandemic. 

“I do think that it is possible that we are nearing a tipping point with regard to grade inflation,” said Adam Tyner, who wrote about the issue in a for the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, where he is national research director. “Maybe parents are also starting to see teacher-assigned grades as a less valuable signal.”

To Hubbard, the results suggest that teachers need better training on discussing test scores with parents. Surveys of teachers conducted by show educators often fear either that parents won’t believe their children are behind or that administrators will overrule their grading decisions.

“It needs to be an expectation for teachers to have ongoing communications with families — which takes time, training and support,” she said. “Otherwise, families will continue to be sidelined in being able to most effectively support their children’s learning and development.”

One day he was chatting with an 8th-grade student, who he described as a “superstar,” and asked if she had studied for that day’s exam. He was shocked to hear she hadn’t.

“Well Mr. Guskey,” he remembers her saying, a quizzical look on her face, “I worked it out. I only need a 50.2 to get an A [in the class]. I don’t need to study for a 50.2.”

This was a moment of realization for him. “This 8th grader had worked it out to the tenth decimal place what she needed to do to get an A in my class,” he said. “And she was surprised I didn’t get it. And I thought, ‘Wow. What have I done?’” 

For this student — and so many others — school was not about learning. It was about getting a good grade. And with flawed traditional grading systems, those two outcomes didn’t always coincide.

Every time Guskey tells this story to other teachers, he said they shake their heads and share similar anecdotes of their own. Other experts in the field echo these sentiments, noting that schools have spent far too long grading students based on whether or not they turned in a pile of work or showed up to class on time, rather than focusing on if a student has learned academic content. This can ultimately lead to final grades that inaccurately reflect and communicate what kids actually know. 

Today, as schools combat post-pandemic learning gaps, it’s become even clearer that traditional grades are not precise communicators of learning. In some cases, this leads parents to believe their kids are performing at grade level, when in reality they’re falling behind. 

As educators push for more clarity and transparency, a number of schools and districts are turning to what’s known as standards-based grading, a system and communication tool that separates academic mastery from behavioral factors. When done correctly, it should more accurately reflect what students know and correct for both inflating — and deflating — grades. 

But a misunderstanding of standards-based grading’s true principles, a lack of proper training for educators and a rush to quickly adopt a complex new system often leads to messy implementation, various experts told ����Ӱ��. And, they warn, districts looking for support are turning to grading consultants, a number of whom aren’t qualified in the field.

“So many districts are getting into this and they’re failing miserably,” said Guskey, the grading and assessment expert and professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky College of Education. “Schools are jumping into this without a clear notion of what they’re doing and what the prerequisites are to being standards based,” he continued. “And then when problems arise, they have no recourse except to abandon [it] completely.”

As schools look for an effective fix to learning gaps, “standards-based grading is one that seems like it can be a quickly adopted effort. But it could backfire and does backfire very easily,” said Laura Link, associate professor of teaching and leadership at the University of North Dakota.

In a she and Guskey wrote, “although many schools today are initiating SBG reforms, there’s little consensus on what ‘standards-based grading’ actually means. As a result, SBG implementation is widely inconsistent.” This creates uncertainty, confusion, frustration — and resistance, which can ultimately lead to it being tossed aside, the authors said.

The many meanings of a “C”

Standards-based grading is not new. While it’s challenging to pin down just how many schools are currently using it, post-pandemic interest in a system that’s seen as more accurate and equitable appears to be growing. 

Link is now working with the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania school district on implementation. It can also be found in at least one school district in the San Francisco Bay Area and is particularly prevalent in schools in Wyoming, New Hampshire, Maine and Wisconsin, with more cropping up in Connecticut, New Mexico, and Oregon, in November.

Another expert, Cathy Vatterott, who wrote Rethinking Grading: Meaningful Assessment for Standards-Based Learning and is professor emeritus of education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, said: “After we got through COVID, all of a sudden I started getting offers to come and speak to people about standards-based grading.” 

Regardless of what model teachers practice, they typically grade using three different criteria: what academic skills students have learned and are able to do, such as solving for “x” in an algebraic equation; what behaviors they bring that enable learning, such as attendance and turning in work on time; and how much they’ve grown and improved.

In traditional models, teachers combine these three, muddling them together and assigning a single mark for an assignment — often a letter grade or a percentage. At the end of a semester, these assignment scores get averaged into a final grade that goes onto a transcript or report card. Proponents of standards-based grading argue that this presents an unclear and inaccurate picture to parents, students and colleges. 

“It makes the grade impossible to interpret,” according to Guskey. For example, a “C” on a paper could mean the student really only understood the material at a “C” level or it could mean they turned in an excellent paper but two weeks late. Further adding to the confusion: what goes into a grade is inconsistent from teacher to teacher and school to school.

Traditional grading not only presents accuracy concerns but also equity ones, according to Matt Townsley, assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Northern Iowa. “For example, if we award points for assignments that are completed on a daily basis — called homework — outside of class, you can imagine a scenario where some families are more privileged in their ability to do it,” he said. 

Some students have access to a quiet place to work, tutors, parents who can help them with assignments, and other key resources, while others work after-school jobs or take care of younger siblings. When teachers grade homework, experts like Townsley argue, they are grading for these factors, rather than what students have actually learned. 

To combat this, standards-based grading does it differently. Rather than lumping together academic, behavioral and improvement grades, it separates them and reports them out individually in what Link calls a “dashboard of information.” 

Too often, she said, consultants and other self-proclaimed experts, who are not researchers, will push to throw away behavioral grades altogether. But she warned “that becomes problematic very, very quickly. We shouldn’t be using our gradebooks to punish and control. But those factors — those behavioral factors — are academic enablers, and we know that to be true as well.”

Reporting it out separately makes students recognize that these other components still count and, in some ways, it makes them each count more because they can no longer be disguised by other factors, like extra credit, according to Guskey.

It’s important for schools to decide upfront what behaviors they want to prioritize — whether that’s attendance, work ethic, responsibility— and then build a guide on how teachers will score for them. “By giving these kinds of dashboards of information, it helps colleges, trade schools, etc. have a deeper understanding of what kind of students they’re accepting into the programs and what kind of support they will need in college,” Link said. 

The academic grades should be based on grade-level standards and learning objectives, like the ability to find strong evidence to support a claim if a student is writing a paper or answering a test question.

A second key criteria is moving away from handing out percentage grades based on 100 to using a much smaller measurement scale, like 0 to 4. On each standard, students could also be graded as “exceeding,”, “meeting,” “almost” or “not yet.” Guskey noted that while this all may sound novel and unusual, other countries around the world, including Canada, have been using these practices for decades.

A third component — providing students multiple opportunities to demonstrate their understanding and mastery of a standard — is often where the greatest controversy crops up and things are most likely to go awry. Some educators argue that students should receive limitless opportunities to redo specific assignments. Researchers such as Link, though, argue that while students need multiple opportunities to demonstrate their understanding, that does not necessarily mean redoing the same assignment. 

“This is where a lot of non-academic proponents encourage that standards-based grading means you give as many retakes as it takes for mastery. Not true. Not true. That’s an assessment issue. That’s not a grading issue.”

So, while a second chance at one assignment is perhaps the fair thing to do, it is not inherent to the ethos of standards-based grading. She emphasized that if schools do implement retake policies, the process needs to be purposeful: If a student doesn’t get it the first time, they need to get corrective feedback and instruction. But “if they don’t get it on the second chance, you’re going to record their grade and move on,” she said. 

There is no empirical evidence supporting the benefits of endless retakes and, she added, such practices can be a time-consuming and unrealistic ask of teachers. 

Because many of the people who write about and consult on testing don’t fully understand what’s behind assessing students more than once, Guskey said, their recommendations on how best to do it are often untested and can’t be supported in practice. Their inconsistent advice, he said, can lead teachers and administrators to forsake efforts to reform grading. 

While it’s important to understand what standards-based grading is, it’s also essential to debunk what it’s not. At its core, experts say, it’s purely a communication tool. It doesn’t tell educators how to create assessments, build curriculum or manage behavior. It can make space for teachers to provide more individualized feedback and for students to move through the skills and knowledge they need to master at their own pace. But these things aren’t inherently a part of it. 

“Basically everything is just to pass.”

When Kenny Rodrequez became superintendent of the Grandview school district a decade ago, he knew the grading system needed to change. He was concerned that as it stood, the traditional grading model they relied on wasn’t communicating students’ progress to their parents accurately. Leaders in the district, located just outside of Kansas City, ultimately decided to shift to standards-based grading for kindergarten through 6th grade. 

Now, in his eighth year as superintendent and ninth year overseeing the transition, he feels good about what they’ve accomplished. One key factor of the successful implementation, he said, was “not trying to do it all at once.” It can be tempting to “just say, ‘Let’s bite the bullet and let’s just roll it all out at the same time,’” he added. It was important, though, to fight this urge and instead find a balance that allowed for deliberate policy shifts that still didn’t take an inordinate amount of time to implement.

Another key factor: making sure there was strong teacher and parent buy-in. The first year in particular, staff was nervous to explain this new system to parents before they even fully understood it themselves. Rodrequez said they created talking points for teachers and gave them the resources they needed. 

In the future, the district plans to bring standards-based grading to 7th-12th grade classrooms, but he anticipates at the high school level this will be trickier. “Our challenge … is nationally we still have a system that’s still pretty based upon our letter grades. And that system’s been around for so long and never was designed to do what we’re trying to get it to do right now.” Demands for GPAs and class rankings, in particular, are incongruous with the standards-based model but often necessary for college applications.

These very challenges have played out in one New York City high school, according to parent Talia Matz. When her stepson started 9th grade at Future High School in Manhattan, the school had orientation sessions to explain to parents how their standards-based grading system works. Still, she and her husband were skeptical. And over the past three years, they’ve only become more concerned, she told ����Ӱ��. 

Some of the major assignments that the school uses instead of statewide Regents exams “are a bit of a joke,” she said, and students are not held accountable. “Basically everything is just to pass. It doesn’t matter how well you do,” she said, adding, “it doesn’t seem like there’s any love of learning. It’s just kind of to get it done.” 

Contrary to best practices, on his report card there are no separated out comments or grades about behaviors. All standards are scored on a 0-4 scale, and parents and students can see grades on an online platform called JumpRope. But, the school then converts this scale into a traditional percentage grade, which is ultimately sent to colleges — another big no-no, according to experts. (According to the , schools may choose from a number of grading scales, including A-F, but it appears that regardless of what they select, all grades are ultimately converted into percentages.)

Students have a number of opportunities to redo assignments and no clear consequences for late work, Matz said. Rather than getting grades on daily assignments, he gets a “Work Habits/Independent Practice” score, which his stepmom said never appears on a transcript. This, she said, provides no incentive to turn assignments in on time or get them right the first time.

School administrators did not respond to requests for comment. The school’s website contests this point: Their official policy states that the “Work Habits/Independent Practice” score becomes 10% of a student’s final grade. Never reporting the behavior grade or averaging it into a single final grade would both go against standards-based grading best practices. 

Matz fears all this lends itself to lowered standards, which will leave her son unprepared for college. In the fall, he’ll enroll at SUNY Buffalo, “but we’re concerned because there’s going to be different expectations … You have to study on your own, you don’t necessarily get second or third chances.”

Unfortunately, they may not have enough foundational knowledge to be able to do the work.

For instance, coming out of the pandemic, New York City standardized its admissions to screened public high schools. Students were . Those with a grade-point average above 94.33 were slotted into Tier 1 and received first crack at the most coveted schools. Those with a GPA above 90.25 went into Tier 2, and so on down the line.

Final marks in seventh-grade English, math, social studies and science were used to calculate the rankings. What wasn’t considered was the difficulty of the individual classes. 

Take the case of a student who took Algebra 1 early, in seventh grade, at a gifted-and-talented middle school and a student who took basic math at a nonaccelerated school as part of the standard seventh grade curriculum. Their final marks would be given equal weight when they apply to high school. So if the Algebra 1 student earned a B, that would be deemed less impressive than an A earned by the second student in basic math. Based on that data, the first student would be assigned to Tier 2 by the Department of Education’s computer and basically taken out of the running for most of the top screened high schools.

Taking easier classes in middle school would give the first student a greater chance of getting into a higher-performing high school. Which seems like the exact opposite of how such a system should work.

Now that admissions to NYC gifted-and-talented programs in first through fourth grade is also grade-based, this contradiction will likely trickle down to the elementary school level. Parents might be less likely to place their kids into more challenging classes, or insist that they be given more difficult work, out of fear that it would hinder their chances for a G&T transfer down the line or a spot at an accelerated middle school.

My teacher husband is always talking about positive and negative feedback loops when it comes to learning. This definitely seems like a negative feedback loop for both students and parents. A’s are already the given at two- and four year colleges. being pressured to pass all students, whether or not they come to class or do the work. for graduation are being phased out. Some states have flat-out made it impossible for students to take even if they wanted to.

Right now, if college is the end game, or a top screened middle/high school, or even a G&T program, there is no incentive to take courses an NYC student might not ace with minimal effort. There is, in fact, a potential penalty to signing up for a class where a C is a possibility, no matter how much new knowledge or life experience might come with it.

The more families who decide to play it safe, sacrificing the concrete present for a nebulous future, the less demand there will be for challenging coursework at all grade levels. And with less demand come fewer advanced class options. The curriculum will dumb down itself. 

Families could end up advocating for easier and easier offerings as more and more A’s are given out. Tier 1 is for the top 15% of students citywide. As courses become less challenging, the GPA necessary to qualify will keep rising and the competition will grow tighter. 

But at the same time, those A’s will become meaningless. Already, only a little over half of NYC’s graduating seniors — 57% — are , meaning they’re prepared to take a university-level course without requiring remediation. This despite a , now at over 80%. Of those NYC graduates who went onto college, however, within the first semester.

It stands to reason that we should expect more such failure if pre-college work, starting at the elementary school level, becomes undemanding and shallow in the interest of grade inflation.

But it’s not impossible to reverse that trend. A simple tweak would be to weight GPAs, the way some colleges do, wherein bonus points are factored into more difficult courses, so that a B in seventh grade Algebra 1 isn’t worth less than an A in arithmetic.

Students and families might feel more comfortable asking to be placed in challenging classes if the reward of taking a risk is greater than the punishment that comes with failing to measure up. Schools might feel comfortable placing lower-performing students in those classes, giving them access to more complex material. Some might stumble, but without penalty, while others could well rise to the occasion, and be appropriately recognized.

Making it less punitive to take advanced and honors classes could open the door to more of them being offered. Which would benefit every student in the system. And finally make it so that learning, not just getting a good grade, becomes the key part of an NYC education.

According to through Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, eighth- and ninth-graders who learned from math teachers with relatively higher performance standards earned better test scores in Algebra I. The same students later saw their improved results carry forward to subsequent years of math instruction, and — contradicting fears that high expectations might cause kids to resist or give up — they were less likely to be absent from classes than similar students assigned to more lax graders. 

Seth Gershenson, an economist at American University and one of the paper’s co-authors, said the breadth and longevity of the positive results showed that they were not flowing from a quirk of testing. Rather, high standards “change the way students engage with school,” he argued.

“There really is a persistent, long-lasting sea change that students experience when they have a tougher grader,” Gershenson said. “And it’s not like you have to be super tough; any marginal increase in standards adds a little boost.”

The findings build on by Gershenson, which showed that pervasive grade inflation in K-12 settings — defined as student course grades that are considerably higher than their corresponding scores on end-of-year exams — is more prevalent in schools serving larger percentages of affluent students. They are also noteworthy in light of the post-COVID academic environment, which has seen many teachers either through personal initiative or in response to district mandates.

The study is built on grading and testing records for a huge swath of North Carolina students who took Algebra I in either the eighth or ninth grades. In all, the sample included over 365,000 pupils across nearly 27,000 classrooms and 4,415 teachers — a rich enough selection to allow comparisons between thousands of similar students assigned to different Algebra teachers over a 10-year span. 

To assess the impact of different standards, Gershenson and his colleagues used multiple measures of grading severity, again relying on the relationship between course grades (over which teachers have wide, though not total, latitude) and performance on end-of-year exams. For example, an Algebra teacher whose students tend to receive higher course grades than their scores would indicate is considered an “easier” grader, and vice versa. 

The researchers then sorted the teacher sample into four comparison groups, ranging from the easiest graders to the hardest, and charted the trajectories of their respective students before and after they took Algebra I. Disproportionately, the teachers grouped in the “toughest” quarter were likelier to be white, female, and more experienced than the sample as a whole. 

They also tended to achieve more in the classroom.

Across several metrics of academic success, students who were exposed to higher grading standards fared better than their peers. Compared with students who had previously demonstrated similar levels of math performance, those assigned to stricter graders saw larger scoring gains. Notably, those effects were both sizable and linear, meaning that the tighter the grading practices — moving from the easiest-grading quarter to the very hardest — the larger the improvement on test scores.

Students of tougher graders also maintained some of their scoring advantage into the next two classes of North Carolina’s math sequence, geometry and Algebra II. The effects were actually twice as large in Algebra II as they were in geometry, a nuance the authors specifically cited in the paper: Perhaps because of the similarities in content between the two levels of algebra, they theorized, students who were formerly held to higher standards did especially well in the later class, even though the effects should have faded more because of the further passage of time. 

“That suggests this wasn’t a pure grade-chasing effect where students crammed more for the test so that they could do better and get the grade they needed,” Gershenson explained. “Instead, it makes me think that there was some real learning that happened and was retained.”

‘Good for everybody’

Though it sets out to measure the benefits of tougher grading policies, the study jibes somewhat with research investigating the inverse phenomenon of grade inflation. According to the , a long-term analysis of student grades conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, the average high school GPA rose from 3.00 in 2009 to 3.11 in 2019. But performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, stayed flat over the same period. 

That federal assessment when it appeared last spring, but it only covered the years before the pandemic. Another report, , found evidence of significant grade inflation over 2020 and 2021, with self-reported student GPAs climbing even as ACT scores themselves did not.

Not all education policy scholars are concerned about these revelations. Zachary Bleemer, a professor of economics at the Yale School of Management, that some grade inflation — whether at the university or K-12 levels — can correct inequalities in which student groups pursue intellectually rigorous subjects. (Female college students, in particular, to discontinue studies in economics if their initial grades are poor.) What’s more, ACT’s hypothesis could rightly be viewed with caution, given the organization’s potential interest in casting high school grades as less reliable than scores on college admissions tests. 

But it is also broadly reflected in accounts given by teachers themselves, who have sometimes as a response to COVID’s disruption to in-person learning. In big districts like , , and (home to Las Vegas), new standards have deemphasized deadlines and classroom behavior, giving students more time and chances to complete graded work.

Education authorities have justified those changes as an equity-minded strategy to keep students engaged who might otherwise become frustrated or fall behind in their studies. But Gershenson and his co-authors found no evidence that North Carolina students assigned to harder graders became alienated from school. In fact, those students were slightly less likely than their peers to rack up unexcused absences.

Best of all, whether measured by attendance or test scores, the results of higher standards were broadly similar for a range of different students. While higher-performing math students enjoyed marginally larger gains than their relatively lower-performing classmates, effects were ultimately beneficial across 20 different student categories — each differing by race, sex, class rank, and prior achievement level in math. 

Gershenson, who sees grade inflation as a significant problem that distorts how scholastic performance is interpreted, said the near-uniformity of his team’s findings was a strong signal that high standards are “good for everybody.”

“For none of these outcomes… is the effect negative. Sure, the effects are smaller for some groups than others, and they’re smaller for some outcomes than others. But on no dimension are students being harmed by higher grading standards.”

There is widespread agreement about the nature of the challenges facing America’s schools, teachers and students as the country tries, gingerly and in fits and starts, to get back to normal after COVID-19. But as for what to do about those challenges, opinions are mixed — and more than a little contentious.

That tension has rocketed across our opinion pages this past year, fueling debate and perhaps (we hope) guiding discussion of the best ways to help kids, schools and educators recover as the pandemic finally recedes. Here are the top 18 essays we published this year:

Schneider: Inside the New Data That Suggest American Education Still ‘Runs on ‘Lies’

Grade Inflation: In March, the results from the most recent High School Transcript Study were released — and unfortunately, wrote Mark Schneider, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, they support the charge that schools routinely mislead their students. Many data points, if they were true reflections of reality, “should lead us all to celebrate the success of our students” — but the evidence “shows a disconnect,” he writes. “We see ‘inflation’ in course grades and course titles but stagnation in student performance.”

Educator’s View — I Understand My Students Because I’ve Been There: 

Child Poverty: When contributor Kristina Eisenhower was in fifth grade, her teacher told the class to bring in $1.25 for a pizza party. She couldn’t scrounge the money and was afraid to ask her father, who worked a 7-to-5 job and barely made ends meet. When she told her teacher she had only had 62 cents, she was sent to the cafeteria to eat lunch instead of celebrating with the class. Sixteen years later, that memory is still clear. But as an elementary school teacher in a Title I school, Eisenhower understands her students and their struggles. And no child who ever came through her classroom has ever had to miss a party, whether they brought money or not. 

Teens Have Changed Their Higher Ed Plans — & Survey Shows They May Never Go Back

Postsecondary Education: A recent survey asked a representative pool of 1,000 teenagers to compare their post-high school graduation plans before the COVID-19 pandemic with what their intentions are now, two years later. Their answers should worry institutions of higher education — because the next generation appears less interested in the traditional college pipeline. Interest in enrolling in a four-year college dropped 14%. And those students may never come back. Contributors John Kristof and Colyn Ritter have the breakdown.

When Grades and Test Scores Don’t Add Up, Who Can Parents Trust?

Grade Inflation: Contributor Alina Adams’s daughter is a straight-A student at her New York City public high school. But on one of the two state Regents exams she took this year, she didn’t even score well enough to qualify for “mastery” of the subject. Adams’s daughter isn’t alone in this disconnect; it happens all over the country. Grade inflation has been a problem for decades, and with COVID canceling standardized tests, it’s gotten even worse. But those scores are a second opinion of sorts. They either confirm the teacher’s view of your child, or they should at least inspire parents to look closer. 

How 232 Schools Across America Are Challenging 5 Big Assumptions About Education

Innovative Schools: Plenty of the challenges being confronted by schools, writes contributor Chelsea Waite, are actually enduring structural flaws that long pre-date COVID-19. “Fortunately, a diverse array of communities are working to reinvent schooling in pursuit of their visions for thriving young people and families,” Waite writes. “The learning environments they’re designing and redesigning don’t all look the same — in fact, far from it. But what they have in common is challenging key assumptions about schooling to create more equitable, joyful and responsive learning environments that reflect community values and priorities.” These learning environments are now the focus of a growing national effort called The Canopy Project — a dataset documenting the practices of 232 schools with lengthy track records of innovation. 

New Edunomics Calculator Estimates COVID Learning Losses by District, and Costs of Catching Kids Up

Learning Loss: Our friends at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab launched an eye-opening new tool that will allow parents and policymakers in 8,000 school districts to estimate how much help area students will need in recovering from COVID learning losses, how much that learning acceleration might cost in the form of tutoring, and how these costs compare with the federal relief funds recently distributed to the district. Read more about how these estimates are calculated, and give the calculator a spin for yourself — all you need is a state and district name.

New Studies Show Charter Schools Drive Gains for All Public School Kids

Charter Schools: Thirty years ago, when the charter school movement was just getting off the ground, devotees of big-city school systems worried that these new options would drain critical funding, hurt the kids who were left behind and make a system in which race played a central but often unacknowledged role even more unjust. Yet, in recent years, it has become increasingly clear that concerns about charter-inflicted damage are misplaced — as demonstrated by a pair of new studies that find broad and statistically significant gains for all publicly enrolled students as charter schools expand. Contributors Michael J. Petrilli and David Griffith take stock of the new research.

Parents: The focus on tutoring, summer school and extended days to make up for lost learning reveals perhaps the biggest blind spot in education, says contributor Alejandro Gibes de Gac, because engaging families is the only wide-reaching, cost-effective and culturally responsive way to increase instructional time and accelerate learning recovery. Parent involvement is the most powerful predictor of kids’ academic success, yet policymakers and administrators focus almost exclusively on improving schools — where students spend just 13% of their waking hours. Ignoring the role parents play in their kids’ learning leaves the door wide open for inequity to run rampant.

There Is No ‘Big Quit’ In K-12 Education — But Schools Have Specific Labor Challenges

Teacher Shortages: Economists have dubbed it the Great Resignation: millions of employees quitting their jobs to seek higher pay and better working conditions. Is this Big Quit happening in education? Says contributor Chad Aldeman, the data suggest the answer is no. While turnover rates are setting new highs in the private sector, they look pretty normal in public education. That doesn’t mean there are no labor challenges in K-12, but those issues are smaller in magnitude than what the private sector faces, and they are much more about specific schools and particular roles within schools. Districts, Aldeman writes, should respond accordingly with solutions — including those involving targeted pay hikes — tailored to the actual challenges schools face. 

Science of Reading: The new NAEP reading scores showed that the need for immediate, effective action has never been more urgent. While districts invest their federal COVID relief dollars in expanded learning time and intensive tutoring, say contributors John B. King and Jacquelyn Davis, they must not neglect their collective responsibility to strengthen core instruction for all children. The best lever to accelerate learning in America is to use the science of how children learn to read. The human brain is wired to speak and absorb language — but not to read. Most kids need instruction in phonics, vocabulary and background knowledge to grasp the written word.

Grants to Expand Tutoring & Other Innovations for Students

Tutoring: Effective tutoring is one of the few educational interventions with a strong research base. The best approach: student groups of four or fewer meet multiple times a week with a trained and consistent tutor, using high-quality curriculum. But high-impact tutoring is hard to scale. How do you find enough skilled adults to work with millions of students in small-group settings? And how can schools know whether the high-tech tutoring products they buy are effective? In this essay, contributors Kevin Huffman and Janice Jackson describe a grant program that aims to promote effective innovative strategies for bolstering student learning.

Rethinking Teaching: Amid the debate about looming teacher shortages, a fundamental point is missed, says contributor Brian Greenberg: Even if schools could go back to the old approach of a single teacher in front of a class, they should not. A better approach than the status quo is possible, and innovative educators are working on creative solutions that focus more attention on each student, expand the impact of the best educators and reshape the teacher’s role. Here, the CEO of the Silicon Schools Fund notes some advances worth paying attention to. 

What Will $50 Billion in COVID School Relief Funding Buy?

Federal Relief Funding: Nearly a year after Congress approved $122 billion in COVID relief aid for elementary and secondary education through the American Rescue Plan, school districts and charter organizations have targeted their spending on three priorities: academic recovery, staffing, and school facilities and operations. A new analysis by FutureEd, an independent, nonpartisan think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, is the first to detail how $50 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds (ESSER III) is flowing through 3,056 school districts and charter organizations educating 60 percent of the nation’s public school students. Contributors Bella DiMarco and Phyllis W. Jordan examine spending in seven major categories and 78 subcategories.

Learning Loss: The new NAEP scores quantify how much of a catastrophe pandemic-era school policy and practice was. But too many leaders are not mustering the political courage to level with parents about the scope of the problem. Schools have obfuscated about what learning loss even means. Some states have dragged their feet on releasing test score data; in others, school officials minimize the exams’ importance. This new round of NAEP data, says contributor Andrew Rotherham, should end any hesitancy about telling parents where things stand and what must be done. It removes the last excuse for not providing an honest accounting — now. 

Time to Change the ‘When’ & ‘Who’ of College

Higher Education: While the pandemic accelerated the nationwide decline in college enrollment, the crisis has been building for decades. Even as a college degree has increasingly become a prerequisite for stable, living-wage jobs, the cost in both money and time has become more and more prohibitive. Addressing these fundamental failures, say contributors Dumaine Williams and Stephen Tremaine, means questioning some of the very fundamentals. For example: Why should a college education start at age 18, and only after a student graduates from high school? In this essay, the dean and executive director of Bard Early Colleges describe programs around the country that start low-income students on the path to college while still in high school and give them tools to help them persist through graduation.

Most Students Who Left College During COVID Want to Return — But Many Can’t

College Pipeline: A National Student Clearinghouse report shows total post-high school enrollment fell by about 685,000 students in spring 2022. In the wake of COVID-19 losses and disruptions, U.S. colleges and universities have lost 1.3 million students over the past two years. Why? A recent Gallup-Lumina Foundation study shows that while there is great demand for and interest in higher education, many students can neither access nor afford it. In this essay, contributor Courtney Brown of Lumina sheds some light on these barriers — and what can be done about them.

Mental Health: The mental health crisis among America’s youth was a slow-burning fire that is now raging in the wake of COVID-19. New research from the Walton Family Foundation and Murmuration shows that more Americans born between 1997 and 2012 are grappling with depression, hopelessness, addiction and suicide than older generations. The symptoms often go unnoticed, revealing themselves in awkward dinner table silences and closed bedroom doors. But the pandemic has exacted a toll too heavy to ignore. Contributor Caryl M. Stern, Walton’s executive director, breaks down the numbers and points to some organizations with innovative ways to help.

Bilingual Education: U.S. schools enroll more than twice as many Latino students as they did in 1995, federal data suggest, and by 2030, Latinos will make up roughly 30% of public school enrollment. These students bring a rich diversity and an array of strengths to the classroom, 74 contributor Conor Williams writes, but also a long history of being segregated and not well served. Williams suggests three ways educators can meet the needs of this rapidly growing student demographic: diversify the teaching force, ensure widespread access to bilingual education and prioritize their enrollment in early education programs.

Between 2016 and 2021, the average GPA for students taking the test increased from 3.22 to 3.39. But scores on the ACT I — reflecting performance in English, math, reading and science — declined slightly, from 20.8 to 20.3. The trend was especially noticeable among Black students and those from low- to moderate-income homes.

The results, based on a sample of over 4 million students in almost 4,800 schools, reflect “persistent, systemic,” grade inflation, wrote the authors, both researchers at ACT. Following a recent from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — or NAEP — the ACT analysis provides further evidence that grades, which often include points for effort and class participation, don’t reflect objective measures of academic achievement.

The study found more grade inflation in higher-poverty schools. Edgar Sanchez, a lead research scientist at ACT, said it’s unclear why that’s the case and called the study “a starting point.”

But Seth Gershenson, an American University researcher who has the issue, attributed the problem to what President George W. Bush “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Schools, Gershenson said, award passing grades “and let someone else deal with the lack of learning later on.”

His research also showed growing grade inflation over time in wealthier schools, where “more entitled parents and students” are putting pressure on teachers to give A’s so students can get into top colleges.

It’s unclear to what extent the relaxation of grading standards during the pandemic affected the study’s outcome, wrote the ACT researchers. California students, for example, were allowed to change their lowest grades. And reduced how much scores on end-of-course tests counted in students’ final grades. The authors noted that students who tested in the middle of a pandemic, especially the spring after schools shut down, “could be different from typical tested students” and also from those who didn’t test until 2021.  

At a time when more colleges and universities are making both the ACT and SAT for admission, ACT CEO Janet Godwin acknowledged the risk that the paper’s argument in support of standardized testing might seem self-serving, 

But she said the company has “a responsibility” to contribute to the conversation.

“We have the means and the data to do this kind of research,” she said.

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank that has published Gershenson’s work, agreed that ACT has “a big dog in that fight.” Regardless, he agreed that current trends in grading are leaving students less prepared for higher education.

“The heart of the problem is that there aren’t any standards or guidelines for grading in most places,” Petrilli said. “Teachers are on their own, and don’t get much, if any, guidance. Nor do they get much training in [education] schools.”

‘In the dark’

Parents rely on grades to give them an accurate portrait of their children’s performance — especially since they are given more frequently than annual state tests, said Bibb Hubbard, founder and president of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit that helps parents become better informed about their children’s progress. 

But many parents might not understand that grades are sometimes more about effort than knowledge, she said. 

“When we ask teachers why they don’t share more with parents about student achievement, they report it is fear-based — fear of not being believed, of being blamed and of their principals not having their back,” she said. “The system is designed to keep parents in the dark about their child’s grade-level performance.”

In recent years, some districts have adopted an approach known as “standards-based grading” that educators say offers a more accurate measure of whether students are meeting expectations. It takes the emphasis off non-academic factors like turning in assignments early and attendance — practices that can vary from teacher to teacher.

The 3,000-student Pewaukee School District in Wisconsin, outside Milwaukee, implemented such a model in 2015. Students are graded on a one-to-four system, with one representing below expectations and four indicating advanced performance. 

“We didn’t want students’ grades dependent on whether they brought in a box of Kleenex,” said Danielle Bosanec, the district’s chief academic officer. “We wanted kids to stop chasing grades and start chasing learning.”

Parents bought into the plan because it allows students more than one chance at a passing grade on an assignment or test so long as they can demonstrate the additional work they did after their first try. The district agreed to convert final scores into letter grades for transcripts.

Bosanec also conducted her own research to test the connection between the new grading model and ACT scores. In general, she found that in a standards-based model, “as students’ grades go up or down, the impact on ACT scores follows suit.”

Despite the studies pointing to grade inflation, there’s no “widespread evidence that institutions have lost trust in GPAs,” said David Hawkins, chief education and policy officer at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. What colleges crave, he said, is more context. 

In the future, he thinks, like research projects or class presentations — used widely in some states like New Hampshire in lieu of tests — could become part of the admissions process.

“There is more to be mined from the student’s high school record than we’re currently getting,” he said. “We’re missing a lot of data about what students can do.”