[Education] Grades Up, Skill-Level Down

What is happening to our nation's schools? Two new reports from the Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress, are showing that while students are challenging themselves with harder courses, and maintaining better grades, their 12th grade reading levels are falling significantly lower than what their peers achieved 13 years ago. What this means is that despite some significant gains being made at the elementary level, the effect of advancing skill levels at that age are not translating to skills later in life.

Some attribute the decline in scores to a 12th grader's tendency to care less about such assessment tests, which I can understand. But the discrepancy between grades and test results seems more closely linked to the trend of grade inflation, which is documented well by other surveys.

The problem then is not simply about education, it is about our tendency to reward appearance over reality. The irony in this is that it has a taken a wholly unacceptable turn. In past years, people complained that standardized testing was biased, superficial and downright not indicative of a student's academic abilities. These concerns were yielded to by many college admissions offices which sought to de-emphasize the importance of the SAT in favor of grades. Now, tests and surveys are showing that grades are equally, if not more, unreliable than the standardized testing that pigeon-holes students. This is because everyone is rewarded by lower standards and higher grades: the students, the teachers and the school administration, except that the real expense of this grade inflation will be America's standing in the world.

Individual achievement is important. It is important to provide our students with the tools they need to find success in the world, and often those tools are work arounds to ridiculous obstacles put in their way. I can certainly understand how in our current educational state these obstacles are ten times worse than those of previous generations, as students are expected to achieve more and more between advanced achievement classes, standardized tests and extracurricular activities. Expectations are higher and harder to meet. But instead of dismantling obstacles, such as superfluous piles of meaningless homework assignments and endless practices for athletic programs, teachers and administrators are instead inflating students grades to give the appearance of achievement. The only effect this can have is to make us as individuals less driven towards higher goals, and it can only create more complacency about the fact that our standard of education is quickly losing ground to other developped and developping nations.

For a very interesting and enlightening article on the "inverse power of praise" check out last week's edition of New York Magazine.

The fact is we can increase standards and grades, but more importantly the quality of our education and the skill level of our students. We can do so while continuing to emphasize the importance of extracurricular achievement and social skills as well. It wouldn't even be that tough. It just takes a little more initiative and a little less reliance on hundred-year-old concepts of teaching.

When I look at the difference between how college students are taught and guided and how high school students are treated, it is immediately obvious that we could be teaching our students more in less time, and that their academic, critical thinking, reading and writing skills could vastly improve in that time. Part of achieving that goal though will be to treat junior high and high school students as individuals capable of learning and synthesizing information from multiple sources while engaging them in the classroom with substantive information instead of busy work. And it can only work as well by deemphasizing the importance of the educational barometers that make us beholden to the appearance of intelligence and not intelligence itself.

For more information on the National Assessment for Educational Progress reports read this article from the San Jose Mercury News