Amid the growing debate over how best to teach math, there is another ballooning problem: grades. They’re becoming increasingly untethered to how much students know. That not only makes it harder to gauge how well students are learning math and catching up from pandemic learning losses, but it’s also making math grades a less reliable indicator of who should be admitted to colleges or take advanced courses.

The latest warning sign comes from college admissions test maker ACT, which compared students’ ACT test scores with their self-reported high school grades between 2010 and 2022. Grade inflation struck all high school subjects, ACT found, but it was highest for math, followed by science, English, and social studies.

Grade inflation accelerated after 2016 and intensified during the pandemic, as schools relaxed standards. But as schools settled back into their usual rhythms in 2021-22, grades didn’t fall back to pre-pandemic norms and remained elevated. Grades continued to rise in math and science even as grade inflation stabilized in English and social studies. For a given score on the math section of the ACT, students said they had earned higher grades than students had reported in previous years.

Edgar Sanchez, an ACT researcher who conducted the analysis, said the inflation makes it hard to interpret high school grades, especially now that A grades are the norm. “Does 4.0 really mean complete content mastery or not?” Sanchez asked, referring to an A grade on the 0 to 4 grade-point scale.

Grade inflation is a big trend across the country.  “It’s not just happening in some classrooms or with some teachers, it’s happening across the system,” said Sanchez. “What is happening in the system that is pushing this trend?”

Grades represent more than just content mastery. Many teachers factor in attendance, participation and effort in calculating a final grade. It’s possible that even math teachers are weighing soft skills more heavily with the increasing popularity of social-emotional learning. Or, perhaps high schools have watered down the content in math courses and students are genuinely mastering easier material.

A’s on the rise

Sanchez speculates that test optional admissions have elevated the importance of high school grades. He encouraged journalists and other researchers to look into the increased pressures on high school teachers of math and science courses, which Sanchez described as ”pivotal” for getting into competitive STEM college programs.  

Sanchez said he shared his grade inflation findings with college administrators, who told him that incoming STEM students are not as prepared as students in previous years. (The Hechinger Report has also found that college students are struggling with basic math.) But college professors didn’t report a similar academic deterioration with their humanities students. “That was an interesting confirmation of these findings,” Sanchez said.

ACT isn’t an unbiased research organization. The nonprofit sells tests and it has been advocating for colleges to re-establish exam requirements. However, neutral observers have also found strong evidence of high school grade inflation. The U.S. Department of Education documented rising grades on high school transcripts between 2009 and 2019, while 12th grade math scores fell on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The National Center for Education Statistics plans to update this transcript study in 2024. 

The ACT analysis, published in August 2023, covered almost 6.9 million high school seniors who took the ACT between 2010-22. They attended over 3,800 different public schools. It was a follow up to a 2022 report, which also detected grade inflation through 2021. This 2023 update looked at grade inflation by subject and added 2022.

Sanchez calculated that average math grades, adjusted for student and school characteristics, increased 0.30 grade points from 3.02 in 2010 to 3.32 in 2022. This translates to a movement from  “B” average to above a “B+” average in a decade. During this same time period, science grades increased by 0.24 points, while English and social studies rose by 0.22 points and 0.18 points, respectively. (The analysis excluded bonus points that some high schools award for Advanced Placement and other courses. A 4.0 was the maximum grade.)

Measuring grade inflation: Grades rise as ACT test scores fall

Grades are rising against a backdrop of declining achievement. English, math, reading and scientific reasoning ACT scores fell slightly between 2010-22. The sharpest declines were in math, in which the average ACT score dropped from 21.4 to 20.2. Three quarters of this math deterioration has taken place since 2020. 

Grade inflation may indeed be an unintended consequence of a well-intended policy to de-emphasize testing. More than 1,800 colleges have adopted test-optional or test-blind admissions. That’s increased the importance of grades. The losers here are students who still need to understand math – no matter what their grade.

This story about grade inflation in high school was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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What is the best way to teach? Some educators like to deliver clear explanations to students. Others favor discussions or group work. Project-based learning is trendy. But a June 2023 study from England could override all these debates: the most effective use of class time may depend on the subject.

The researchers found that students who spent more time in class solving practice problems on their own and taking quizzes and tests tended to have higher scores in math. It was just the opposite in English class. Teachers who allocated more class time to discussions and group work ended up with higher scorers in that subject. 

“There does seem to be a difference between language and math in the best use of time in class,” said Eric Taylor, an economist who studies education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and one of the study’s authors. “I think that is contradictory to what some people would expect and believe.”

Indeed, the way that the 250 secondary school teachers in this study taught didn’t differ that much between math and English. For example, math teachers were almost as likely to devote most or all of the hour of class time to group discussions as English teachers were: 35 percent compared to 41 percent. Lectures were one of the least common uses of time in both subjects.

The study, “Teacher’s use of class time and student achievement,” published in the Economics of Education Review, gives us a rare glimpse inside classrooms thanks to a sister experiment in teacher ratings that provided the data for this study. Teachers observed their colleagues and filled out surveys on how frequently teachers were doing various instructional activities.

How secondary school teachers in low-income secondary schools in England allocate class time

The researchers studied 32 high-poverty English secondary schools and looked at how the allocation of classroom time in years 10 and 11 related to the test scores of 7,000 students. Throughout the United Kingdom, including England where this study took place, 11th year students take General Certificate of Secondary Education [GCSE] exams, which are akin to high school exit exams. (Years 10 and 11 are equivalent to 9th and 10th grades in the United States.)

Researchers didn’t prove that teachers’ choices on how to spend class time caused GCSE scores to go up. But they were able to control for teacher quality, and they noticed that even among teachers who had the same ratings, those who opted to allocate more time to individual practice work had higher student math scores. Similarly, among English teachers with the same quality ratings, those who opted to allocate more time to discussions and group work had higher student English scores. “Better” teachers who received higher ratings from their peers had a slight tendency to allocate time more effectively (that is, more practice work in math and more discussion time in English), but there were plenty of teachers who had gotten strong ratings from peers who didn’t spend class time this way.

The researchers did not theorize about why individual practice work is more important in math than in English. I’ve noticed that doing a lot of practice problems during school hours is a big part of the algebra tutoring programs that have produced strong results for teens. Advocates of project-based learning once tried to develop a curriculum to teach math, but backed off when they struggled to come up with good projects for teaching abstract math concepts and skills. But they had success with English, science and social studies. 

Although the study took place in England, Taylor sees lessons here for U.S. educators on how to spend their class time.  “I suspect that if we repeated this whole setup in high schools in New York or elsewhere in the United States that we would see similar results,” said Taylor. 

In this country many teachers are encouraged to incorporate “math talks” as a way to develop mathematical reasoning and help students see multiple strategies for solving a problem. Progressive math educators might also favor group over individual work. Yet this study found stronger math achievement for students whose teachers devoted less class time to math discussions or group work. 

Critics might complain that test scores shouldn’t be the ultimate goal of mathematics education. Some teachers care more about developing a love of math or inspiring students to pursue math-heavy fields. We cannot tell from this study if teachers who conduct more math discussions produce other long-term benefits for students. 

It’s also unclear from this study exactly what math teachers are doing during the long stretches of independent work time. Some may be milling about offering hints and one-to-one help. Others might be kicking back at their desks, catching up on email or drinking a cup of tea while students complete their homework in class.

Even teachers who devote most of their class time to independent practice work may begin class with five or 10 minutes of lecturing. It’s not as if students are magically teaching themselves math, muddling through on their own, Taylor said.

“It’s not the only thing that’s going on in these classes,” said Taylor. 

I suspect that we’re going to have more information on how good teachers spend their precious minutes of class time in the near future, thanks to improvements in artificial intelligence and learning analytics. I can imagine algorithms more accurately analyzing how class time is spent from audio and video recordings, eliminating the need for human observers to code hours of instructional time. 

“Even if we don’t know exactly the recipe to give to teachers today, I think this study does say, ‘Well, hold on a minute, maybe we should be thinking differently about what’s right if we’re teaching math or language’,” said Taylor. These results, he added, should encourage educators to think more about what works best for each subject.  

This story about math teaching methods was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

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It’s often hard to express exactly why certain teachers make such a difference in our lives. Some push us to work harder than we thought we could. Others give us good advice and support us through setbacks. Students describe how a caring teacher helped them “stay out of trouble” or gave them “direction in life.” What we cherish often has nothing to do with the biology or Bronze Age history we learned in the classroom.

For the lucky among us who have formed connections with a teacher, a school counselor or a coach, their value can seem immeasurable. That has not deterred a trio of researchers from trying to quantify that influence.

“Many of us have had a teacher in our lives that just went above and beyond and was more than a classroom teacher,” said Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University and one of the researchers on a draft working paper circulated in May 2023 by the National Bureau of Economic Research that has not been peer reviewed. “It’s really an underappreciated way in which teachers matter.”

Kraft and two other researchers from Harvard University and the University of Virginia turned to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, a periodic survey of 20,000 teens from 1994 into adulthood. One of the questions posed in 2000, when they were 18-24, was this: Other than your parents or step-parents, has an adult made an important positive difference in your life at any time since you were 14 years old?

Three quarters of the students said they had an adult like this in their lives. Often their most important mentor was another relative, a neighbor or a religious leader. But over 15 percent of the students – more than one out of every seven respondents – said that a teacher, a school counselor or a sports coach was their most important mentor. These school relationships were notably long-lasting; students said that teachers and coaches played important roles in their lives for more than five years, on average.

The researchers compared what happened to the 3,000 students who had mentors at school with the roughly 5,000 students who said they had no mentors at all. The ones with school mentors did moderately better in high school with slightly higher grades – for example, a  B- versus a C+ –  and failed fewer classes. 

But what was really striking was what happened after high school. Those who had formed a positive relationship with a teacher, a counselor or a coach increased their chances of going to college by at least 9 percentage points. That’s a substantial boost given that only 51 percent of students without a mentor enrolled in college.

Kraft and his colleagues brought the tools of modern applied economics to answer the question of a teacher’s worth outside of the classroom. There are many confounding factors and perhaps the teens who form these relationships with caring adults are different in other ways  – maybe they are more ambitious or have more self-confidence – and they would have gone to college in higher numbers even if they hadn’t had a mentor at school. Though it’s impossible to account for all the possibilities, the researchers crunched the numbers in various ways, arriving at different numerical results each time, but consistently saw strong benefits for students who had mentors at school. This was true even between best friends, romantic partners and twins. For example, the twin sibling with a mentor did better than the one without, even though they were raised by the same parents and attended the same high school. 

Kraft and his colleagues didn’t detect a big difference in college graduation rates between those with and without mentors. The largest difference seems to be the decision to apply and enroll in college. For students who are undecided on whether to go to college, having a school-based mentor seems to carry them over the threshold of the college gates.

Related: Two studies point to the power of teacher-student relationships to boost learning

Students from low-income and less educated families were less likely to have a mentor, but having a mentor was even more beneficial for them than it was for their higher income peers. Their college going appeared to be dramatically higher. The mentoring itself also seemed different for poor and rich students. Lower income students were more likely to report that their mentors gave them practical and tangible help, along with advice on money. Higher income students were more likely to report receiving guidance, advice and wisdom. 

Being mentored by a sports coach was just as effective as being mentored by a teacher; these young adults experienced the same short-term and long-term benefits. However, female students were more likely to gravitate toward teachers while male students were more likely to bond with a coach. 

Formal mentorship programs, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, have also produced benefits for young adults, but Kraft said the benefits from the informal relationships studied here appear to be larger.

“We know how to set up formal mentoring programs but not all the relationships are going to pan out,” said Kraft. “We know far less about how to support and cultivate the formation of these voluntary relationships. And we have no control over whether or not it’s the students who might most benefit from them who are able to successfully seek out and form these mentoring relationships.”

But there are some clues in the study as to what schools can do to create the conditions for serendipity. “There is no magic wand for exactly the best way to do it,” Kraft said. “It’s not something we can say, do this and relationships will form. But schools are social organizations and can create environments where they’re more likely to happen.”

The researchers noticed that high schools with smaller class sizes and those where students said they felt a greater “sense of belonging” tended to produce twice as many of these mentoring relationships than schools with larger classes and a less hospitable school environment. “When students say that school is a place where they feel welcome and part of the community,” said Kraft, “you’re much more willing to open up to a teacher or counselor or a coach, and reciprocate when they reach out and say, ‘Hey, I see you’re looking a little down. Do you want to talk about it?’” 

Kraft offers two additional suggestions for schools:

• Hire more Black and Hispanic teachers

White students were substantially more likely to report having a school mentor than their Black and Hispanic peers. That’s likely because the U.S. high school teacher workforce is 79 percent white and 59 percent female, and from middle and upper-middle class backgrounds. “Shared common life experiences increase the likelihood that you’ll develop an informal mentoring relationship because you can talk about things in a common way,” said Kraft. “This adds weight to the pressing need to diversify the teacher workforce.” 

The researchers do not know why so many Asian males (more than 20 percent) sought out and built strong relationships with adults at school. Seventeen percent of Asian females had school mentors. Only 10 percent of Black and Hispanic female students had mentors at school while Black and Hispanic males reported slightly higher rates of about 12 percent. Fifteen percent of white students reported having school-based mentors.

• Create small group moments

Kraft suggests that school leaders can promote these student-teacher relationships by creating more opportunities for students to have multiple, sustained interactions with school personnel in small group settings. This doesn’t necessarily require smaller class sizes; small groups could be advisory periods, club activities or tutoring sessions during the school day.

Is the implication of this study that teachers should be taking on even more responsibilities? Kraft says that’s not his intention. Instead, he wants to recognize what many teachers and other school staffers are already doing. It’s another way, he said, “in which teachers are incredibly important.” 

This story about the importance of teacher-student relationships was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

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A troubling post-pandemic pattern is emerging across the nation’s schools: test scores and attendance are down, yet more students are earning high school diplomas. A new report from Washington, D.C., suggests bleak futures for many of these high school graduates, given the declining rate of college attendance and completion.

The numbers are stark in a March 2023 report by the D.C. Policy Center, a nonpartisan research organization. Almost half the students in the district – 48 percent – were absent for 10 percent or more of the 2021-22 school year. Seven years of academic progress were erased in math:  only 19 percent of third through eighth graders met grade-level expectations in the subject in 2021-22, down from 31 percent before the pandemic. 

At the same time, the high school graduation rate rose to a record 75 percent, up from 68 percent in 2018-19. Although the city is producing more high school graduates, fewer of them are heading off to college. Within six months of high school graduation, only 51 percent of the class of 2022 enrolled in post-secondary education, down from 56 percent from the class of 2019. 

Based on these trends, the D.C. Policy Center predicted that only eight students out of every 100 ninth graders in the district would earn a post-secondary credential within six years of high school graduation. Before the pandemic, 14 out of every 100 ninth graders were predicted to hit that important milestone.

Washington has long grappled with entrenched poverty and its test scores are in the bottom half of major cities in the nation. The city had been improving rapidly before the pandemic and it’s depressing that its bleak education statistics have sharply deteriorated. Educators and researchers also worry that Washington’s pandemic trends are playing out nationwide. 

“From my perspective you could find and replace ‘DCPS’ [DC Public Schools] for basically any major school system right now,” tweeted Ben Speicher, the principal of a charter school in Philadelphia. “The shift in post-HS [high school] plans is a real uncovered story right now.”

Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California, is collecting reports from around the country to summarize what is happening in schools beyond the well-documented nationwide slide in test scores. “My general perception is basically that the trends in D.C. are true everywhere—attendance is way down, grades are up, high school graduation is slightly up, college enrollment is down,” said Polikoff in an email.

The Washington report described how school leaders are still struggling to persuade students to come to school regularly in the 2022-23 school year, despite such incentives as student awards and celebrations and efforts to contact parents. The report also connected the dots between poor attendance and low test scores. Students who were designated as “at-risk” because they were homeless, in foster care or their families were poor enough to receive social welfare benefits, had the lowest academic outcomes, reflecting that these groups of students had the highest rates of chronic absenteeism in the previous school year. Only 15 percent of “at-risk” students met grade-level expectations in reading. In math, only six percent did. 

A majority of D.C. public school students are Black. But just nine percent of the city’s Black high school seniors were deemed to be college or career ready in 2021-22, according to an SAT benchmark, a three percentage point decline from before the pandemic.  

More research is needed to understand why so many schools are giving high grades to students who haven’t mastered material and graduating so many ill-prepared students. In some cases, schools have eased graduation requirements. Washington suspended a requirement for high school students to perform 100 hours of community service, but students were supposed to be in school for a minimum number of instructional hours again in 2021-22. It’s puzzling how high school graduation rates increased, given that absenteeism was so high. 

As I cover pandemic fallout, I am constantly struck by the grim academic toll and how oblivious so many families are to their children’s predicament. National assessments tell us that 20 years of academic progress were erased in a year.  Middle school students are terribly behind in math. Third graders are so behind grade level in reading that the curriculum and assessment company Amplify warns that a third are in need of intensive remediation. Yet, there are multiple reports that parents aren’t signing their children up for free tutoring, even when schools make it available. Who can blame them when their children’s grades are strong and their children are on track to graduate?

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has been documenting the collapse in college-going since the pandemic started, particularly at community colleges. I’ve been focused on the economic reasons. With such a strong labor market, many teens can get a job with decent hourly wages and help support their families. I hadn’t considered how so many more high school graduates might be too ill-prepared for college or a job training program even if they enrolled in one. 

Years from now, we could have too many young adults without the skills to get a good job. And companies won’t have skilled people to hire. That will hobble the economy for everyone. 

This story about a pandemic fallout report in Washington D.C. was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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College isn’t for everyone, many argue. But what is the alternative? An old idea is to train kids in a trade in high school. However, high school trade programs have had a deservedly bad reputation as a “dumping ground” for low-income students, providing a subpar education and failing to prepare young adults for the modern world. These classes are also bound up with a shameful racial history. When schools were forced to desegregate, many funneled Black students into vocational tracks to keep them apart from white students under the same roof. 

High school vocational programs have changed a lot over the past 20 years by both increasing their academic rigor and expanding career fields, from construction and cosmetology to information technology and healthcare. Federal legislation has encouraged these programs to prepare students not only for a career, but also for college. Labels have changed too. It’s now called career and technical education and often abbreviated as CTE. Today, students are actively choosing, instead of being passively steered to shop classes, and white students are more likely to opt for a CTE high school program than Black students.

Massachusetts has been at the forefront of this trend. Four years of math are typically required of vocational students along with the option to take challenging honors classes and calculus. The state spends about $3,000 more per vocational student a year, according to a September 2022 analysis. Vocational programs are more costly to run because they require expensive equipment and spacious classrooms. The hands-on instruction also means smaller classes. Schools usually need to hire more teachers to serve the same number of students.

In recent decades, student performance at Massachusetts high schools dedicated to career and technical education has surpassed traditional high schools, according to a May 2022 book, “Hands-On Achievement: Massachusetts’s National Model Vocational-Technical Schools,” published by the free market research organization Pioneer Institute. Both test scores and graduation rates were higher.

It’s hard to conclude from raw data if students are really better off with job training in high school and whether it’s worth the extra taxpayer expense to run these programs. In Massachusetts, many vocational schools are extremely popular and have long waiting lists. They’re akin to magnet schools that admit the strongest students with unblemished attendance records and high grades. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that strong students might continue to thrive at a high caliber vocational school.

Now a pair of academic researchers from Florida State University and Vanderbilt University have analyzed the Massachusetts experiment in career and technical education by following students seven years after graduating high school in 2009, 2010 and 2011. Thanks to detailed school records, the researchers were able to compare students of the same race or ethnicity, family income and most importantly, with the same eighth grade test scores, grades and attendance records. The only difference was that some had career training in high school while others took traditional high school courses. 

The biggest surprise was that college going rates were higher for students in five career categories: healthcare, education, information technology, arts/communications and business. For example, 77 percent of the students who specialized in healthcare enrolled in college within seven years of graduating high school. That’s 15 percentage points higher than similar students who had a traditional high school education. 

“There’s nursing programs and allied health programs at community colleges that clearly follow after a student’s healthcare classes in high school,” said Walter Ecton, an assistant professor of education at Florida State University and lead author of the study, Heterogeneity in High School Career and Technical Education Outcomes, published in August 2022 in the peer-reviewed journal of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. “Students have a clear pathway and a clear track that they’re putting themselves on.”

Fields of concentration for high school vocational students in Massachusetts for graduating seniors 2009-2011

Seven years after high school graduation, these career students’ salaries were higher too. For example, healthcare students earned $5,491 more annually than their traditional high school counterparts.

By contrast, college going rates were considerably worse for two career fields: construction and transportation, an area that includes auto repair. Students who specialized in construction fields in high school were five percentage points less likely to go to college than similar traditional high school students. 

On the bright side, construction had the highest earnings premium after seven years. Students who studied construction earned $7,698 more annually seven years after high school graduation than similar students who had a traditional high school education. The earnings premium for transportation students diminished from over $6,000 (four years after graduation) to under $5,000 (seven years after graduation) as traditional high school students started to catch up. 

“Students who go into construction, they are earning more, at least for the first seven years after high school graduation than we might otherwise expect, and quite a bit more,” Ecton said. “But they’re also much less likely to go to college than we might otherwise expect. I think that that’s a difficult tradeoff. Different students and families and counselors might make different choices here.”

Ecton’s bigger point is that all career and technical education isn’t the same. “We wanted to understand if certain career pathways are paying off more,” he said. “It’s not a simple yes or no answer. It matters which field you’re going into.” 

Higher earnings for vocational high school students in Massachusetts by field

In Massachusetts, every career field showed at least some benefit over a traditional high school education – either in higher earnings, higher college going or both. But Ecton says that’s not a reason for everyone to pursue a vocational high school course of studies. 

“For a student who already has very high academic achievement, who is already on a clear path to attending and graduating from a bachelor’s degree program, I think that there’s less clear evidence to suggest that CTE is necessarily going to help those students,” said Ecton. 

“I think CTE can be really useful for students who are less engaged in high school in a traditional classroom setting,” said Ecton.  “If I were advising a student on whether to be a CTE concentrator or not, one question I would ask is, how else are you going to spend your time if not as a CTE student?” 

If the alternative is study hall or a test prep class for struggling students, which Ecton says is often the case, CTE can be more engaging and help expose students to clear options after high school. Ecton highlighted how ninth graders at Massachusetts’ vocational high schools take courses in several career areas, from construction to healthcare to business, getting a taste of many fields before settling on a specialization.

The rosy student experience with career-and-technical education in Massachusetts might not be true elsewhere. The state has a highly educated population with workforce needs in high tech and healthcare. And Massachusetts has invested a lot of money in high-quality vocational programs for high school students. A cost-benefit analysis published in September 2022 determined that the public gains between $56,500 to $113,900 in higher earnings and reduced welfare expenditures for each vocational high school student in Massachusetts. But in Connecticut, the benefits were much smaller — only about $10,000. New Jersey and Delaware run costlier vocational programs and more analysis is needed to see if they are paying off. 

Still, even in Massachusetts, the results are uneven. The Pioneer Institute found that one vocational high school in Boston didn’t produce such glowing benefits for students. 

“Sometimes in CTE we see a legacy program that’s been around for a very long time,” Florida State’s Ecton said. “But maybe it’s not setting students up for either college or a good paying job right after high school. But we keep those programs because they’ve been here forever. Maybe they’re even popular among students. I would really encourage schools to do this same analysis and make sure they’re seeing at least some positive outcomes in all of their different programs of study for students.”

This story about CTE was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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It may be self-serving for a test maker to produce research showing that high school grades are rising and less reliable. Yes, it’s a justification for why high schoolers shouldn’t be freed of onerous college admissions tests, but it’s also more evidence that grade inflation is significant and worth closer attention.

The latest is an analysis of more than 4 million high school seniors who took the ACT from 2010 to 2021. ACT’s researchers calculated that the number of test takers with an A average surpassed the number of B students after 2016. Today, A students make up a majority of ACT test takers, some of whom are not college bound and take the test as a required high school assessment.

As grades rose, achievement fell. These recent A students, for example, posted lower ACT scores than A students from a decade ago. Achievement declines were seen across the board among students scoring in the middle and bottom too. That’s a worrisome sign that today’s students aren’t better or harder working and more deserving of higher grades. 

“Even after accounting for all these other factors, we still see evidence of grade inflation,” said Edgar Sanchez, a researcher at ACT who presented his study in April 2022 at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). “Something interesting is happening in 2016. At that point, the rate at which grade inflation occurs really increases considerably.”

One drawback of the study is that it relies on self-reported grades that students disclose on an optional survey when they register for the ACT. Students could lie, but it is unlikely that lying has suddenly increased so much in recent years that it explains the rising grades. 

Another bad sign is that the grade inflation detected by ACT closely mirrors Department of Education research. In a study of actual U.S. high school transcripts around the nation, grade point averages climbed 0.11 points from a 3.0 – a B – in 2009 to 3.11 in 2019. That study ended just before the pandemic years when ACT researchers detected the fastest grade inflation. Just as ACT scores declined, so did 12th grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a national achievement test. The grade inflation prompted the head of the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, to post a warning on the agency’s website, “Education Runs on Lies.”

Rising grades are not a new phenomenon. Research detecting sporadic bursts of high school grade inflation dates back to at least the 1970s. The College Board, which administers the SAT, has also documented grade inflation by comparing SAT scores with high school grades. A 2017 study by a College Board researcher found that grade inflation was worse at wealthier schools. 

In the new ACT study, high school grade point averages (GPAs) climbed 0.17 points from 3.22 (a B) in 2010 to 3.39 (a B-plus) in 2021. Grade inflation was fairly modest during the first half of the 2010s and began to take off after 2016. High school grades skyrocketed between 2018 and 2021, jumping a full tenth of a point as many schools struggled to grade students during the disruptions of school closures and remote learning.

At the same time, the average ACT score decreased by almost a point from 21 in 2010 to 20 in 2021. (The top score is 36.) For any given ACT score, student grades rose. For example, a student who scored a 25, which is among the top 25 percent of test takers, had an average GPA of 3.5 in 2010, but a 3.7 in 2021.  A student with a solid B (3.0) average was likely to have an ACT score of 19 in 2010, but only 15 in 2021. 

ACT researchers considered that the mix of high school seniors taking the ACT changed over the decade and checked to make sure that wasn’t confounding the analysis. But after controlling for student and school differences, grades still rose among students in each family income bracket, poor and rich alike. Black, Hispanic, white and Asian students all earned higher grades. Grade inflation happened at both high poverty schools and more affluent ones. (Depending upon the calculation, grade inflation was sometimes seen to be higher among Black students than white students, and sometimes seen to be higher among schools with more affluent students.) 

The ACT study didn’t factor in bonus points that high schools award for Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes. That means grades topped out at 4.0 and grade inflation was not detected among the very highest ACT scores, which clustered at 4.0 for the entire decade.

It’s not clear exactly what happened in 2016 that prompted so many high school teachers across the nation to hand out higher grades. But I wonder if grade inflation could have been an unintended consequence of the test optional movement, which gathered steam in 2016 as more than 900 colleges dropped the requirement to submit ACT or SAT scores in applications. The vast majority of colleges subsequently went test optional during the pandemic to accommodate students who were unable to sit for a college exam. As a result, college admissions officers relied more heavily on both grades and advanced coursework to make decisions. 

Previous academic research had shown that college admissions tests weren’t a strong indicator of college readiness and that grades were much better at predicting which students would do well, and could help increase diversity on campuses. This research, along with the expense and stress of test prep tutoring, inspired many colleges to drop the exams. However, the anti-testing research was conducted before the recent escalation of grade inflation and it is unclear whether grades will still be a good indicator now that As are more plentiful.

This story about grade inflation was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Alternative high schools often get a bad rap. Test scores, graduation rates and attendance records can make them look like failure factories. 

In New York City, only 54 percent of students graduated from high school within six years at the city’s 50 transfer schools, which is the name the city uses because students who fall behind “transfer” from traditional high schools, where 83 percent of students managed to graduate within six years. (Most finish far sooner.) New York’s transfer schools are frequently featured on the city’s lists of schools that need improvement and are threatened with closure.

But an April 2022 report by Eskolta School Research and Design, a nonprofit consultancy that provides training and services to alternative schools in New York, Boston and Washington, D.C., argues that New York’s transfer schools are doing a much better job at educating struggling students than traditional schools. Eskolta analyzed data for New York City students who should have graduated in 2015, but didn’t because they didn’t pass enough classes and earn enough credits. The data showed that 51 percent of these students subsequently succeeded in graduating over the next four years if they attended a transfer school. That’s double the rate at traditional high schools, where only 25 percent of this population of older students without enough credits succeeded in graduating. For younger students who were sophomores at age 17 — two years older than their peers —  the graduation rate at a transfer school was almost three times that of a traditional high school, 56 percent versus 20 percent.

“They are graduating underserved students at much higher rates,” said Ali Holstein, co-author of the Eskolta study on transfer schools. “Twenty percent of transfer schools in New York State were labeled as needing comprehensive support and improvement. They’re looking at test scores and graduation rates. And we don’t think that captures a lot of the growth that we’re seeing.”

The report, How They Thrive: Lessons from New York City Alternative School Alumni, was also written by Anelfi Maria and Alicia Wolcott. One of the authors, Maria, ended up at a transfer school after struggling with dyslexia, family responsibilities and changing high schools three times. She is now a graduate student in biostatistics at New York University. (Eskolta’s report was partly financed by the Gates Foundation, which is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

Normally, I would read a self-serving report by a consulting group and file it away. But I decided to write about this one because so many students have failed classes during the pandemic and may never earn their high school diplomas. I was curious to learn what advocates of alternative schools say we should do to help them.

Even before the pandemic, during the 2018-19 school year, nearly 100,000 New York City high schoolers — almost a third of the city’s 350,000 high school students — had fallen significantly behind in their course credits and were two or more years older than their grade-level peers. But only 13,000 students found their way to the city’s 50 transfer schools. According to Eskolta, most are coping with some combination of poverty, disabilities, mental illness, homelessness, domestic violence, bullying, being a new immigrant and learning English, taking care of siblings or parenting their own children.

Transfer schools are much smaller, intimate schools. Classes tend to be smaller too, about 13 students for each teacher. They also hire more counselors, 2.6 counselors per 100 students, plus additional social workers from community organizations, such as drug rehabilitation clinics. That compares with fewer than one counselor for every 100 students at traditional high schools.

Eskolta conducted in-depth interviews with 19 alumni of transfer schools. Not everyone graduated, but the alumni interviewed all talked about the importance of forming close relationships with teachers who cared. Some said that the counseling they received at a transfer school motivated them to continue to address their mental health needs.

Relationships with teachers endured after graduation. One student who was stuck in remedial math classes in college returned to her high school math teacher for tutoring. During the pandemic, teachers attended funerals of their former students’ relatives. One sent origami kits to students who were taking care of children at home.

Students said they had no support in their former schools when they fell behind. At transfer schools, teachers allowed students to make up missed assignments and catch up.

Teachers tended to be more flexible and lenient, according to students. One recounted how he was able to eat in class, something that was forbidden in his former school. And his transfer school provided substantial meals of chicken and steak, instead of pizza and fries. “When I’m hungry, I can’t focus,” he said. “They let you eat.”

Students described an atmosphere of school police, metal detectors and strict discipline at their former traditional schools. One student recounted getting into trouble for having a cell phone at school. A third of students in transfer schools had been suspended at their previous school, Eskolta found. 

By contrast, students described feeling far safer in their transfer schools and less bullied. Some transfer schools have an informal reputation for being safe places for LGBTQ students. 

For one student who didn’t graduate, a transfer-school internship led to a full-time job at a nonprofit that serves queer Black youth in the Bronx. Another transfer school dropout described becoming a manager at a retail store. Both former students felt proud to be employed and independent, but they would be considered failures in the education data.

Life was not always easy after transfer school. Students said it was difficult to find a good job without a college degree. Only 28 percent of transfer students enrolled in a college within six months compared to 64 percent at a traditional high school.  Many of those who did enroll expressed frustrations in college because they were stuck in remedial classes and listening to lectures, something they didn’t like in their traditional high schools.

Because of missing data, Eskolta researchers were unable to prove that attendance rates or course grades were better at transfer schools. Assertions that social-emotional well-being is better at transfer schools are anecdotal and not based on quantitative measures. 

And even Eskolta’s data indicate that one group of overage students – 16-year-old ninth graders – might not be served well at transfer schools. Their four-year graduation rates were higher at traditional high schools. However, once these older ninth graders spent six years in high school, the transfer school students were more likely to graduate. Some ultimately fare better in traditional high schools and some don’t.*

After reading the report, I felt persuaded that these smaller, nurturing transfer schools are clearly superior for many students who aren’t self-motivated or don’t have supportive parents and siblings at home. But they are also enormously expensive to operate. Eskolta was unable to provide an estimate of how much it costs to educate students at these schools because a lot of the funding and personnel flow through external community organizations. I’d like to see a good analysis to learn if these schools are ultimately cost effective in reducing future burdens on social services. 

My big takeaway from this report is that struggling students need caring adults to help them find a path forward when they’re falling behind.  Effective transfer schools could show one way to help create that path.

*Clarification: This paragraph was changed from an earlier version to clarify that short-term and long-term outcomes for older ninth graders diverged. An earlier version highlighted only four-year graduation rates. 

This story about transfer schools was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Mark Schneider is a veteran numbers guy who has spent a career crunching education data about things like post-college earnings, graduation rates and charter schools. He once served as the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, an agency that Schneider now oversees as the director of the Institute of Education Sciences, which is the research and data arm of the Department of Education. 

Every month or so – sometimes more frequently, sometimes less – Schneider pens a blog post about bureaucratic topics like the 2022 Principal Investigators Meeting or Update on the IES Use of ARP Funds. I admit, dear reader, they bore me. But Schneider grabbed my attention with this damning headline in March 2022:  “Education Runs on Lies.” It was an alarm bell about what is going on in U.S. high schools – even before the pandemic.

Schneider borrowed the vitriolic (and hyperbolic) phrase from Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education under former President Barack Obama. Duncan fretted that schools had dumbed down standards and were lying to parents that their children were ready for the college or the working world. Now Schneider, appointed by former President Donald Trump, is arguing exactly the same, based on a fresh March 2022 report of a government study of high school transcripts. 

This study found that in 2019, high schoolers were earning more course credits than ever and taking more rigorous courses, such as physics and calculus. Grade point averages climbed; the average GPA in the nation rose to 3.11 in 2019, up from 3.00 – a B – in 2009. Schneider summed it up like this: “More courses, more rigor, more A grades. All good!”

But maybe not so good. During this same time period, 12th grade achievement fell. The math scores of high school seniors dropped four points on the National Assessment of Education Progress, a highly regarded test that is administered to a group of students around the country and intended to represent the nation. The test score drop was even larger – five points – for students who had taken a more demanding curriculum. And despite all extra science classes that students sat through, science scores didn’t budge.

Four or five points may not sound like a lot, but on a national test that covers millions of students, a two-point difference in average test scores is big.  I’ve seen public officials fret and celebrate over smaller drops and jumps.

Schneider thinks that a lot of so-called rigorous high school classes are now terribly watered down. He pointed to an old 2005 course content study, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. It looked at the actual content and curriculum underneath course titles. Analysts concluded only 18 percent of honors algebra I courses and 33 percent of honors geometry courses actually used a rigorous curriculum. 

“What we found is that the titles and what was being advertised by the schools as an advanced course in these areas really did not pan out when we actually looked at what was being taught,” said NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr at a March 2022 presentation, where she referred to this study. 

NCES is planning to update this course content study in 2024 to see if course content has deteriorated further.

Schneider argues that the nation is pretending to increase science and math (so-called STEM) skills by putting high schoolers in courses with fancy titles. “Simply telling students who have not truly mastered STEM skills that they are “A students” who have finished a rigorous math and science curriculum is not the way to produce that workforce,” Schneider concludes. “If education runs on lies, this is one of the more pernicious lies around.”

I’m sympathetic with Schneider’s concerns. But it runs counter to progressive ideas about motivating low-income students to finish high school and go to college by placing them in difficult classes. My colleague, Sarah Butrymowicz, wrote about one of these many efforts in 2017. Philanthropic foundations financed programs in which high school students who would have been placed in remedial classes in the past were instead being pushed into courses that earn college credits. Researchers found promising results. If these rigorous classes – even if they are in name only – motivate students to stay in school and continue their education, is that such a bad thing? 

However, it is troubling that math achievement has actually deteriorated amid this progressive experiment, as it has been implemented nationwide. That’s a sign that students aren’t mastering foundational basics, like what 30 percent off means.  As a society, we need to decide if the tradeoff is worth it. Kids may learn less math, but gain self-confidence to go to college. I worry that too many of these young adults will get trapped in remedial classes in college, and drop out with debts. At some point, content matters. 

This story about high school achievement was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Educators are worried about a wave of high school students who are failing classes during the pandemic. A December 2021 McKinsey report predicted that an additional 1.7 million to 3.3 million eighth through 12th grade students might drop out of school in the coming years if historical correlations between chronic absenteeism and high school graduation prove true. 

One solution that schools are expected to turn to is something called online credit recovery. When students fail a required high school course, they can retake a prepackaged version of it in a classroom or computer lab, clicking through screens and multiple choice questions to “recover” the credit.

“I believe, absolutely, there will be a massive increase in credit recovery, not just during the pandemic, but continuing for a long time afterwards,” said Kinsey Rawe, senior vice president and general manager of courseware and instructional services at Imagine Learning, a leading seller of credit recovery programs to schools. 

Online credit recovery programs were a big driver of improving high school graduation rates, which soared from under 70 percent in 2007 to over 84 percent in 2016. According to the most recent federal data I could find from 2014-15, almost 90 percent of high school principals said they offered online credit recovery in their schools and estimated that 15 percent of their students used these software programs. It made school leaders look good. The online software was a lot cheaper than paying a teacher and graduation rates went up. 

But there was a downside. Journalists discovered cheating scandals and evidence of low-quality instructional materials. Researchers documented that students were often learning a lot less through these prepackaged online courses compared to repeating the class with a human instructor. A 2021 study found that students who earned high school diplomas through credit recovery eventually earned lower wages in the labor market. That’s a sign these adults didn’t learn needed skills in school. 

Before the pandemic hit, school leaders and researchers were trying to figure out ways to improve online credit recovery. 

Los Angeles experimented with adding a certified teacher into the credit recovery classroom. The hope was that the teacher would motivate students to stay focused, help them when they got stuck and supplement the canned curriculum as they saw fit. 

During the summers of 2018 and 2019, more than 1,600 students who had failed freshman English or Algebra I were randomly assigned to one of two versions of summer school. Half were run by teachers and half learned through an online course made by Edgenuity, one of the leading providers of online credit recovery courses. (Edgenuity has since been acquired by Imagine Learning.) The online students sat together but learned at their own pace on laptops, with a teacher in the classroom. 

In this case, clicking on screens wasn’t an easier path to earn credits. For English, only half of the online students passed the course and made up the credit compared with two-thirds of the students in the traditional teacher-taught class. For algebra, the difference was smaller, with 62 percent passing the online course and 69 percent passing the teacher-taught class. 

“We see a big difference with students in the online class less likely to pass,” said Jordan Rickles, a researcher at American Institutes for Research, who conducted the study, which he published in a series of seven briefs during 2020 and 2021. 

Rickles and his team also created their own test to measure how much the teens actually learned. Surprisingly, there was no difference. Students learned just as much online as they had learned from a teacher. In algebra, students in both formats got only one third of the questions right. 

“Getting a third right on this test is not a good sign,” Rickles said. In English, students in both formats did a bit better, answering half of the questions correctly. 

So we have a mystery here. How is it that students are learning the same in both formats but more likely to earn a credit when taught by a teacher? Rickles suspects that sympathetic humans might be passing borderline students who are trying, while the emotionless computer passes students only on the merit of their work. 

Teachers told Rickles that it was hard to ask struggling 14- and 15-year-olds to learn online because many of them didn’t have the self-discipline to work independently and focus for long stretches of time. Typically, schools use credit recovery for older high school students during the junior and senior years, when they feel the pressure of needing to pass the course to graduate. 

But Los Angeles school administrators wanted to help struggling high school students make up their credits earlier. That’s because research has also shown that students who fail courses in the first year of high school are less likely to graduate on time. With earlier credit recovery, school officials had hoped to keep more students on track with their classmates.

Researchers had intended for the credit recovery to take place during the regular school year, but students’ 10th grade schedules were too packed with other requirements. That forced researchers to conduct the experiment in the summer. (Imagine how thrilled these teens must have been to sit in front of a computer for two and a half hours on a hot summer day for more than five weeks.) 

Most students didn’t even get halfway through the online course, Rickles said.

Meanwhile, teachers complained that the reading passages in the prepackaged online course weren’t culturally appropriate for their mostly Hispanic students. In theory, teachers could have assigned supplementary readings that their students might have enjoyed more. But teachers often didn’t understand when or how to override the online lessons. 

“The model broke down in practice,” said Rickles. “The intended model was that the teachers wouldn’t just be monitors….We were naive to think that you could just ask teachers to be more engaged. It’s hard to know what to do.”

Rickles said that teachers need training in how to teach students who are at different places in a self-guided course. And they need examples of how to combine in-person instruction with computer time. Rickles believes that the answer may be some sort of rotation, where teachers can work with small groups of students while other students are practicing skills on the computer.

“The research is becoming clear,” Rickles said. “Having a teacher in the classroom is beneficial. Just putting a kid in front of a computer is not the best way to learn. But we still need to develop these blended learning models and evaluate them.”

Cost remains a concern. Credit recovery was originally marketed as a cheaper option. But when you put a teacher in the credit-recovery classroom, it’s a lot more expensive. Los Angeles had to pay teachers their usual salaries, plus the cost of the software license for the online program. 

”We definitely wouldn’t come away from this study saying online credit recovery is great,” Rickles said. “It may not be much different than the typical teacher option. Maybe neither of them are good.”

Finding the right way to help failing students is going to become even more important as schools try to repair pandemic damage.

This story about online credit recovery was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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More and more jobs require training in science, technology, engineering and math. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, occupations in these fields are projected to grow 8 percent by 2029, more than double the growth rate of non-scientific professions. There’s a pressing need to attract young students from all backgrounds to study these fields in college. 

One large group trailing behind are rural and small town students, who account for 3 out of 10 students nationally. A new analysis of federal data finds that only 13 percent of rural and small town students major in math and science in college, compared with almost 17 percent of students in the suburbs. That’s a large 4 percentage point gap. Urban students also trail suburban students when it comes to studying science, but only by a little, according to the federal data. 

Fewer rural and small town students go to four-year colleges and that explains part of this gap. But even rural and small town students who do go to four-year colleges are less likely to major in science or math. 

It’s curious that rural students aren’t pursuing science in greater numbers. Many rural towns rely on science-heavy fields, from agriculture and mining to forestry and manufacturing. Scholars are trying to understand why more rural students don’t pursue studies that could lead to well-paying careers for themselves and a more productive economic future for their communities.

Some of the clues are contained in this June 2021 data analysis conducted by two researchers at Claremont Graduate University and Indiana University. They scrutinized a large federal dataset of more than 20,000 students across the nation who started high school in 2009 and were surveyed through to their third year of college in 2016. The students in the survey were specially selected to represent the nation and rural, suburban and city students each made up about a third of the students. (There are two different categories for non-urban students in the federal data: rural and small town. Rural accounts for about 20 percent of U.S. students. Small towns, also far from major metropolitan areas, account for another 10 percent of students. Many small towns started as market towns or as small manufacturing towns in the industrial era and are now economically struggling. One example is Harlan, Kentucky, a former coal town. Others, like Provincetown, Massachusetts, are seasonal tourist towns. See map at the top of this page.)  

The demographics of rural and small town students are distinctive. Two-thirds of these students are white, a much higher percentage than either suburban or city students. Their families also tend to be poorer and less educated, particularly so for the students in economically distressed small towns. 

Rural students began high school with the same interest in science and math careers as their suburban counterparts, the survey reveals. At the start of ninth grade, almost 12 percent of both groups of students said they hoped to have a career in life and physical sciences, engineering, mathematics, architecture, or information technology industries. 

However, there are also warning signs that many of these rural students aren’t as well prepared for this pathway. Rural students posted lower scores on math assessments in early ninth grade than their suburban counterparts and they had taken half as many high-school level courses in middle school.  

By the end of 11th grade, rural students’ desire to pursue a career in math or science dropped below 9 percent. Some suburban students became disenchanted with a life in math or science too, but their enthusiasm fell only 1 percentage point. At the same time, the math achievement gap between rural and suburban students grew even larger. 

The researchers point to three explanations for the rural shift away from science: classes, teachers and extracurricular activities. 

Rural and small town schools are far less likely to offer advanced math and science courses, such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes. For example, 63 percent of rural students had access to an in-person calculus class at their school compared with 83 percent of suburban students. In many cases, students who want to take an advanced class that isn’t offered can take an online version. In theory, these remote classes can prepare students for challenging college programs in, say, engineering. But Guan Saw, an associate professor at Claremont and one of the co-authors, points out that students often miss out on forming a relationship with a good teacher at their high school who can inspire a student to make the decision to major in engineering in the first place. 

Teacher quality is another impediment. In the survey data, researchers discovered that rural math and science teachers didn’t participate in professional development as often or feel as confident in their teaching ability or subject knowledge as suburban math and science teachers. “Even when rural students have access to the same coursework, they are not taught by highly qualified teachers,” said Saw. 

Rural students also had fewer opportunities to do math and science outside of the classroom, activities such as science fairs, robotics competitions and math clubs. Sometimes these out-of-school projects and social experiences can motivate students more than performing well in a science or math class. 

Solving these problems won’t be easy. The Rural STEM Education Act proposes to improve teacher training and increase both online and hands-on science education in rural schools. It has bipartisan support, has passed the House and may become law. But it will remain hard to justify hiring an Advanced Placement physics teacher for just a handful of students in a small school and harder to recruit an excellent teacher to teach it. 

There are many studies about the dearth of Black and Latino college students who pursue science but rural students, who are predominantly white, are another underrepresented group. Getting more of them to study science may not only help improve their lives but could also help revitalize economically distressed areas of our country. That’s something that could benefit all of us.

This story about rural science was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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