Another Kind of Inflation

This is the kind that hurts Arkansas' kids.

OUR FIRST thought was: Educational statistics professor? This guy’s brains must be off the chart. Could he take a look at our checkbook? 

That’d be Sean W. Mulvenon, Mr. Ed. Stat. Prof. at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville division. 

He was speaking before the state House and Senate education committees the other day about—what else?—education statistics. 

And what he said wasn’t good. 

No, he wasn’t talking about teacher salaries or student-teacher ratios or athletic spending or any number of other problems that professors of educational statistics might well ponder these courtsupervised days in Arkansas. He was talking to the pols about Grade Inflation. 

You know about grade inflation. Don’t deny it. That was back when you thought that washing the chalkboard for Mrs. Loudermilk and complimenting her on her dress would help bring that C up to a B. 

That was then. Grade inflation is much more complicated now. These days you have parents complaining to principals when the little darlings flunk a test. Or maybe the coaches are pressuring classroom teachers to pass the star tailback. (Nothing new there.) Or maybe teachers don’t want to hurt feelings. Do you remember back when teachers cared more about whether you learned something than about your precious feelings? And when you came home with a bad grade, you caught it at home—and your folks never did think to march to the school and chew out the principal? 

Professor Mulvenon said kids are getting higher grades, and in what are supposed to be harder courses, too, but all those better grades aren’t translating into better performance on college entrance exams. One index showed that more than half the kids who planned to go to college last year needed remedial courses before they could tackle college work. 

More than half? Yep, 52.2 percent in 2004. 

And those are the kids—the all too small number of them in this state—who are planning to go to college at all. 

Leave it to state Representative Jodie Mahony to put it plain: He said lawmakers have been trying “to identify the schools that are lying to their kids about how well they are performing on the courses. Essentially, our theory has been that they are not getting it in the classroom.” Thank you, Representative Mahony. When you’re not being infuriating, you can make perfect sense. And you’re not afraid to call lying lying. It’s also cheating the kids out of what they deserve: fair grades. 

PROFESSOR Mulvenon has completed a study on this grade inflation phenomenon. He’s identified 42 schools in Arkansas as having “chronically inflated grades” and the state’s Department of Education expects to have a list of those schools some time this week. We can’t wait to see the list. And print it. 

Surprise, surprise. Professor Mulvenon says small districts have the highest remediation and grade-inflation rates. Large districts have the lowest. 

Save your ink, stamps and gunpowder. We’re not picking on small school districts. Not without reason, anyway. The same homey atmosphere that proponents of small school districts claim makes smaller better also makes them hotbeds of grade inflation. Think about how things work in a close community where everybody knows everybody else, where teachers are on a first-name basis with most parents, where everybody goes to one or two churches, and so chummily on. Oh, I can’t give little Betty a D on her project. She was probably helping her mother with all that food at the church carnival. 

Other studies show that grade inflation isn’t a problem unique to Arkansas. But that doesn’t mean Arkansas can ignore it. Let’s find out which schools are having this problem. Let’s point them out and force them to be honest with themselves, and with their kids. 

And then somebody should explain to the teachers, principals, coaches, parents—and their kids—that a 3.5 gradepoint average in high school won’t do little Johnny much good if he’s getting only a 16 on the ACT. It’s an important point to make. For one thing, it could be the difference between attending (and paying for) college for four years—or five or six. Even worse, if the kid finally wakes up and finds he’s been duped all those years by his inflated grades, he may get discouraged and decide not go to college at all. 

Grade inflation isn’t a harmless favor. It harms. A lot. It can cripple a child’s future.