We need more discrimination in education

I don't mean racial, gender or age discrimination. I mean differentiation between "A" work and "C" work. The path to equity is not by dumbing down.

It’s important to have the data, skills and willingness to discriminate. At the same time, it’s critical that we know when and for what to discriminate.

“Discrimination” is so often associated with racial, gender, and religious discrimination that the word has developed a negative connotation. And, indeed, in the social movement to eradicate those “bad” discriminations, the pendulum has swung too far afield from appropriate and necessary forms of discrimination.

The path to maximizing society's creativity and capabilities is to recognize our differences—to discriminate—and provide customized resources for each group. Instead of leveling down as the path to equity, we need to level up to a higher level of equity.

How this shouldn’t work?

In the 1990s, Massachusetts disbanded its Office for Gifted and Talented. Why? Karen Blumstein, the co-president of the Massachusetts Association for Gifted Education, says that Northeastern states, in particular, worry that having these sorts of programs is elitist. At about the same time, cities like Cambridge eliminated their honors courses in high school, with the rationale that they made the non-honors students feel inferior. In the mid- 2000s, Cambridge reinstituted honors classes, as they found that parents of honors-capable students who had the resources were sending their children to private schools.)

More recently, the Massachusetts town of Newton, known for its high-achieving schools, sought to make its teaching instruction more inclusive, creating high school classrooms where the objective was that students at different achievement levels could learn together so that a child taking honors history might be seated next to a student taking standard history, according to a story in the Boston Globe.

Newton’s mixed level classes were intended to tackle a stubborn problem faced by many districts: Black, Latino, and high needs students were concentrated in lower level courses, and often were stuck in those levels during all four years of high school. Districts across the state and country have attempted a range of solutions in recent years, such as eliminating certain advanced classes in Brookline and Cambridge or creating new criteria to take honors classes in districts including Wayland and Peabody.

This notion of leveling down in the name of equity invariably brings to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s short story, “Harrison Bergeron.” In a dystopian future, Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The equality laws were enforced by requiring citizens to wear "handicaps" such as ugly masks for those who are too attractive, earpieces for the intelligent that blasted irritating noises every 30 seconds to disrupt cogent thoughts, and heavy weights for gifted ballerinas or athletes.

Grade inflation compresses the capability to discriminate

Then there is grade inflation, which occurs when students receive higher grades for the same quality of work over time. Grading students has long been a critical form of discrimination. It is a useful, if imperfect, feedback mechanism to identify areas where students need improvement and provides a metric by which they can set goals and track their academic performance while also communicating their achievement level to parents, teachers, and potential future institutions like colleges or employers. Essentially, grades are a well-established mechanism for measuring and communicating a student's understanding of a subject matter.

However, over the past three or four decades, school grades have become less meaningful in that role. As is often the case, there are a multiplicity of intersecting factors at work, including pressure from parents and students to maintain high grades¹, competition between schools to attract students, a desire to boost graduation rates, and a trend toward prioritizing student satisfaction over academic rigor, often leading to teachers assigning higher grades than they might otherwise due to these pressures.

More recently, the justification for flattening grades has been an emphasis on “equity.” With slight variation, the reasoning echoes that of the San Diego, California school district, which has removed from grade consideration handing in late assignments while allowing students to resubmit poorly graded assignments indefinitely. Cheating cannot even be considered in grading, with “reflection” and counseling being the approved responses to academic dishonesty.²

And why is this policy needed? The San Diego administrators, similar to those in Newton, cited the fact that black and Hispanic students receive D or F grades 20 percent and 23 percent of the time, respectively. In comparison, white and Asian students do so just 7 percent and 6 percent of the time.

Essentially, this says we can statistically reduce this gap with low-achievement students by raising their grades—without increasing their knowledge or understanding.

How is that working out? As might be expected, grades. in both high school and college, have become a less valid method for differentiating the level of learning among students. (This isn’t the time for a broader discussion of how predictive grades are of “success” in college or in life or how accurately they forecast actual wisdom. And grades in an English Literature course may be more subjective than grades in a calculus course. However, aggregating 12 years of schooling should provide a reliable ranking of capabilities, as would the overall ranking over four or five years of a university degree.)

ACT, the provider of standardized tests for high school seniors comparable to the older SATs, studied the relationship between high school grade point average (HSGPA) and composite ACT scores. In 1990, the average HSGPA was 2.68. It increased steadily over the years, to 3.39 in 2021. Looking at just the period from 2010 to 2021, cumulative HSGPAs increased by 6%. If grades were measuring learning, then we would expect ACT scores to increase as well. Instead, they decreased by 3%.

Source: ACT Reserach Reports

The grade inflation detected by ACT closely mirrors U.S. Department of Education research. That found that despite rising HSGPAs, 12th grade math scores declined.

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.

Many colleges and universities that eliminated requirements for submitting one of the standardized scores for admission, a trend that accelerated with the pandemic in 2020, have reverted to their prior requirements. Among them are some of the most competitive, including Dartmouth, Brown, Yale, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, University of Texas, Vanderbilt, and Harvard. Why? With the leveling of high school grades, the SATs and ACTs provide the missing measure for discrimination among levels of preparation to handle advanced university studies.

It helps admissions officers differentiate students. As Sian Leah Beilock, Dartmouth’s President, wrote in a letter to the Dartmouth community, “SAT/ACTs can be especially helpful in identifying students from less-resourced backgrounds who would succeed at Dartmouth but might otherwise be missed in a test-optional environment.”

Back in my home state, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) was instituted by legislation in 1993 following a lawsuit brought by low-income districts over inequitable school funding. It was intended to improve accountability and school performance. In 2003 the MCAS took effect as a graduation requirement. This past November, the state’s largest teachers’ union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA), succeeded in a referendum to eliminate the MCAS as a requirement for a high school diploma. The standard exam, which students were administered several times in their progression to high school, the final time in 10th grade, set a low bar for passing in mathematics and reading. Students who failed could receive help and take the test repeatedly.

The arguments by the union for scuttling MCAS included that the standardized test graduation requirement unfairly holds back students of color, low-income students, students with disabilities, and students who are English learners. MTA Vice President Deb McCarthy added that the exam was “creating anxiety, removing agency and autonomy around information that’s really important and engaging….”

This is another example of throwing out the baby with the bath water.³ Accommodations could be made for English learners and students with learning disabilities. The latter would generally not have been included in regular classrooms until the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was passed in 1990, leaving the vast majority of students with the original MCAS requirements.

And anxiety in test taking cuts two ways. On the one hand, it's normal to feel some pressure before an exam, and a little stress can actually help us focus and do better. On the other hand, some people's worries are so intense that they can’t concentrate and don’t do as well as they'd like. However, we are all likely to face some moderately stressful situations in our work life, whether in having to stand in front of a class for a lecture, argue a court case, climb a 20-foot ladder as a house painter, or as a plumber facing cascading water from an unknown source. Learning how to cope with moderate stress is a practical learned experience.

So, this shouldn’t be an excuse to eliminate tests that have consequences.

Meanwhile, eliminating honors courses in favor of programs such as multilevel classes appears to have had little, if any, effect on achievement gaps in testing or on the likelihood of students of color and high-needs students to enroll in advanced courses. Paradoxically, in an attempt to reduce disparities among racial and socio-economic groups, public schools may be doing a disservice to those they think they are helping.

When advanced courses are dumbed down or eliminated, families that are better off economically may enlist tutors for their children. In many cases they can send their children to private schools. From personal experience, I can tell you that as my daughter approached her high school years in Cambridge, we learned that the city high school had eliminated honors classes so that those who didn't qualify would not suffer from lowered self-esteem. We started looking at private schools. The cost in cash and time would have been onerous. In retrospect, it would have put a real dent in our retirement savings. Cambridge did, in fact, experience measurable “white flight” from the high school—not for racial reasons but along economic lines. Fortunately, by the mid-2000s, the elected school board got the message and reinstituted honors courses. We knew several families whose children started in private schools and brought their children back to the city high school. (One eventually went to Harvard, one to Cornell, one to Pomona College).

With short institutional memories, today, there is another attempt to reduce statistical differences in grades in schools around Boston—and likely elsewhere. There has been intense debates about whether to eliminate advanced classes,.

In Cambridge, such debates may have had a notable effect. By the time the 2021 school year began, when almost every school was back in session full-time, just 16 percent of children in Cambridge attended private or parochial schools. Two years later, that number had surged to more than 23 percent.

Across the country, almost half of private schools experienced a rise in enrollment between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years, while only a quarter saw a decline, according to The Cato Institute.

To be sure, there are other reasons for the shift besides watered-down curricula, such as such as budget cuts or strikes. Some parents are seeking small class sizes and personal attention, which can be harder to find at a public school.

Eliminating advanced courses and grade inflation may disadvantage those they are most intended to help

With the flattening of grades, they become less of a useful differentiator for both employees and higher education. Hence, we see the return of standardized tests for college admissions.

When opportunities for advanced learning are eliminated or adulterated with multilevel classrooms, those who have the means hire tutors and find private schools that meet their educational needs. Left behind in the stripped-down public school are the students with no path to advanced courses.

Meanwhile, research has found that so-called marginalized students can be beneficiaries of well-documented and thought-out programs. A recent study of studies, Think Again: Are Education Programs for High Achievers Inherently Inequitable?⁴ concludes:

Historically, marginalized students have been under-identified for participation in advanced education programs. But eliminating these offerings will not solve the problem. Instead, implementing more effective methods of identification, and developing and nurturing their capabilities over the course of their education, will allow more high-achieving marginalized students to access programs that benefit their achievement in ways that heterogeneous differentiation often cannot. In short, mend it, don’t end it, and extend it to many more students. This will create opportunities for them that they would not otherwise have, and will thereby also strengthen society’s prosperity, security, and cultural vibrancy.

I am perfectly aware that meeting the diverse needs of public education students encompasses not just resources for education but social factors, not the least of which is single-parent households where there may be fewer resources and time. The goal of equity, however, should be focused on raising up, rather than leveling down. A rising tide lifts all boats.

1. In grading, my policy is to assign the letter grade strictly based on the final average. Subjective items such as class participation are already baked in. In 1997, I thought I had generously upped a student with an 89 average from the calculated B+ to an A-, which usually requires a minimum of 90. During Christmas break, I found a phone message from the father of that student, who said his daughter thought she deserved an A.

2. I would have preferred providing a link to the San Diego Union-Trbune article reporting on this policy change. However, it is behind a complete paywall. I instead relied on an article in City Journal that summarized some of it.

3. What is the origin of this proverb? It's plausible that, in an era of limited warm water, an entire family shared one bathtub, with the baby bathing last. If not careful, someone might unintentionally toss out the baby along with the dirty bathwater when emptying the tub.

4. The study is from The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which promotes educational excellence for every child in America via quality research, analysis, and commentary. As an advocate for charter schools, it is sometimes identified with politically conservative principals.