Notes on Grade Inflation
So I did some digging into the data on the two schools in question, PS221 North Hills Elementary and MS67 Louis Pasteur. If they are just inflating student’s grades this would surely show up on their math state test scores. But here are the numbers for the 2024-2025 school year.
PS221
MS67
Looking at these scores it is hard to say that the school is guilty of rampant grade inflation on their report cards. So these state test scores are excellent and if you’re the New York Post and that’s all you care about, you cannot trash these schools because one kid forgot some of his math skills over the summer. And if The New York Post now thinks that state test scores are not a true measure of the quality of a school well, there goes all their Success Academy stories from now on.Now this parent actually is involved in the school system and even got to confront the Chancellor on this issue with her son recently, so let me try to think about how to assess this situation for her based on my 35 years teaching Math.
The parent says that except for 7th grade, her son had passed all the math state exams so that is some kind of objective way to gauge grade inflation. And the one test he didn’t get a 3 on, how much did he miss by? Since her characterization that he never understood anything about math does seem very exaggerated.
If he’s in Algebra now, I’m curious what sorts of fractions he’s dealing with. Because a kid can know fractions really well from elementary school and can do something like 1/2+1/6=3/6+1//6=4/6=2/3 but might have trouble when in an Algebra course the questions are like 1/(x+2)+5/(x+3)=x/(x+2)(x+3). Making that transition might be hard even if the student had mastered fractions back in elementary school. So I would have to see the work the son did to see if he really had not learned any math in his 9 years of K-8.
