Education’s Deep-Rooted Culture of Lax Standards

by James A. Bacon

Grade inflation and other indicators of lax standards are deeply rooted in the educational culture — starting in education school and continuing in the professional workplace. Grades handed out in university education departments are consistently higher than in other disciplines, finds Cory Koedel in a paper published by the American Enterprise Institute. Likewise, K-12 teachers receive overwhelmingly positive professional evaluations.

In “Grade Inflation for Education Majors and Low Standards for Teachers: When Everyone Makes the Grade,” Koedel shows the grading “curve” for 12 major academic departments at the University of Missouri-Columbia. The grade distribution resembles a bell-shaped curve for all departments — except education, where it looks like an upward-sloping line. (Click on the graph to the left for details.)

Ruling out possible explanations for the discrepancy such as smaller college class sizes or smarter students, Koedel traces the problem to an inefficient labor market for teachers. Disciplines such as engineering or business have an incentive to maintain grading standards and produce better qualified graduates — if standards fall, businesses will recruit fewer students, which would lower demand for the programs. By contrast, he writes, “The education sector is notoriously ineffective at identifying high- and low-quality workers, making it difficult for the labor market to penalize students from education departments that produce low-quality teachers.”

And why is that? Because there is no competitive market to hold public schools and school districts accountable. Koedel again: “If a school hires mediocre teachers and produces mediocre outputs year after year, there is no mechanism to meaningfully penalize the school or its workers.”

Koedel doesn’t make this point, but I suspect it is valid: In organizations insulated from market discipline, internal politics dominates decision making. Giving good grades and positive evaluations to teachers makes everyone feel good and dampens political turmoil.  Overlay the organizational incentives with the permissive therapeutic culture of the self-esteem movement and you get the lax standards that pervades American education today.

Koedel suggests that university administrators can start changing the culture of laxity by imposing tougher standards on education schools, while state and local governments can develop metrics to hold principals and teachers accountable for performance.

But nothing will happen until the public starts demanding higher standards. Here in Virginia, 37 institutions of higher learning offer education programs. A good first step to start changing the culture of permissiveness would be to conduct a Koedel-style study at Virginia’s larger education schools, comparing the grading curves for education programs versus those of other disciplines. The results, I suspect, would be eye opening.