The Dallas experiment is interesting, and it’s not surprising at all that the students actually learned more than if they had been in less-advanced classes.
The question I have is what the grades look like for the kids who were somewhat involuntarily included in the class. In junior high, grades don’t matter all that much, but come high school it could be worse to have lower grades in more challenging courses, depending on how hard the GPA hit is.
I understand that grades matter for getting into college, but this mindset is viscerally horrifying to me. It almost reads to me as: "What if people were appropriately challenged and learned more? Wouldn't that be horrible?" Grade inflation is a terrible thing, even if it is likely an intractable problem because of the incentives that go into it.
Grades are a score that parents can use to compare their children to other children.
It doesn't take too many parent-teacher conferences to figure out that the parents that ask for parent-teacher conferences want to see "the line go up" and aren't necessarily concerned with their children being challenged or learning much of anything.
The squeekiest of those wheels move from parent-teacher conferences to parent-administrator conferences (and sometimes parent-lawyer-administrator conferences) and you end up with school-wide policies like failure quotas where you are not allowed to have more than 5% of your students fail your class (ie the responsibility of the students grade falls on the teacher, not the student). And that is how grades stop being a measure of a student's understanding of the material.
The pathology about grades is caused by colleges giving far too great a weight to high school GPA. If it falls below a 3.5, your chances of getting into the kind of school that people who give a shit about their or their child's education are gunning for drops precipitously.
Meanwhile, universities don't take the time to seriously consider what courses a student took, save for a few APs. That leads to a situation where it may well be in the student's best interest to coast through an easy A rather than get a B or C in a more challenging course. An example I can think of immediately was a friend who got an offer rescinded from a UC because they failed Discrete Mathematics as a senior, despite the fact that taking the class at all was completely optional for him.
Most people are at school because their parents need daycare, not to learn. Schools perform the important social function of sorting and ranking by academic ability and what students learn isn’t all that relevant to the sorting and ranking. One sixth of students in US high schools are bored in every class, every day and two thirds are bored every day[Highschool Study of Student Engagement].
I wouldn't advocate for grade inflation, and there's no indication here that's what happened. I would advocate for analyzing which types of students were well-served by the change, taking into account their learning and the effect on their GPA.
I would expect that it wouldn't be that difficult to select kids (perhaps based on prior performance in math classes, or overall GPA) to opt them into the class. This would be more fine-grained than simply shunting all kids into an advanced class.
> select kids (perhaps based on prior performance in math classes, or overall GPA) to opt them into the class.
That's how it works now, pretty much everywhere. Your 7th grade teacher recommends you to take the 8th grade algebra class based on your performance (or, at least, their interpretation of your performance)
The question is, where do you draw the line that qualifies someone to take 8th grade algebra? Who do you let in when there is 1 seat left and 3 eligible students to fill that seat? How do you make sure that the grades you are using to determine who makes the cut are accurately measuring mathematical ability of the students and not biased in some other way?
I'm not advocating for either the California or the Dallas solution to this problem, but both those school districts have identified that letting the 7th grade teachers make this placement decisions is a problem.
This is only realy relevent for college admissions. Having a high school degree is a credential that matters, but few people will look at the GPA on it.
For college admissions, the admissions offices aren't stupid. They generally don't look at "GPA", but compute it themselves. A small private school might need to worry about how colleges interpret their transcripts. But a system as large as California? Colleges will learn very quickly how to weight grades from different levels of classes. They already need to deal with grades being wildly inconsistent between schools. They also get other signals such as the SAT, which provides a consistent measure independent of class level.
Last I checked was decades ago, but even then colleges were looking at class rank as GPA could not be compared between schools. SAT scores can be compared, but even then only to others taken the same year (realistically the yearly test changes are small enough that you can safely compare over a few years and be close enough)
>but come high school it could be worse to have lower grades in more challenging courses, depending on how hard the GPA hit is.
At least when I was in high school, the regular, pre-AP and the AP classes each had a different grade scale. Core classes were a 1.0(70%)-4.0(100%), pre-AP were +1 (1-5) and AP were +2 (2-6). So in theory they were taking into account how difficult the classes were. Since this was in the DFW area, I'd expect something similar in Dallas.
The question I have is what the grades look like for the kids who were somewhat involuntarily included in the class. In junior high, grades don’t matter all that much, but come high school it could be worse to have lower grades in more challenging courses, depending on how hard the GPA hit is.