On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Tim Donahue, an English teacher at the Greenwich Country Day School, joins Mike to discuss who loses when grades are inflated. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber reports on a new study that examines if Tennessee’s new school funding law really is progressive.
Recommended content:
“If everyone gets an A, no one gets an A” —Tim Donahue, New York Times
“Grade inflation is not a victimless crime” —Frederick Hess, The Education Gadfly
Christopher Candelaria, Ishtiaque Fazlul, Cory Koedel, and Kenneth Shores, “Weighting for Progressivity? An Analysis of Implicit Tradeoffs Associated with Weighted Student Funding in Tennessee,” Annenberg Institute (October 2023).
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Daniel Buck at dbuck@fordhaminstitute.org.
This transcript was created using AI software.
Michael Petrilli (00:01):
Welcome to the Education Gadfly Show. I'm your host Mike Petrilli at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Today Tim Donahue, an English teacher at the Greenwich Country Day School in Greenwich, Connecticut, joins us to discuss what grade inflation looks like in the classroom. Then on the research minute, Amber reports on a new study that examines of Tennessee's new school funding law really is progressive. All this on the Education Gadfly Show.
(00:30):
Alright, well that is all the time we've got for David to be grumpy.
(00:33):
Hello, this is your host, Mike Pettrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute here at the Education Gadfly Show and online at fordhaminstitute.org. And now please welcome our special guest for this week, Tim Donahue. Tim, welcome to the show.
Tim Donahue (00:49):
Thank you very much.
Michael Petrilli (00:50):
Yeah, Tim is an English teacher at the Greenwich Country Day School and he's here to talk about a fantastic op-Ed he had in the New York Times. We will get to that in a moment. First, let's welcome my cohost David Griffith. David, welcome back to the show.
David Griffith (01:05):
Hey Mike, always a pleasure.
Michael Petrilli (01:07):
Alright, so Tim, first of all, Greenwich Country Day School, I assume Greenwich, Connecticut or Greenwich New York. Where are you?
Tim Donahue (01:14):
I'm in Greenwich, Connecticut. I don't know that there is a Greenwich, New York, but I may be wrong.
Michael Petrilli (01:19):
I feel like I had some relative that I always got confused that there was maybe one. Maybe I'm making that up. I'm not sure.
Tim Donahue (01:26):
I mean, unless I'm just going to the wrong school the whole time.
Michael Petrilli (01:30):
Fair to say, Greenwich, Connecticut, quite the affluent place. This is you get to educate the children of hedge fund.
Tim Donahue (01:38):
Yes, it is a very privileged school that looks its part, it's actually a new high school, which is kind of exciting for me. I'm new to the school actually, and you may appreciate that. Our large new high school building was largely funded by the Winkle boss twins
Michael Petrilli (01:57):
And originally famous from Facebook and of course the movie about Facebook. Alright, that's fascinating. Well, hey, we saw your great op-ed in the New York Times about grade inflation. Let me see, let me get the title right. I said if everyone gets an A, no one gets an A. Let's talk about that on ed reform update. We've talked about this issue a lot on the show over the years and especially in recent years. We've published a few studies by Seth Gerson on the topic. The SAT folks and the ACT folks have all published various research showing even before the pandemic that grades were drifting upwards even though test scores were flat or even down. So it's not that kids are learning more, they don't seem to be learning more, but they're getting better grades over time. We certainly see this, especially in affluent schools that this is happening. And so the question is why is it happening? Is it a problem and what might we do about it? So Tim, take it away from your perspective as a teacher, why is this something worth raising the alarm bell about in the New York Times?
Tim Donahue (03:04):
Yeah, well first of all, you do great work with it as I discover, but for as much as it's in the air, I just don't see enough written about it. I don't hear enough talk about it. It is interesting. In the week after, maybe I'll call myself a trendsetter, but of course I think it's the gravita of the New York Times. But I did notice several articles that follow the week last week right after mine came out on Monday. I think there was a few out on Wednesday, Thursday about the same subject. I just think there's a hunger for it and people are worked up about it. I think it's such a presence in my day-to-Day operations as a high school English teacher. Now I teach at a private school and that's been my career. Prior to this, I was at a school called Fieldston in the Bronx, and from what I saw there was just diminishing room for students to show distinction for themselves.
(04:00):
Last year I advised seniors I had an advisory with kids applying to colleges and I was looking at their grades and they were really good students, great kids, but almost every grade was an A and I'm thinking these kids are not the only ones sending their transcripts off to competitive colleges and after a time it does them little service, right, to have every grade be the same. In the article I highlight this Freudian concept called the narcissism of minor differences that if you have this tiny aberration, well you really stand out a lot and for a long time you could argue that well, giving really good grades helps the student's mental health. However, when everyone is getting the same thing, I actually think it has a backfiring effect and I definitely notice it adds layers of stress upon an already fraught time in a youth's life.
Michael Petrilli (04:59):
Yeah, no, I love this. You say grade inflation after all acts just like real inflation. You just say that if everybody's applying to the same college with an A and now you've got an A minus, suddenly it seems like something's wrong with you. Okay. That's from the perspective of the student, but I assume that there's also, what is this due to the school? What happens if and why is it happening? I mean, is it coming because is it true that just all these kids are doing a level work or is there pressure coming from the parents or elsewhere?
Tim Donahue (05:32):
I'll back up and just say, as an English teacher and I get to teach a relatively small amount of students, I really value feedback. If I had my choice, really I would not have grades, I would just have straight feedback. But how do we quantify that on a national scale? What I can say is that when you have uniformity of grades, the feedback becomes less important and it gets that. You can write as I often do 500 words on an essay with comments, but it's just that one letter that gets noticed and I would like grades to have more range so that there is a greater attention to feedback and ideally a greater attention to how to improve grades based on that feedback. But I mean, I can say that as I also write in the article, here we are, it's end of October, I'm at a new school, but I've met my students and I see they have complex lives and they're trying their best. By and large, they play serious levels of sports and they lead clubs and they're getting involved with international relations discussions. They're showing me their hearts. So on the one hand, you don't want to be the one teacher to give them AB plus when all the other teachers are giving them a. So I think part of it is a little bit of a unwritten, I'll say conformity right out of sort of deference to a lot of things, but wanting their child or their student to have the best shot to be the best they can be. So there is that as well.
Michael Petrilli (07:09):
Yeah, it's so interesting because Tim, it sounds like in a school like yours and the ones you've taught at, of course the thought is all about the competitive colleges and are you going to ruin the kids' chance to get into the Ivy Leagues or to something like it? I can think about the kind of school where David taught, which was a high poverty school where the teachers might be worried about being the teacher that gives the F, that's going to lead to the kid dropping out. And obviously those are very different kinds of life consequences, but it still is the same. It's that you can't solve this problem one teacher at a time. You've got to have some kind of school-wide approach to this or else all the incentives are to conform. David, you want to get in on that?
David Griffith (07:48):
Yeah, Mike, I mean actually it's a good segue because everything that Tim was saying rang very true to me despite being in a very different context. Basically, my first question when I got to the school was, what do you do here? I mean, half these kids aren't on grade level. What am I supposed to give them? And that is fundamentally a question about what everybody else is doing and what is expected of me and what is institutionally culturally appropriate. I think that is very powerful. You don't want to be the one teacher who's way out there on your, wherever the standard is. You don't want to be out on an island, out on a limb all by yourself. How that level gets set, I think is another question entirely, but I'll just say I don't know how anyone is supposed to, any individual school is supposed to fight this either because I just think it's much deeper and broader than that. And there's a sense in which a school is shooting itself in the foot as well if it just gives all its kids seas. So it's a collective action problem, not to put too fine a point on it, and it's kind of a wicked one,
Michael Petrilli (08:57):
Although it does seem like if the colleges, especially the most selective colleges, they know these schools and they know what it means to get a certain GPA. I mean, isn't it true? I mean, you would devise kids, Tim, I assume that it's at the end of the day, some of these colleges, they're going to compare your students to one another and they're going to have in their head, Hey, we're going to take a certain number of kids from Greenwich Country Day or Fieldstone. And so then the question becomes, which of these 20 kids who applied should be among the ones we say yes to, and we're going to compare them. And so it really is tough on the teacher that you give that B plus that could be, you can't get away from it. It could actually hurt a kid's chances of getting into their dream school.
Tim Donahue (09:38):
So one thing that was interesting was writing this piece, you also get the readers to comment and there were about 1400 comments and probably would've been more, they kind of cut them off and I really enjoyed reading them because they,
Michael Petrilli (09:55):
Jim, you never read the comments? Come on, know that?
Tim Donahue (09:58):
What? No, no. I've specifically asked my editor to have them because was hoping to raise a bit of a chorus, and I think that is happening. But one of the points somebody made or several people was sometimes if you can give the grade for the class, but then also next to it, the average grade in that class, then it can have more relativity. And very much I agree with David, this is, you can't do this alone. So one of the things I was questioning or keep questioning is who is driving great inflation? Is it colleges that demand flawless transcripts or is it high schools that some kids truly do deserve a's? And we know that there are some who are getting them because of convenience, really, how do we get these entities to really talk to each other in a constructive way? Because another downside of grade inflation is that it makes students careful and nervous in ways that I think really prohibit the kind of freeform thought that we are encouraging.
(11:06):
At least we are an English class and history class and interconnection, interdisciplinary notions taking some risks when you have to really hand things in that are polished, yes, it's good if they follow the rules, but it can belie some of the kind of quandaries that we think. For instance, when you look at whether an essay is written by chat GPT, they check for qualities of dustiness and perplexity. Those to me, are the earmarks of developing thought, right? If you're teaching an actor how to do a monologue, it's often that they are discovering the meaning as they give it, right? And so when ideas are safe and kind of finished when they're handed in, it becomes a sort of a different experience for you.
Michael Petrilli (12:01):
Yeah, that is so well said. Well, Tim, again, appreciate you coming on the show. I imagine you are a joy to take English class from, and congrats on the New York Times article, and thank you for starting or at least continuing this important conversation.
Tim Donahue (12:15):
Oh, likewise.
Michael Petrilli (12:16):
It is a tough one to solve. It certainly is one reason why tests as imperfect as they may be, seem to have at least some usefulness. I'm not going to make you say yes or no on that one, but
Tim Donahue (12:27):
Well, I will say, I guess I shouldn't read the comments, but I think that was the first comment and the most popular comment was because I referenced that 80% of colleges or more don't require tests. Again, how do you sift? I don't know.
Michael Petrilli (12:44):
Yeah, no, exactly. This world where we're going to pretend that we're going to ignore the test scores, but now we can't trust the grades either. It is a quandary. Alright, well again, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah. This has been Tim Donahue, English teacher at Greenwich Country Day School in Greenwich, Connecticut. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Tim.
Tim Donahue (13:04):
Pleasure. Thank you.
Michael Petrilli (13:05):
Alright, now it's time for everyone's favorite Amber's research minute. Amber, welcome back to the show.
Amber Northern (13:17):
Thanks Mike.
Michael Petrilli (13:18):
Alright, I am curious about Halloween costumes. Now Amber, tell me if I'm wrong, I'm assuming you're not dressing up for Halloween, but is that correct?
Amber Northern (13:26):
That would be a correct assumption, although I'll admit I miss Fordham dress up for Halloween days. It's one thing you lose when you're not coming into the office regularly anymore.
Michael Petrilli (13:34):
I know. And my son loves Halloween, 13 years old, asked me if I had any corny dad joke ideas for my education Halloween stuff this year. And I do have an idea that you have to get together with a group of friends. Everybody dress up like a book, which I'm not sure exactly how you do that and then grab different instruments and you'd be a book band. What a bump. Alright, Davis, save us from this. What are your little kiddos going as?
David Griffith (14:06):
We got one Willy Wonka and an Umpa Lumpa. So
Michael Petrilli (14:10):
Oh, they're going to match. Oh that's great.
David Griffith (14:13):
Yeah, and people even got it. I mean we had Hilloween on Friday, I don't know if you guys are familiar with, but it falls on the Friday before Halloween and so we got to preview everything and I didn't think people were going to get it ecause she just looked like some sort of clown that had checked out of rehab, but people got it.
Michael Petrilli (14:34):
Well then you must've done an excellent job with the costumes.
Amber Northern (14:37):
That's right.
Michael Petrilli (14:38):
Alright, Amber, onto more serious material here, what you got for us?
Amber Northern (14:42):
Alright, we have a new study that looks at Tennessee's new weighted student funding formula model. So this is like 2022 just getting off the ground and we've got Chris Candelaria and Corey Del and a couple other economists who are digging in deeply to kind of see if this thing is playing out like policymakers intended it to. So this just for folks, just a little background weighted student funding allocates funds on a per pupil basis, not on a staffing based allocation. So they are looking at the degree to which state funding is progressive on paper versus in reality. So in this case you can define progressive funding different ways, but in this case it's the degree to which more resources are directed to low income students. You can have it directed to kids of different identifications, but here we're talking about low income. Then they look at what may be driving the differences between the formula intended amounts and the realized funding progressivity.
(15:46):
Okay, so a little bit about the formula. Tennessee's new formula includes a base amount, which is roughly 6,900, provides additional funding because this thing gets complicated for students with specific attributes including poverty, the language emergent level of kids, their special education status. And then you get another sort of add-on for students who attend schools and districts with other attributes like the school is small or it's located in a sparse district or it's a charter school and the weights vary, but again, we're looking at ed educationally disadvantaged kids, they get 25% of the base amount. Then the EL weights vary between 20 to 70% of the base amount and the special education categories vary from 15 to 150% of the base amount on top of this. Tennessee then published a projected funding level for each district based on these new funding allocations. And these analysts use those funding projections to compare to actual projected funding.
(16:57):
But basically they're going to take these projections and see if they're actually intended doing what they said they were going to do in terms of the bottom line for kids. So the new funding system, again, it's an additive increase. So some states have like, well you're either special education kid or you are ELL, but you can't be both, you're one or the other. But Tennessee actually adds on. So if you're more than one category, then you're going to get an additive amount. So that means that they can use the district shares of students in each category to replicate the district allocations and the projections and verify again that the system is working as anticipated or not. Alright results. The base funding accounts for most funding under the formula. So that's no surprise that 76% or the base funding. Then the largest category outside of that is the ED kids.
(17:52):
So the low-income kids, they account for 33% of all Tennessee students. Then you got the students that have language needs account for 4.4% of total funding and kids with special needs account for 5.7% of total funding. And then those add-ons that I told you about for various district and school attributes, they account for a little over 8% of total funding. Alright, so their definition of progressivity is based on the difference in exposure to district per pupil funding between poor and non-poor students on average statewide. And then they go into this thing and they say the ED status is, it's not like FRL basically in Tennessee, they use this direct certification method where they actually track whether kids are receiving welfare subsidies and food stamps and that sort of thing. So even when they try other ways of measuring disadvantage, it's basically very similar. So this is pretty strong way to identify disadvantaged.
(18:55):
Alright, bottom line, the formula intended funding gap, the formula intends the gap between ED and non ed kids to be $1,715, but after they implement their formula, which captures again the difference in exposure to per pupil funding, the actual gap in exposure when you really get down to it between the ED and the non eds is just $299. So it's 17% of the formula intended gap. So they intended the gap to be between ED and nine ed kids to be over $1,700. In actuality it was only 17% of that gap, almost 300 bucks. And they say that the attenuation of that gap is basically driven by the mixture of poor and non-poor kids within districts. And then you get this definition, this sort of description of everything that causes this particular mix of kids in these districts who've got residential segregation. You've got the district boundaries look different, the size of the district is a factor.
(20:06):
All these things interact in a very complex way. And so they basically say they look at each of these categories and they say funding for ELL and these district and school attributes is progressive since this gap declines when those categories are removed. So basically then they start saying, okay, which one of these components of this formula are explicitly tied to poverty and which aren't? That's where they start getting some of these gaps get lessened and they find that special education funding is progressive neutral for poor students. There are very few kids who require those top levels of special education funding and they do this sort of simulation where they adjust the formula, so all factors accept individual student poverty receive zero weight and then they distribute that excess to poor students. This is again, a simulation and then that increases the progressivity of district funding by 124%. So the bottom line is that there are trade-offs and that some of these categories are correlated to ED and some are less correlated, and that makes a difference in how these weighted student systems play out. All right. Did you get the crux of that? It was not an easy study?
David Griffith (21:28):
Yeah, we got it. I mean, insofar as there's something to be gotten, I feel like I'm still struggling to understand what's going wrong. Right, Mike? I mean, okay, the sped, that seems like a big factor it seems like, and I don't know, maybe the SPED identification rates are right or maybe they're not. But either way it's kind of muffling the impact of it. I don't know. I mean, I feel cynical, but how did I, beforehand, somehow I knew that it wasn't going to be as progressive. I mean sort of apriori, no logical reason. It should become less progressive. When we take all these things into account, it might become more progressive. It's not obvious to me just, and yet somehow I just knew that it was going to become less progressive. And so I feel like the conspiracy theorist, but why, what is this telling us about the world that these seemingly neutral things always seem to work out in this particular way. And despite our best attempts, we can't seem to make a stack of money be bigger on this side of the street than it is on the other side of the street. I mean, that's not a complicated thing to execute. I found a little frustrated. I
Michael Petrilli (22:40):
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist, you just have to be a political scientist. Right. It's politics. I mean, of course
David Griffith (22:46):
I know, but what are the specific mechanisms, Mike? What is happening here? We've got the sped thing, we've got what was it, district size or
Amber Northern (22:55):
District boundaries, the size of the districts. Yes.
Michael Petrilli (22:59):
Yeah. I mean the SPED thing is interesting with the special ed is I was wondering, well is that just because so much money and it's not progressive and so that washes out some of the other stuff? Or is it, you mentioned about identification rates, that's interesting. Is it that some affluent districts are identifying a ton of kids as ADHD or dyslexic or learning disabled in some way and spending, getting more money for those kids as a result? You could imagine some of that stuff happening. But look, you have to make some political compromises in order to get something done. And so that is showing up here. I mean, it sounds like they did not in the end have a creative formula that linked everything to poverty. So there you go. It does make me think, I don't know. My friends down in Tennessee, they all won a big prize last year at the Pine Eddie's for game changer of the year. I know. Should we take that thing back now that it's not as big a deal? I'm kidding people. I'm kidding. Just bitter that Ohio great efforts on charter school funding did not yet win that award. But look, it's, look, in the real world, things get complicated and you've got to get people to vote for these kinds of reforms. And so the elected representatives are doing their job, they're trying to figure out how to make sure that their districts get a fair piece of the pie.
David Griffith (24:17):
Okay, so Mike, what I think you're saying is that you think this is at some level deliberate and it happens before the wall was passed and there were people sitting there with calculators crunching the numbers and not saying anything, but they understood that when it all penciled out, this was not going to be as progressive as it appeared on the surface.
Michael Petrilli (24:37):
Yeah. I mean, if you're going to, for example, put extra money in there for small districts or small schools, if that's somehow in there, come on. We know that's just, it's hard to justify that. And yet the politics are such that stuff gets in there a lot. I don't know if there was, when we've gone through this in Ohio, of course there's always these fights over these various clauses around that are basically grandfather clauses districts that are losing kids. And do you account for that right away or do you give them some time before that really hits? I mean, there's all these different ways that districts know what they've got to do to try to get as
Amber Northern (25:16):
Much, I didn't even mention they also had add-ons for K three literacy programs, fourth grade tutoring, career and technical education. So you begin to wonder, it's definitely there are people who want extra money for these programs, but yeah, it isn't often thought out in terms of how it's going to impact the bottom line.
Michael Petrilli (25:39):
And as our own Adam Tyner found, and I think again this year we've made huge progress in this country on making schools spending more progressive. And yes, we probably need to keep moving in that direction because we know, for example, it's a lot more expensive to attract high quality teachers to high poverty schools in general. So let's keep at it, but let's also not let the perfect be the enemy the good.
David Griffith (26:02):
At what point am I allowed to make it The enemy of the good Mike? $300 is like, why bother?
Michael Petrilli (26:07):
Oh, you mean that increase? That increase in progress.
David Griffith (26:10):
I mean that's the cost of a new textbook and then you're done.
Michael Petrilli (26:14):
Alright, well that is all the time we've got for David to be grumpy about this stuff. But until next week,
David Griffith (26:22):
I'm David Griffith.
Michael Petrilli (26:23):
And I'm Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Signing off.
Share this post