By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — It’s been nine years since the Arkansas Legislature first passed a law requiring schools to look at the issue of grade inflation, but lately the issue has received an unprecedented amount of attention thanks to a new development.
Now there’s money on the line.
In 2001, the Legislature passed a law authored by then-Sen. Jodie Mahony, who died last year, requiring the state Department of Education to identify schools with a “statistically significant variance” between students’ ACT scores and their grade-point averages.
Lawmakers were concerned because “they would see students going to college with great (high school) grades, and their test scores did not match up with those grades, and the students were not at the level they thought they would be,” said Rep. Bill Abernathy, D-Mena, chairman of the House Education Committee.
A report released in 2000 by the college testing service ACT Inc. showed that more than one-fourth of students who graduated from Arkansas high schools with above-average GPAs required remedial classes upon entering Arkansas colleges.
In 2005, the Legislature passed another measure by Mahony that more specifically defined grade inflation. Under Act 2197 of 2005, a school is considered to inflate grades if 20 percent or more of its students make As or Bs in certain courses but do not pass corresponding end-of-course exams.
The 2005 law also requires the Education Department to release a list of grade-inflation schools to the state Board of Education and the Legislature every year. The latest list, the fourth to be released, includes 52 of the nearly 300 public high schools in the state.
The grade-inflation list became linked to money last year while lawmakers were crafting legislation to set up the voter-approved state lottery to fund college scholarships. They included a provision requiring students graduating from grade-inflation schools to have at least a 2.5 grade-point average and score at least a 19 on the ACT or pass their end-of-course exams to qualify for lottery-funded scholarships.
For students at non-grade-inflation schools, a 2.5 grade point or a 19 on the ACT is enough to qualify.
Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, argued during the recently recessed fiscal session that it was unfair to impose higher standards on students graduating from grade-inflation schools. Grade inflation is the fault of adults but the law punishes students, Elliott said.
The Legislature approved an amendment postponing the higher standards for one year, though some lawmakers protested the change, calling the link between scholarships and grade inflation a much-needed “carrot” to spur action within the education system.
“If we remove the carrot (for this year’s graduates), the kids behind them aren’t in any better shape. We’re going to be dealing with this problem a year down the road,” Rep. John Burris, R-Harrison, said on the House floor last week.
Rep. Rick Green, R-Van Buren, said during a recent committee hearing, “I think it’s a shame that it takes a carrot” to get educators and education officials interested in the issue.
Gov. Mike Beebe and state education officials say that criticism is unfair.
“I don’t know where they’d get that,” Beebe said. “The Legislature passed laws to be able to identify grade inflation and then to be able to take appropriate steps to identify that, and they (education officials) have done that.”
“I think it’s very unfair,” state Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell said. “We’ve had this report for four years. It wasn’t until money was tied to it that anybody cared. It has been important to us.”
But Kimbrell acknowledged that linking scholarships to grade inflation has brought the issue heightened attention. That isn’t a bad thing, he said.
“What I liked about this, and what encourages me about this, is that it got communities talking, it got parents taking about what’s going on in classroom, and it got school boards talking about this issue,” he said.
Some schools have complained that the grade-inflation index does not take into account factors such as high-performing students who take high school courses in the eighth grade. Kimbrell said there appear to be “some problems” with the methodology, and noted that Abernathy is putting together a task force to study those problems and recommend changes.
“We need to take a hard look at this index and how it’s being applied, a hard look at what data we actually use, how we define a high school and which students’ scores actually count per school,” Kimbrell said.
Some lawmakers say action on grade inflation has been too slow.
“When my then-husband Tim Hutchinson was a state representative way back in the 1980s they were discussing what to do with schools that inflated grades. … I just think it’s time we stop playing games with these schools,” said Rep. Donna Hutchinson, R-Bella Vista.
But Sen. Johnny Key, R-Mountain Home, said the state has had many other education-related issues to deal with, notably the state Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling that Arkansas was inadequately funding public schools.
The court ruled in 2007 that school spending had been adequately increased, after the Legislature poured nearly $1 billion in additional funding into public education and adopted sweeping changes in school finances, academics and accountability.
“We’ve been trying since post-Lake View to fix some of the basics,” Key said. “Now that we’re getting beyond that we can get into other things that we kind of let slide.”
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Rob Moritz contributed to this report.
