Ignoring the idiocy of No Child Left Behind, this is a good thing! The author seems to think there is a magical alternative where students are graded to an abs

Ignoring the idiocy of No Child Left Behind, this is a good thing! The author seems to think there is a magical alternative where students are graded to an absolute scale that doesn't change over time. That's not an option. Every grading system that ostensibly does this suffers from grade inflation. By the time you get to employers looking at grades, they just mentally convert the grades into a percentile. You end up back at grading on a curve/percentiles but with more steps. At the scale of all students in Texas, the true rate of year-to-year change in ability is just going to be too small to measure (barring sudden events like the pandemic). And speaking of the pandemic, where loosy goosy grading led to enormous grade inflation, what do you think employers/universities did? They obviously undid the inflation by regrading people back to the curve - "oh you did get 3 As but I can see that you graduated in 2020 so..."