Tribune Marilyn Brown's articles represent the best research of any of the public-school reporters.

Brown wrote a perceptive article on the grade inflation going on now in the county schools: "Grades Going Higher," January 12, 2008. She doesn't call the situation grade inflation; but she provides the data that make that inference inescapable.

Ms. Brown also doesn't say so, but one can infer that this grade-inflation scheme is another plot to make Ms. Elia's superintendency look good so that she and her administrative myrmidons can gouge more money from taxpayers for this doctored performance. Elia's scheme to hype grades, in fact, is a scam on the taxpayers but, worse, the students.

What dummying down razzle-dazzle does instead of prepare students for college or the real world of employment is to make them unequipped for the rigors of both. In college, they will compete with students whom grade schemes have not disenfranchised with a crooked scheme like the local one that Brown outlines.

Students will apply for jobs in companies whose employers even now complain of the lack of writing ability of applicants who graduated from schools with grade scams such as the one that the administration thrusts down the throats of county teachers. These artificial grades cripple students' futures. Hyped grades may make their work easier now, but these catch up with them after graduation.

I used to get area students in freshman English class at HCC who couldn't write a literate paragraph much less an essay and whose grammar and punctuation were abysmal. Instead of teaching them Shakespeare and Yeats, I had to take up half the class time reteaching them what they should have mastered in high school. Yet they would have made A's and B's in high-school English. And this was before this newest grade-inflation scheme promulgated by the Hillsborough County administration.

These students hated me, of course, when I turned back their papers festooned with red marks for all the errors. It traumatized them to get the grade they deserved. This was a new experience. They had grown used to the cotton wadding of grade inflation.

I had a high drop-out rate. Students would leave to take adjunct teachers' classes and get A's and B's. The reason for these inflated grades is that adjuncts have no job protection. They are like teachers in high school and can get fired for opposing administration's wishes to hype grades to get funding in HCC's case and to get Ms. Elia a glowing reputation in the public schools' case.

When the HCC administration summoned me to question my high attrition rate, I told its members as tenured professor that if they bothered me again I would go to the board and complain about their pressuring me to give students a grade their performance did not deserve. The administration gave up on me after a few interviews like this and left me alone to award students the grades they deserved.

When students passed my classes, they celebrated in the cafeteria that they had survived "that bitch's" class. I like to think that I am the teacher students once hated and later admired. As the years pass, I have had evidence that such is the case.

Teachers' lying to students about what their real grade is does them no good in the real world, where grade inflation stops at the employment door.

Only school administrations offer a haven for illiterate college graduates. Both Dr. Hamilton and Ms. Elia must have slid through their school years as students with the help of grade inflation. Neither one has a grasp of basic grammar, punctuation, or felicitous rhetoric. A moderately talented junior-high student writes better than does Ms. Elia. Dr. Hamilton would drop to 4th-or 5th grade.

The comments of the teachers following the Brown article cheer me. They know what the administration is doing; so the administration does not pull the wool over their eyes when it dictates that teachers distort student grades for dishonest ends.

The principals in the article who defended the grade-inflation cheat reveal why they became principals. Board member Edgecomb was a principal. She reflexively defends the administration no matter the outrage. Her daughter is now in the administration chute to inflated salaries. So I doubt voters can expect Ms. Edgecomb ever to defend education excellence and not administration perks or grade-inflation schemes.

Parents need to grasp the harm this new grade-inflation distortion will do their children when they move on to college or to a job. Dummying down high-school training with artificially pumped grades will cripple their children later in college and in the job world.

lee drury de cesare