Grade Inflation

I did this illustration for a Time magazine article about grade inflation, a fashionable topic at the time. What's interesting to me, and I don't hear it discussed at all, is how much smarter our kids are than we were. Since business metrics were applied to public schools during the Reagan years, and we began requiring test scores to climb by X amount per year, and Y amount per dollar expended, I calculate that our children's brains have grown to around 2 1/2 times larger and 5 or 6 times faster than ours were at their ages. So maybe grades haven't inflated enough.