States’ Data Obscure How Few Finish High School
JACKSON, Miss. - When it comes to high school graduation rates, Mississippi keeps two sets of books.
One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.
The state schools superintendent, Hank Bounds, says the lower rate is more accurate and uses it in a campaign to combat a dropout crisis.
“We were losing about 13,000 dropouts a year, but publishing reports that said we had graduation rate percentages in the mid-80s,” Mr. Bounds said. “Mathematically, that just doesn’t work out.”
Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.
California, for example, sends to Washington an official graduation rate of 83 percent but reports an estimated 67 percent on a state Web site. Delaware reported 84 percent to the federal government but publicized four lower rates at home.
The multiple rates have many causes. Some states have long obscured their real numbers to avoid embarrassment. Others have only recently developed data-tracking systems that allow them to follow dropouts accurately.
The No Child law is also at fault. The law set ambitious goals, enforced through sanctions, to make every student proficient in math and reading. But it established no national school completion goals.
“I liken N.C.L.B. to a mile race,” said Bob Wise, a former West Virginia governor who is president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a group that seeks to improve schools. “Under N.C.L.B., students are tested rigorously every tenth of a mile. But nobody keeps track as to whether they cross the finish line.”
Furthermore, although the law requires schools to make only minimal annual improvements in their rates, reporting lower rates to Washington could nevertheless cause more high schools to be labeled failing - a disincentive for accurate reporting. With Congressional efforts to rewrite the law stalled, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has begun using her executive powers to correct the weaknesses in it. Ms. Spellings’s efforts started Tuesday with a measure aimed at focusing resources on the nation’s worst schools. Graduation rates are also on her agenda.
In an interview, Ms. Spellings said she might require states to calculate their graduation rate according to one federal formula.
“I’m considering settling this once and for all,” she said, “by defining a single federal graduation rate and requesting states to report it that way. That would finally put this issue to rest.”
In 2001, the year the law was drafted, one of the first of a string of revisionist studies argued that the nation’s schools were losing more students than previously thought.
Jay P. Greene, a researcher at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research organization, compared eighth-grade enrollments with the number of diplomas bestowed five years later to estimate that the nation’s graduation rate was 71 percent. Federal statistics had put the figure 15 points higher.
Still, Congress did not make dropouts a central focus of the law. And when states negotiated their plans to carry it out, the Bush administration allowed them to use dozens of different ways to report graduation rates.
As an example, New Mexico defined its rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th graders who received a diploma. That method grossly undercounts dropouts by ignoring all students who leave before the 12th grade.
The law also allowed states to establish their own goals for improving graduation rates. Many set them low. Nevada, for instance, pledged to get just 50 percent of its students to graduate on time. And since the law required no annual measures of progress, California proposed that even a one-tenth of 1 percent annual improvement in its graduation rate should suffice.
Daniel J. Losen, who has studied dropout reporting for the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he once pointed out to a state official that, at that pace, it would take California 500 years to meet its graduation goal.
“In California, we’re patient,” Mr. Losen recalled the official saying.
Most troublesome to some experts was the way the No Child law’s mandate to bring students to proficiency on tests, coupled with its lack of a requirement that they graduate, created a perverse incentive to push students to drop out. If low-achieving students leave school early, a school’s performance can rise.
No study has documented that the law has produced such an effect nationwide. Experts say they believe many low-scoring students are prodded to leave school, often by school officials urging them to seek an equivalency certificate known as a General Educational Development diploma.
“They get them out so they don’t have them taking those tests,” said Wanda Holly-Stirewalt, director of a program in Jackson, Miss., that helps dropouts earn a G.E.D. “We’ve heard that a lot. It happens all over the system.”
After several research groups questioned graduation rates, the federal Department of Education in 2005 published an estimated rate for each state, to identify those that were reporting least accurately. The figures suggested that nine states had overstated their graduation rates by 10 to 22 percentage points.
Part of the discrepancy is because many states inflate their official rate by counting dropouts who later earn a G.E.D. as graduates or by removing them from calculations altogether.
The undercounting of dropouts can be striking.
In Mississippi, the official formula put the graduation rate for the state’s largest district, Jackson Public Schools, at 81 percent. Mr. Bounds, the state schools superintendent, said the true rate was 56 percent.
At Murrah High School, one of eight here, the official graduation rate is 99 percent, even though yearbooks show that half of Murrah’s freshmen disappear before becoming seniors. Even Murrah’s principal, Roy Brookshire, expressed surprise.
“I can’t explain how they figured that, truly I can’t,” Mr. Brookshire said.
Governors also stepped in, worried that schools were not preparing the work force their states need. In December 2005, all 50 agreed to standardize their graduation rate calculations, basing them on tracking individual students through high school.
Fifteen states have begun to use the formula, said Dane Linn, director of the education division at the National Governors Association. And it has produced some stunning revelations.
In North Carolina, the rate plummeted a year ago to 68 percent from 95 percent. The News & Observer in Raleigh likened the experience to the shock of hearing a doctor diagnose a terrible illness.
“But now doctors can start treatments that can lead to a cure,” the paper said in an editorial.
Mississippi is among the states that have become the most serious about confronting their dropout problem, Mr. Linn said.
The state has been building a record system capable of tracking student data from year to year, and in 2005 used it to estimate a graduation rate of 61 percent, 24 points below the official rate.
Mr. Bounds took office that fall and was initially consumed with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But he eventually had time to pore over the data.
“It was time to boldly confront the facts,” he said.
Mr. Bounds has used the new figures to persuade the Mississippi Board of Education to require school districts to prepare dropout prevention plans. Last month he told 2,000 community leaders that the state’s dropout crisis was like “a Katrina hitting our schools every year.”
The state will eventually report the lower rate to Washington but has set no schedule, Mr. Bounds said. One problem, he said, is that when Mississippi sends revised rates for its more than 200 high schools, their success levels will appear to plummet and many schools could be exposed to sanctions.
“It’ll look like everybody has dropped, when actually everybody’s doing a better job,” Mr. Bounds said. “But we’re capturing the right score on the scoreboard.”
© 2008 The New York Times
My favorite comment was from the California official “We’re patient”. But hey, it works. The corporate empire is filling the country with low wage jobs, so it needs a country filled with low wage workers.
Greg Palast got it right, calling the NCLB act “No Child’s Behind Left”. Think about what this country has become. Our children go hungry, withut medical care, are homeless, uneducated. So what. Why should the rich care. They’ve got all the money anyway. If you feed people they will be able to think. If you educate them they will be able to reason and the next thing you know, they will start demanding their rights.
kathyodat
THE REALITY IS THAT THERE HAS GOTTA BE SOME KIND OF “BOTTOM LINE” NUMBER WITHIN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENTS “NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND” (READ: “EVERY CHILD LEFT BEHIND SO THAT THERE WILL BE NO RESISTANCE TO AUTHORITY AS THEY DO NOT POSSESS THE SKILLS NECESSARY TO DEBATE OR UNDERSTAND ISSUES..THEY ARE FOOD FOR THE MACHINE”)ANYWAY..A NUMBER THAT IS NECESSARY TO OBTAIN THE FUNDING FOR THE SCHOOL..AND IT MUST BE AROUND…DUHHH..80%
OKAY..SO I WENT TO A “HIPPIE SCHOOL” A “WALDORFF” SCHOOL..AND HAVE SOMEWHAT OF A GIFT FOR GAB..BUT CAN’T SPELL..NO MATH SKILLS..ALTHOUGH GROWING UP IN THE EMERALD TRIANGLE HAS GIVEN ME SOME MATH SKILLS..BUT THE REALITY IS THAT “THESE KIDS TODAY” WHOM I LIKE TO CALL..”GENERATION HITLER YOUTH” OR “GENERATION Y BOTHER” AS THEY ARE VISCIOUS, STUPID, GREEDY (AS IN THE MOST AGGRESSIVE CONSUMERS IN THE HISTORY OF OUR NATION) AND HAVE NOTHING TO LIVE FOR IN TERMS OF ART, MUSIC ETC..ETC..AS IT HAS QUITE LITTERALLY ALL BEEN DONE…AND NOW..THEY WILL RECIEVE THE BENEFITS OF AN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM THAT HAS BEEN ACTUALLY ‘TAKEN OVER’ BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, WHICH…MOST FOLKS DON’T SEEM TO UNDERSTAND..IS NOT THE NORM..WAS NOT, IS NOT(UNTIL NOW) AND HAS NEVER BEEN BEFORE..UNTIL BUSH DOCTRINE POLITICS.. AND ONLY THE FORCE OF BENEVOLANT INTELLIGENCE KNOWS HOW MANY “THINK TANKS” IT TOOK TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO…’DE-EDUCATE’ THE AMERICAN PUBLIC…THAT IS THE SYSTEM THEY ARE “LEARNING” UNDER..
ALSO, THEY ARE SUBJECT TO THE REALLY..FRANKLY…OBVIOUS RE-EDUCATION AS TO THEIR “RIGHTS”
I AM CLASS OF 1986..I CALL US..ALONG WITH BEING “X-ERS” I LIKE TO CALL MY GENERATION..”THE LAST INNOCENT GENERATION” FOR WE ARE THE LAST ONES TO NOT HAVE THE INTERNET IN HIGHSCHOOL, TO NOT HAVE PORN READILY AVAILABLE..(DON’T GET ME WRONG..LOVE PORN..)TO NOT KNOW ABOUT BENZODIAZAPINES IN THE 6TH GRADE, TO NOT BE DOING “ASS TO MOUTH” IN HIGHSCHOOL..AND WE ACTUALLY HAD “RIGHTS” I NEVER SAW..NOT ONCE..AND I WENT TO A “PUBLIC” HIGHSCHOOL AS ‘MOUNTIAN MEADOW’ DID NOT OFFER 9-12..AND WE NEVER..NOT ONCE..IT WAS NOT EVEN IN OUR FRAME OF REFERANCE…NEVER DID WE HAVE A PIG WITH A GERMAN SHEPHERD SEARCHING OUR LOCKERS, WE DID NOT CONSIDER ‘LOCKDOWN’ AS A “NORMAL” THING..WE DID NOT EVEN HAVE THE CONCEPT OF COURSE..WE DID NOT HAVE SNITCH TEACHERS..NOT IN THE WAY THEY ARE NOW..USING PSYCHO-BABBLE TO RAT-FUCK KIDS INTO SUBMISSION..”YOU SOUND DEFENSIVE..ARE YOU THREATENING ME..” SAID TO AN ANGRY 9TH GRADER WITH ALMOST NO REAL EDUCATION AND ON SOME KIND OF MIND ALTERING “ADHD” DRUG…
NO..FOLKS..GET READY..THIS GENERATION IS..I AM SORRY TO SAY…’FOOD’..FOR ANY AND ALL..THEY LACK EVEN THE BASIC ABILITY TO ACT DISCRIMINATELY WITH REGARD TO THEIR OWN EXISTANCE…IN A MUCH…MUCH MORE DANGEROUS WAY THEN THE PREVIOUS GENERATIONS…THESE IDIOTS ARE WIELDING GUNS, DRIVING AT 100 MILES AN HOUR THROUGH RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOODS..SURE, THERE WAS ALWAY’S A FEW KIDS IN OUR DAY..LIKE THIS…BUT THE DIFFERENCE FOR “NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND” KIDZ…UHHH…IT’S NOW ALL OF THEM THAT ACT THIS WAY…WELL..ALMOST ALL OF EM…AND THEY ARE NOT GOING TO BE ABLE TO TAKE THE RIENS OF ANYHTING OTHER THAN A PICTOGRAPHIC PUSH BUTTON WEAPON IN SOME WAR FOR OIL..OR SOME OTHER FORM OF “MORLOCK” LABOR…NOPE! GET READY…IDIOCRACY IS HERE…NOW…GIRLS GONE WILD…YAY!
AND LASTLY…DO NOT PAY FOR IT! YOU ARE PAYING FOR THESE “PROGRAMS” THAT CHURN OUT IDIOTS WITH NO RIGHTS…YOUR MONEY IS FOOTING THE BILL FOR ARMIES OF LIEING ADMINISTRATORS TO ABANDON CHILDREN TO THE WORLD…AND OF COURSE TORTURE, ILLEGAL SPYING, ILLEGAL WAR…ON AND ON AD NAUSEUM..SO DO NOT DECLARE..JUST DO NOT PAY..OR BE COMPLICIT IN THE ACTIONS OF THIS “GOVERNMENT”..EITHER DO NOT PAY..OR BASICALLY BE A PART OF THE CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY THAT IS RUNNING THE SHOW…DO..NOT…PAY!
There is a conspiracy of ignorance in our schools, and the NCLB is the kind of ‘newspeak’ that ironically and purposefully means just the opposite, as others here have pointed out–a death knell for public ed as McCain talks of vouchers and Bush’s family makes money on the largest testing boondoggle to come down the pike yet.
However, we have a lot of nerve blaming the new kids when we have created them through a generation of allowing a school culture of multiple choice and yes/no answers. Put that together with the unceasing barrage of soundbites, tv commercials, web searches, blogs, porn, ipods, techno-assault in every form imaginable, and it is no wonder that their brains are fried (plus open access to drugs, of course).
We’re fighting a losing battle against an industrial-model public school system that just doesn’t work anymore, and it’s time to do what Buckminster Fuller said decades ago, to step outside what has become obsolete and create something new. Teachers, kids, and parents are fighting the system every day, and all of us are so inured to the fight that we think unceasing struggle is the way things are supposed to be.
It’s time for a revolution–ok, a revolution of roses, to borrow another country’s model–a revolution that overthrows the rigid system and creates public schools that can be fertile, creative, and even–oh, no, another heresy–enjoyable! It can be done, it is being done, billionaires are even footing the bill, and it’s time for the rest of us to wake up to our own power and look at the changes that a determined grassroots movement can create. The web has brought us that opportunity, and I can’t help thinking it’s up to us to use it.
I don’t think I can bear another spring where the teachers are pink-slipped in droves as school funding fluctuates yet again, but the bureaucratic hierarchies are never touched, the industry we have built up around school never suffers, the inertia of the system carries us all along as if we were going the right direction–and the kids and the country are the big losers. Just take a look at the two kids in the photo with this article (posed or not) and see the reality of the ennui and hopelessness that this pointless argument about statistics engenders.
Here’s an idea: When we create human-sized schools that meet the needs of people and move from a factory to a family model of teaching and learning, the whole society will shift in a dramatic and democratic way that we can’t even imagine from this vantage point. If you want to know more, check out the School Reform page and the links on the Getting Involved page at www.changetheschools.com. It’s a new site that I just put up today because writing a wake-up call in a novel just wasn’t enough. If anyone on Common Dreams would like a free copy of the book, please just email through the site.
I love the Gen-Xers, too, and have three of my own. I think all of you are at a place where you are mad enough to make a difference. Want to join me?
Well, all is not lost for an ambitious high school dropout. No college degree is absolutely required at Fox News Cesspool and talk radio to get a job bashing dissenters of the Plutocracy as anti-American, traitors, or worse. Top income (read:obscene pay) is the reward. If a dropout can “catch on” with the vacuous as did Limbaloney and Hannutsy for example, his/her problem is solved even without a high school diploma.
Yesterday one of our high school teachers retired and as she spoke to us all she talked about the tremendous change that has occurred recently in schools. Due to NCLB almost every decision made in districts is based on achieving passing test scores, period. We no longer look at the child as a whole person, simply as something that needs to be force fed the required information in order to regurgitate it on the federally mandated tests that mean everything to school districts because that is how they are publicly rated- your district and school’s “report card” is based almost solely on percentages passing the test and attendance.
She said how she has seen an almost total loss of creativity and critical thinking skills and an increase in kids and teachers who feel lost and angry and trapped in the system. Teachers who have been at it for a while know something is seriously wrong.
The people who created these laws, I do believe, had every intention of destroying public education and in the process turning out a generation that abhors the concept of “education” because they are experiencing school with all the joy of learning removed. What is left satisfying in life but shopping and sitting mindlessly in front of the TV? Art and music were the first programs to go when districts faced economic hard times. So listen to your iPod, but only those who can afford private lessons will be creating the music. Can you imagine suburban kids playing on make-shift instruments as in 3rd world cultures? No way! Too totally embarrassing.
I am getting close to retirement but doubt I can take the few more years. We are not doing the right thing but have no choice. Never have teachers been “held accountable” like now- and what that means is TEACHING TO THE TEST! Those used to be the worst words anyone could utter. Now it is the forced upon us mantra of public education.
The reason schools don’t work is that they have always been run on the business model–ever since the early 1900s. Read Ray Callahan for the documented history on this.
http://www.amazon.com/Education-Cult-Efficiency-Raymond-Callahan/dp/0226091481
Simply put: all key components of the schooling process have been bent and shaped within the requirements of a business model. So, even when some few progressive measures were adopted the intent was subverted by the number crunching ethic.
And the response to the failings of the business model is always to increase the hold that model has over teaching and learning. Teachers are not free to be the professionals they should be (and they’re certainly not paid anywhere near what they should be paid) and students’ continuing impulse to learn is crushed by a never ending pile of worksheets as part of the effort to memorize mostly meaningless facts and statistics. All so they can get a score on a fill in the bubble sheet of paper that can be reported to a school board, newspaper and Congressman under the guise of accountability.
The result has been, as Seymour Sarason once said, that schools in American are boring places.
But not all of them.
John Dewey had it right almost one hundred years ago in his advocacy for democratic schools and testing that did not center on standardized instruments but rather teacher directed observations of student performance of many varied tasks. However, Dewey and his allies and democratic minded colleagues around the country lost essentially every key battle for better schools.
Still, because of the power of the democratic ideal, there are many schools that are successfully implementing many of Dewey’s—and other like minded progressive reformer’s— ideas around the country.
Go here: www.essentialschools.org
or here: www.wholeschooling.net
or here: www.performanceassessment.org
or here: www.rethinkingschools.org
or here: www.deborahmeier.com/links.htm
Move away from the business model; embrace democratic schools.
I meant to say, “But there are many schools…” (the edit function wouldn’t let me edit)
And here is one of these schools:
http://www.urbanacademy.org/
Check this school out. You think they have a lot of drop outs? I doubt it.
So no child left behind actually means 30% huh?
We need to privatize schools along with the libraries and get the government the hell out of it. If kids can’t make it, we’ll just build more prisons. There are many towns looking to have those good prison guard jobs in their communities. Also, these drop outs are a good source of cheap bodies for the military to use around the world to guarantee Amercan Freedum.
The demise of the school system was ensured when K 12 school districts were formed in Wisconsin. Before that the parents elected a school board that hired a principal and/or teachers as needed. The county had a superintendent of schools that visited schools and made sure laws were followed. This was a quality control function that reported up to the state and down to the local school board and parents.
Consolidation of schools to get better sports teams and theoretically save money involves buses running in every direction on the road and all kinds of support personnel.
I think the US IS THE ONLY COUNTRY in the world that more than half of all the school system employees don’t teach. Administration that doesn’t teach anyone is paid more than the teachers and good teachers sometimes leave teaching just to get the big bucks in administration. Superintendent of Rhinelander WI school system gets 6 figures to run 1 high school, 1 jr. high and a few elementary schools that each have their own principals.
Hey — with all the IT and manufacturing jobs being outsourced, medicine next on the chopping block, declining stature of American engineering and science, what the hell do you need an education for anyway? Hell, Walmart, etc. don’t need a PhD in French to work the cash register.
Besides, an educated and critical — but under-employed — populace is a risk. Better to keep them stupid, uncritical and easily misled.