Everyone talks about high school graduation rates, but no one-including me–has any idea what they mean and what they really are.
We operate from the assumption that 100% of students “should” graduate from high school and excoriate the schools when the numbers are anything less. The assumption–which is wrong–is that we used to have high graduation rates but now we don’t. This is simply wrong. Over the course of the 20th century, graduation rates started from a very low point–less than 10% of young Americans finished high school at the beginning of the 20th century–and the rate rose steadily until it reached 50% in 1940. By 1970, it was 70%, and since then it has inched up.
Today, it is difficult to know what the graduation rate is because there are so many different ways of counting. If you count only those who graduate in four years, then it is about 75%. If you include those who graduate in August, after four years, it goes up. If you add those who took five or six years, it goes up more. If you add those who received a GED or some other alternate degree, it is up to 90%. (Aficionados of the issue can have fun poring over the latest federal data here).
These days, politicians play with the graduation rate to make themselves look successful (never mind the students). They lament the “crisis” in dropouts when they enter office, then crow at every uptick once they are in office to demonstrate “their” success.
Unfortunately, the pressure to raise the numbers typically overwhelms the standards required for attaining a high school diploma. When teachers and principals are sternly warned that their school will close unless they raise their graduation rate, they usually manage to raise their graduation rate without regard to standards. The usual gambit these days is called “credit recovery,” a phenomenon that was unheard of twenty years ago.
Credit recovery means simply that students can earn credits for courses they failed by completing an assignment or attending a course for a few days or weeks or re-taking the course online. As I wrote this week in Education Week, online credit recovery is typically a sham, a cheap and easy way of getting a diploma that was not earned. Students sit down in front of a computer, watch videos, then take a test that consists of multiple-choice questions, true-false questions, and machine-graded written answers. If they miss a question, they answer again until they get it right. Students can”recover” their lost credits in a matters of days, even hours. I wrote about online credit recovery as academic fraud in my EdWeek blog this week. Students realize quickly that if they fail, it doesn’t matter because they can get the credits in a few days with minimal effort. In this way, the diploma becomes meaningless, and students are cheated while the grown-ups fool themselves into thinking that they succeeded in raising the rates.
In this way, Campbell’s Law applies. When the pressure is raised high to reach a goal, the measures of the goal become corrupted.
The same number may be used either to bemoan a lack of progress or to claim victory. For example, the recent “Blueprint” created by a business strategy group for the school district of Philadelphia lamented that “only” 61% of its students attained a high school diploma in four years. At the same time, Mayor Bloomberg in New York City was delighted to report that the graduation rate was up to 65.5%, a figure that included summer school plus a heaping of credit recovery. The state of New York, which did not include summer graduates, put the actual figure at 61%, no different from the rate in Philadelphia. The state says that only 21% of students are “college-ready,” and the City University of New York–where most of the city’s graduates enroll–reports that nearly 80% require remediation.
So what is the real high school graduation rate? I don’t know.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I agree that “credit recovery” can be a scam if managed wrong. When run right it is not an empty class. I am currently running a summer credit recovery lab, and I can testify that my students have to do the work. I am a certified teacher but the main problem occurs when principals put an uncertified lab manager in charge in order to save money. Credit recovery can be a useful tool to help students make up deficits in their credits for graduation but no one should think that the computer can do all the work. A teacher still needs to be involved.
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What’s interesting is that as high school graduation rates have gone up, college readiness hasn’t. Students in the New York City state college and university systems need a lot of remediation.
What does it mean to graduate students who will need to retake basic math and writing courses at a community college–courses for which these New York City high school students will receive no college credit? How valuable is that high school diploma, when they have to take high school level coursework all over again?
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and then.. what does a diploma even mean.. honestly. 4.0’s who bang up tests .. in our assumed curriculum and pace.. needing those same remediations.. because word is out.. we’re teaching them to take tests.
let’s not pick our battles via individual frustrations. let’s work on a better way together.
visionvideos.tumblr.com
no?
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Diane, you should start this inquiry back in GW Bush’s first term. Miracles were accomplished by making low-scoring, low-income students disappear from data bases.
I saw the shallowness of the original test-based accountability drive but (like you at the time) I thought it would pay off in one way. I thought they could no longer push my low-income students out of the way. They couldn’t not-bother to teach them math at all, and we’d offer them all a shot at my laboratory-based, college preparatory chemistry class.
In 2000, I had 3 sections of non-college prep, general education chemistry classes, and 2 sections of college prep level at my Title I public high school. I taught them all the same curriculum and they took the same tests, but I had to write letters to the community colleges to get them into nursing programs, because the “chemistry” on their transcripts said “General Education” level. In 2004-5, the “reformers” untracked my building, eliminated the GE track, and won me over.
My allegiance was theirs to lose, and they lost it. They (MassInsight!) willfully purged my students from their own high school, and declared a test-score triumph. It was happening all over Massachusetts, but we couldn’t see it because “they” cooked the books at the DOE.
At first I thought they just wanted to feed kids into their credit recovery program, but that didn’t happen. At that time I wrote and blogged (over and over), “my girls are coming to me in tears to be signed out of the building against their will, and they disappear from our statistics.” Think about what that means for a 16 year old girl, who gets her lunch and her health care through her school enrollment. Think about what that means for interstate trafficking in underage prostitutes, and access to first trimester pregnancy care.
We blew every whistle there was to blow, but the world was deaf. We had to claw it back, to finally make the fraudulent data bases confront the tens of thousands of largely minority kids put out onto the streets with less than a tenth grade education, to bolster the rising MCAS scores. Anne Wheelock did the study to prove it, and Linda Darling Hammond finally got it into print in The Flat World and Education.
http://store.tcpress.com/0807749621.shtml
I still don’t know what the “real” graduation rate is either, but it seems like we have to fight corporate reform’s cheats, frauds, and profiteers for every child, one way or the other.
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There is a bill going through the Michigan legislature to exempt credit recovery programs from seat time requirements. I’m not a fan of seat time as a measure of anything, but it is how Michigan school districts get paid (unless they get a waiver from the state department of ed).
Under this bill, districts would get paid based on credits earned, or progress toward credits, on a monthly basis. The bill requires only one “advocate” for every 50 students to monitor progress and provide student support. It does seem to expect there will be a “teacher of record,” I assume to meet certification requirements.
This bill passed the Michigan House last week and is now in a Senate committee. You can read a description of the bill here:
Click to access 2011-HLA-5267-3.pdf
and find the bill itself here (see Section 23A):
http://www.legislature.mi.gov/%28S%280irlpfveyitjasbxsjudbn55%29%29/mileg.aspx?page=getObject&objectName=2012-HB-5267
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You know, I’d say if graduation rates rose from 10% at the beginning of the 20th century to somewhere around 75%, that is a MAJOR victory and should be shouted as the greatest education success story ever! Instead, the pundits and the billionaire philanthropist/reformers say we are failing because it isn’t 100%. My view is that, despite the fact that I believe that every child can learn, we will never get 100% because there are always extenuating circumstances that come into play.
A child can fail a test simply because they didn’t eat breakfast or stayed up too late playing xbox. A high school student can feel the pressure to drop out if a parent suddenly dies and the family needs income. The myriad of reasons why we will never reach 100% is endless. Don’t get me wrong, I am not making excuses…I am looking at reality. We are not a society of programmable robots. We are a society of flawed, complex, emotional human beings.
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As the mother of a special needs junior high school student, I’m wondering how IEP students are figured into the graduation rates.
As most of us here know, federal law allows special ed students the option to stay in school through their twenty-first year. Those extra years are used in various ways, depending on the student’s needs, and can be quite critical for the student’s success in life after public school. I’m guessing these are at least some of the kids Diane is talking about when she says graduation rates go up from 75% when you count those who take five or six years.
I’m sure it differs from state to state, but it seems to me that if schools are rated strictly according to how many students leave school with a diploma at the end of their twelfth year, with no allowances made for those staying under an IEP, a lot of special ed students are going to be pushed out then, to their detriment (at least those who don’t have parents who can afford attornies!), else the schools will be penalized.
But as they say, that’s probably a feature, not a bug.
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I am a Board of Education member from Denver, CO.
From Michael Winerip in NYT on Feb. 5, 2012 …”if the [graduation] standard is set too low, the result is a diploma that has little meaning.”
The information below comes from a district power point presentation of Feb. 16, 2012. We are still waiting for 201-11 remediation data:
Graduation rate 56.1% v. state 73.9%. 4 years of reform have seen an increase of 445 students.
Remediation rate of 59.7% up from 57.1%. 4 years of reform have seen an increase of 231 students.(these are for instate 2 and 4 year institutions)
How did our district respond to this disheartening news? The superintendent sent out an email and I quote: “The data shows that far too many DPS graduates who enroll in college – 40% – from the class of 2010…need to take remedial courses.” When I asked about this discrepancy – 59.7% v. 40% the answer I received was, 59.7% of instate students need remediation; 40% is “our best estimate of the overall remediation rate for our college enrollees.” I repeat, BEST ESTIMATES being used to hype a failing reform. This at a time when our teachers are being data’d to death ( Can you imagine the outcry if teachers were allowed to give BEST ESTIMATES as real data for student learning), our students being tested to death, our graduates in some cases receiving sub-standard diplomas.
Finally, we have a citizens’ oversight committee in Denver, A+Denver, which just released, in conjunction with three other so-called reform organizations including Stand for Children, a rather scathing report on DPS’ “success.” Because of the makeup of these organizations, their criticism was particularly noteworthy. “Increasing graduation rates is a laudable objective, however graduation without benchmark academic achievement is specious, and there are legitimate concerns about credit recovery programs and other strategies that increase graduation rates while proficiency remains stagnant.”
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“Can you imagine the outcry if teachers were allowed to give BEST ESTIMATES as real data for student learning(?)”
Shouldn’t be any outcry at all because the supposed “real data’ are only “BEST ESTIMATES” anyway. Logically there can never be any “real data” for “student learning.” (And I’m glad you used “student learning” instead of the way too frequent “student achievement”.) Teaching and learning belong in the logical category of “quality”. Logically speaking one cannot determine quality in terms of quantity, they are two different things.
“There are ten apples” does not tell us anything about whether those apples are any good to eat. Johny got 11 out of 20 answers correct on the test tells us absolutely nothing about the quality/characteristics of Johny’s learning. But in most school systems that score would be labelled “failing”. We add to the falsehood by adding the label. Any attempt to quantify student learning-grading, standardized testing, “real data”, etc. . . is a falsehood. When one bases a practice on a falsehood the results will, more likely than not, be false. (Every now and then one may obtain a correct answer/conclusion by chance).
The educational practices of grading, labeling, etc. . . are so ingrained into us that to question the practices is to be considered by most to be a question of a mentally deranged person. I know, I’ve seen the looks teachers and administrators have given me when I bring this up. When I point out the fact that so much of what we in public education do, especially with regards to “data driven decsions”, in essence is a falsehood and therefore a huge waste of time and energy that could be better spent on the actual teaching and learning process. They think I’m nuts. And sometimes I do to because people don’t want to know that “the emperor has no clothes”.
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Almost 8 months after the fact, I want to weigh in.
First it is really important to note the different graduation rates.
I was actually looking for the information
But I don’t think credit recovery is academic fraud, at least not across the board.
The way to do it, however, is to insist that students come back at a later time to get their credits. If someone has to come back for a 5th year or a summer, that takes away the incentive to say, “Ah I can always do it later.”
I’ve worked in programs with credit recovery components, usually with older (17-21) kids. They do have their faults, but they are necessary to help a lot of kids patch together their academic record after being in schools where they were left to drift or drifting away from school.
For myself, I’ve always hated the ‘full credit/no credit’ dichotomy. A lot of may students did learn something in their classes, but not enough, and I felt they deserved at least half a credit. Couldn’t give them half a credit, though.
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Credit recovery fraud is currently a major problem at John Dewey High School in Brooklyn. Principal Kathleen Elvin oversees a program that allows her to graduate over two hundred students a year who are not in any way prepared for higher education. They simply sit in a room where they are assigned a packet of work that would take no more than two or three hours to complete. This as a replacement for a course. Attendance barely matters and the teachers overseeing these classes are not licensed to teach them. For example, a licensed English teacher sits in a room where students are doing credit recovery for math, social studies, and science. Assistant principals such as Eunice Chao, John Messinger, and Andrew Kenny supervise these scam courses. Please keep in mind that Kathleen Elvin receives a generous bonus for reaching specific required goals. So this is a major motivator for her unethical and illegal activities.
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