Teacher Matt Jablonski writes that Ohio is about to hit a full crisis in its graduation rates: 30% or more of high school seniors will be denied diplomas, as will 60-70% of students in urban districts.
This is a crisis created by the state, which has changed its tests again and again and set unrealistic standards.
What will Ohio do about the kids who don’t graduate?
Angie Sullivan, second grade teacher in Clark County (Las Vegas), Nevada, sent our her bulletin to legislators and journalists:
As far as I discern from the data available on the Nevada Report Card:
Nevada has 22 charter providing services to High School Seniors.
Five charters did not report data in 2015-2016:
Founders Academy (State Charter)
American Prep Academy (State Charter)
Global Community (CCSD)
Leadership Academy of Nevada (State Charter)
SSCS – Silver State High School (State Charter)
Leaving 17 Nevada charters which reported graduation data.
This is how many seniors failed to graduate in these charters:
Innovations Charter (WCSD) – 1554 Seniors; 1262 failed to graduate.
Nevada Connections (State Charter) – 1923 Seniors; 1238 failed to graduate
Delta Charter (CCSD) – 826 Seniors; 684 failed to graduate
Nevada Virtual Academy (State Charter) – 1127 Seniors; 411 failed to graduate
I Can Do Anything High School (WCSD) – 560 Seniors; 400 failed to graduate
Beacon Academy of Nevada (State Charter) – 803 Seniors; 380 failed to graduate
Odyssey Charter ( CCSD) – 792 Seniors; 376 failed to graduate
Rainshadow HS (WCSD) – 188 Seniors; 141 failed to graduate
Quest Academy (State Charter) – 42 Seniors; 8 failed to graduate
Coral Academy Reno (State Charter) – 34 Seniors; 8 failed to graduate
Andre Agassi (CCSD) – 34 Seniors; 7 failed to graduate
Explore Knowledge (CCSD) – 29 Seniors; 7 failed to graduate
Academy for Career Education (WCSD) – 59 Seniors; 2 failed to graduate
Coral Academy Vegas (State Charter) – 42 Seniors; 2 failed to graduate
Nevada State High School (State Charter) – 181 Seniors; 2 failed to graduate.
Alpine Academy (State Charter) – 21 Seniors; all graduated.
Overall Nevada Charters provided services for 9015 Seniors and 4928 failed to graduate. Perhaps more – since 5 charters did not provide data.
Tell me now why we are in a rush to turn our public schools into charters?
Aren’t charters supposed to be the experiment and competition for public schools? You would expect the graduation rate to be at least as high as a neighborhood public schools correct.
What is being done about these failing charters?
If CCSD and WCSD took out their failing charter data – their graduation rates would greatly improve.
Charters are worse than the regular neighborhood public schools. Legislation needs to get this mess under control. Failing charters have to be closed. This is ridiculous.
This is expensive and a scam.
Jeff Bryant noted that President Obama has been boasting lately about the success of his education policies, pointing to a rise in high school graduation rates as proof of their efficacy. Bryant says that the President’s education policies are nothing to brag about.
The emphasis on using outcome measures has been a hallmark of the Obama years in education. That has put unusual and often harmful pressure to get results, even when the results are meaningless. Take those rising graduation rates. Some schools have increased their graduation rates by assigning low-performing students to phony credit recovery classes, where they can guess the right answer until they pass and get meaningless credits.
The focus on test scores has warped education, in some cases, causing schools to cut time for recess, the arts, history, civics, and everything else that is not tested.
He writes:
For instance, according to the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called “the nation’s report card,” academic achievement generally is declining under Obama’s watch.
As the Washington Post reported earlier this year, for the first time since the federal government began administering the exams in 1990, math scores for fourth-graders and eighth-graders declined. Reading scores weren’t much better: Eighth-grade scores dropped while fourth-grade performance was stagnant compared with 2013, the last time the test was administered. Achievement gaps between white and minority students remain large.
But the education numbers that have worsened the most are those associated with what’s being invested into the system rather than what’s coming out of it.
Drawing from a new report on government spending on children, Bruce Lesley president of First Focus finds, “Federal support for education has dropped from a high of $74 billion in 2010 to $41 billion in 2015, a decline of more than 40 percent in the last five years … Federal education spending remains 9 percent lower than in pre-recession 2008.”
Beyond the support for education at the federal level, the picture is arguably even worse.
In its most recent report on spending on education, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds, “Thirty-five states provided less overall state funding per student in the 2014 school year (the most recent year available) than in the 2008 school year.” Even in the states where local funding rose, the “increases rarely made up for cuts.”
Local funding for schools, another significant share of education support, generally fell during the same time period. “In 36 states, total state and local funding combined fell between the 2008 and 2014 school years,” the CBPP finds.
This steep decline in education funding is arguably the most significant threat to our children’s education, and thus, the country’s future.
According to a recent review of the research on the systemic correlation between education spending and school quality and student achievement, William Mathis and Kevin Welner, of the National Education Policy Center, find, “While specific results vary from place to place, in general, money does matter and it matters most for economically deprived children. Gains from investing in education are found in test scores, later earnings, and graduation rates.”
In another review of research studies on the importance of adequate and equitable school funding, Rutgers University professor Bruce Baker writes, “To be blunt, money does matter. Schools and districts with more money clearly have greater ability to provide higher quality, broader, and deeper educational opportunities to the children they serve. Furthermore, in the absence of money, or in the aftermath of deep cuts to existing funding, schools are unable to do many of the things they need to do in order to maintain quality educational opportunities.”
What Obama Never Got About Education
Emphasizing education output, while generally leaving input unaddressed, has been a feature, not a bug, of the Obama administration’s education policy all along.
This was the administration whose signature programs, Race to the Top and the waivers to No child Left Behind, demanded states rate schools and teachers based on a “learning output,” which most states took to mean student scores on standardized tests. The president’s Education Department and Secretary Arne Duncan incentivized states to lift any restrictions on the number of charter schools in the system and provided significant grant money to expand their numbers. States were encouraged to spend vast sums of money on new systems to track output data and use them to sort and rank schools, evaluate teachers, label students, and force schools into turnaround efforts that would result in being subjected to even more scrupulous data tracking.
But while the Obama administration obsessed over output numbers, its attention to the inputs in the system was ad hoc and haphazard at best.
Obama’s Education Department never showed much interest in equitable and adequate funding, nor for that matter, in desegregation. The biggest change induced by Race to the Top was more funding for privatization, and more states authorizing privatization in order to be eligible for RTTT money. Imagine if Race to the Top had awarded millions to states that created policies to promote desegregation. It is important, it is measurable. It would have changed our schools and our society. But desegregation was not a priority.
And then there are his choices for Secretary of Education. Arne Duncan was a failure as Superintendent in Chicago, where he promised that there would be a Renaissance by 2010 (the name of his program, “Renaissance 2010”). He failed. He closed schools, he opened charter schools. He failed. And then came John King, who had been an embarrassing failure in New York state. He couldn’t speak to parents, because they were so angry about his heavy-handed promotion of Common Core and high-stakes testing. Governor Cuomo wanted him gone. And now he is Secretary of Education. Based on what?
Nothing to brag about here.
An object lesson in what not to do to improve American education.
More on Nevada.
The list of high school graduation rates was posted yesterday. Charter schools had the lowest rates in the state.
The legislature and governor bestow billions on billionaires for stadiums and tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. But public schools go without basic supplies.
To avoid paying for public schools, the legislature opens charter schools and offers vouchers.
But the vouchers explicitly violate the state constitution (which doesn’t necessarily mean the state courts will rule them unconstitutional since conservatives interpret state constitutions very loosely when vouchers are at issue).
And the charters include many of the lowest performing schools in the state (including the amply funded but highly disorganized Andre Agassi charter school) and have the lowest graduation rates.
Read this: http://m.lasvegassun.com/news/2016/oct/13/nevada-high-school-graduation-rates-continue-to-cl/
The school with the lowest graduation rate in the state is Silver State Charter School, where only 18% graduated. That’s even worse than ECOT (Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow) in Ohio, where the graduation rate is 20%.
Not to worry, reformers! There will be no accountability for charter schools! In fact, the state has hired a receiver to fix Silver State charter school at $25,000 a month…do what? Who knows? It’s Nevada, where kids don’t count, especially if they are poor and Hispanic.
The US Department of Education reported that the high school graduation rate rose to another historic high.
The rate represents those who graduated in four years. It does not include those who graduated in August or took five years to graduate. The overall graduation rate of the population 18-24 is higher than the four-year rate. Sometimes I think it was set at precisely four years to make the schools look bad. Personally, I think both rates should be reported at the same time: the four-year rate and the rate for the group 18-24, which shows a truer picture.
It should also be noted that the pressure to raise graduation rates as a marker of success may have inflated the graduation rate through such dubious means as “credit recovery,” in which students who failed a course may get full credit by taking a short-cut program, often online, often fraudulent in terms of learning.
It should also be noted that the District of Columbia has the lowest graduation rate of any state (DC is reported in federal data as both a state and a city). DC is widely hailed as one of the stars of the corporate reform movement. It has been under mayoral control since 2007, when Michelle Rhee took charge as chancellor. Bill Gates once said it would take a decade to know if “this stuff” works. The clock is ticking. Maybe he meant to say two decades or three.
Mike Klonsky reports that Chicago’s open enrollment public high schools are driving the city’s improving graduation rate. You know, the public schools that accept everybody.
“Well, it’s that time of year when the media spotlight in all the privately-run charters schools that supposedly enroll 100% of their students in a college program. Of course they fail to mention they mean 100% of the 25% or fewer that make it from freshman year to the graduation ceremony.
“I wonder how many of those 100%-ers actually show up for college classes, can afford skyrocketing tuition, or graduate some time down the road. Urban Prep, for example, continually boasts about it’s college-acceptance rate for the few that graduate, but rarely about reading and math scores which are among the lowest in the city. This year only 24% of students at this school are considered proficient in math and/or reading.”
“Check out the number of Urban Prep Charter Academy (Englewood) 9th-graders in 2014, compared with the number that make it to senior year.
“Or the high-flying Noble St. charters which lost about half their students by senior year.”
What’s driving the rising graduation rates? Not the charters, with their exclusion of kids with disabilities and ELLs. The open enrollment public high schools.
SInce Pearson bought control of the GED test, there has been a staggering collapse in the number of students who passed it and won a high school diploma. Pearson raised the cost of taking it and made it harder by aligning it with the Common Core.
Before Pearson took over, about half a million students took the GED, and most passed. After Pearson took control, passing rates dropped by a stunning 90%.
These days, employers often require a high school diploma even for menial jobs. No diploma, a life of limited opportunity.
New York City once had a superb adult education program, one of the best in the nation. But that program is now producing few graduates.
“The city Department of Education touts its $47 million-a-year adult-education program as the biggest in the state and second-biggest nationwide, but last school year it awarded just 299 high-school equivalency diplomas, The Post has learned.
“About 27,000 people over age 21 were enrolled in classes offered by the DOE’s Office of Adult and Continuing Education, including 15,700 learning English as a second language and nearly 11,000 in basic education classes that can lead to a diploma.”
The New York Post blames the program’s leadership, but in light of the national data, the test itself might be flawed. Still, $47 million to produce 299 graduates. Wow.
Mercedes Schneider recently reported that the GED was dropping its cut score, though not by a lot. This was a recognition that the failure rate was too high. But will this solve the problem?
Peter Greene reports a sad story about a small university in Maryland. The president, recruited from the financial sector, was given a goal: raise retention rates. He realized that the best tactic was to kick out 20-25 of the likeliest not to succeed early in the semester. He called the students “bunnies” and asked a faculty committee to draw up a list so he could “drown the bunnies.”
What really made him and the Board of Trustees mad was that the student newspaper revealed the plan. Then the faculty refused to assemble a list of students to kick out.
This is an illustration of Capbell’s Law at work. The goal (raising the graduation rate) became more important than the mission (educating students).
Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and even President Obama have done a victory dance about the “historic” rise in the graduation rate, but Robert Pondiscio of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute says that it is the “phoniest statistic” in American education.
Pondiscio writes:
According to federal data released late last year, and dutifully trumpeted ever since (including in last night’s State of the Union address), the nation’s high school graduation rate has hit an all-time high, with 82 percent of the Class of 2014 earning a diploma. “As a result, many more students will have a better chance of going to college, getting a good job, owning their own home, and supporting a family,” crowed then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Isn’t it pretty to think so?
In fact, Secretary Duncan might be right for now. Confidence and good will are baked into a high school diploma. It is an academic promissory note that signals to college admissions staffers, employers, and others that the holder has achieved some reasonable level of academic proficiency. But it’s also a faith-based system. It only works if people believe it stands for something tangible.
Regarding the recent spike in graduation rates, good luck figuring out what it stands for. Not improved student proficiency, certainly. There has been no equally dramatic spike in SAT scores. Don’t look for a parallel uptick on seventeen-year-old NAEP, better performance on AP tests, or the ACT, either. You won’t find it. The only thing that appears to be rising is the number of students in need of remedial math and English in college. And the number of press releases bragging about huge increases in graduation rates.
Read the article to see the many links.
He adds:
To be sure, there are very good reasons for credit recovery: We should want students who fall behind on credits due to illness, pregnancy, or some other disruption to have the opportunity to catch up and graduate. Neither the child nor society benefits if we place barriers in the way of graduation. But problems with credit recovery are legion. There’s no clear definition of what it is, no good or consistent data on how often it’s used, and no way of knowing whether it’s academically rigorous or merely a failsafe to paper over failure and drag unprepared kids across the finish line to boost graduation rates.
The potential for abuse is rampant, whether through less-than-rigorous credit recovery schemes or (as in many of the cases detailed in the New York Post) a teacher holding his nose and passing a student for the sake of expedience. Has the student earned her diploma, or is she merely being handed a diploma as a parting gift?
The even bigger problem is that we might just be stuck with it. Refusing to confer even a debased, potentially meaningless credential on an eighteen-year-old is tantamount to publicly pronouncing him a failure—unfit for post-secondary education, entry-level employment, or military service. As one child advocate lamented to Chalkbeat this week, “Panera Bread asks if you have a high school diploma. What are the options for these kids?”
So here is the dilemma:
In years past, young people without a high school diploma could sell get a job, and often a job in a factory with decent wages. But no more. The factories have been outsources, and most employers expect a high school diploma, which they use as a proxy for “shows up for work every day.” Thus, the student without a high school diploma may be permanently unemployed or consigned to menial labor. As states ratchet up the standards for high school graduation, as they base them on end of course exams in Algebra and other tough subjects, more young people will drop out or have diplomas that signify attendance. Face it: the push for higher standards debases the high school diploma. The alternative is to have large numbers of young people who are permanently unemployed and unemployable.
While I was unplugged, the New York Times published an article by Motoko Rich about whether schools had lowered their standards for high school graduation. Some “experts” complained that students were getting a diploma without being college and career ready, creating a need for significant rates of remediation in colleges and community colleges.
Rich visited a high school in South CaroIina where the graduation rate had increased impressively but college admission tests show that most students are not well-prepared for college, and only about half the students had the math skills needed for many jobs today.
The implication of the article is that high schools are lowering standards to increase the graduation rate.
Now here is the dilemma. Most employers won’t hire anyone who never got a high school diploma. What do we do with the significant numbers of students who can’t pass the increasingly difficult tests that policy makers have decided are essential? If the students flunk them again and again, they will likely drop out. What jobs will be open to them? They might be well qualified to learn the skills of a home health aide, a nurse’s assistant, a truck driver, a retail clerk, a construction worker, but these jobs will be closed to them without the high school degree.
If faced with this dilemma, what should we do? Long ago, it was possible to drop out of high school and get a good factory job. Those jobs are gone.
It seems to me that it is useless to keep raising standards and making tests harder, because that will increase the number of students who won’t graduate. I favor differentiated diplomas. One, a “local” or “general” diploma, signifying that the student took all the required courses, passed them, and graduated in good standing. Another might be a Career and Technical Education diploma, signifying success in a career path. And a third might be a college-ready diploma, signifying academic prowess.
What we can’t afford to do is to make schools so “hard” that half the students never get a diploma and are locked out of gainful employment.
Diane Ravitch's blog 