According to data from the U.S. Department of Education, the high school graduation rate reached a new high of 81%. This is based on the four-year graduation rate. If one looks at the six-year rate and includes students who receive a GED, the rate is well above 90%.
The jurisdiction with the lowest four-year graduation rate is the District of Columbia at 62%. D. C. has been devoted to corporate reform since the arrival of Michelle Rhee in 2007.
EduShyster reports on a new study of college completion rates in Boston. It includes a comparison of Boston public schools vs. charter schools. http://edushyster.com/?p=6326
Students who attended public schools were more likely to get a college degree than their peers who attended charter schools.
“The report compared members of the respective classes of 2007 from the city’s high schools and five of our local academies of excellence. Fifty percent of the BPS students had scored a college degree within six years vs. 42% of their charter peers. Now I know what you’re thinking. That equals a difference of eight percent, and eight rhymes with *hate* and also *overstate.* Which is why it’s time to look at the numbers behind those numbers. The 2007 class of Boston high school grads consisted of 1700 students, of whom some 850 have now attained their post-secondary attainment. The 2007 class of Boston charter high school grads, from a total of five charter high schools, consisted of 80 students, of whom 33 have scored their sheepskin.”
Wow.
Is it time to put the brakes on the number of standardized tests that students must take? In this article, Pennsylvania legislators say that the graduation rate will decline if state testing requirements are left in place.
“By 2017, in order to graduate high school in Pennsylvania, students must pass three state standardized tests: algebra, literature and biology.
Based on most recent student scores — especially in biology — if trends continue, Pennsylvania will soon see far fewer of its students walking down the aisle in cap and gown.
“In order to preempt that reality, state Rep. Mike Tobash (R-Dauphin County) has introduced a bill that would repeal the state-mandated graduation requirement, leaving the decision to local school districts.
“The children of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, they need to learn, they need to be assessed, but when we’ve gone so far that we end up handcuffing our educational system with really an overwhelming amount of standardized assessment,” said Tobash. “We need to stop and put the brakes on here, take a look at it.”
“The bill would also halt the creation and implementation of the seven other subject-specific Keystone exams called for by existing state law.
Tobash, who testified on the matter at a hearing at Philadelphia City Hall in November, is skeptical that the tests are actually judging students on material that’s applicable to modern workforce.”
There was a new tone in the President’s brief comments about education in his State of the Union address. Of course, he promoted his proposal for 2 tuition-free years of community college and the need to help students from debt incurred when pursuing higher education. That was welcome but not surprising.
What was welcome was the absence of fear-mongering about our public schools. No crisis talk about how nations with higher scores would take away our jobs and ruin future economic growth. The President instead highlighted the facts (that I documented in “Reign of Error” in 2013) that the high school graduation rate is at an historic high, as are test scores.
I don’t know if anyone gave much thought to this shift to a positive tone, but it definitely represents a repudiation of the “reformers'” sky-is-falling rhetoric. No reference to “obsolete” high schools, to “failing schools,” or to the ludicrous claim (advanced by Joel Klein and Condoleeza Rice) that our public schools threaten our national security.
Even better, the President did not attribute the slow, steady gains to Race to the Top, nor did he pitch merit pay or teacher evaluation by test scores (VAM) as panaceas as he has done in previous SOTU. There were no paeans of praise to charters or to turning schools around by firing their staff.
It would have been nice if he had expressed the widely shared view that our children are over tested and it is time to focus on creativity, not test prep. But you can’t ask for everything.
The President stated the facts, stayed positive, and for that we can be grateful.
An earlier post described what happened after Pearson bought the GED and aligned it with Common Core. Passing rates collapsed by as much as 90%. The GED is a high school graduation test for students who didn’t finish the traditional four year high school course.
This New York teacher explains her own experience with the TASC, which is McGraw=Hill’s version of the GED and is also aligned with the Common Core standards:
Thank you so much for writing on this important and often overlooked topic. I would like to add insight about the TASC exam, which has replaced the GED in New York State and Indiana (their website also names New Jersey and West Virginia). I’m not sure about the new GED, but for the TASC it is important for people to know *how* the new test has become harder.
The old GED was a reading test that sought to test the test-taker’s ability to read, synthesize, and comprehend complex text in the content areas. The test taker would read a passage about, say, methods of union suppression during the early 1900s, and then respond to a series of text-dependent questions. McGraw Hill could have chosen to make the test more rigorous and more Common Core aligned by increasing the text complexity and deepening the questions. They did not do this.
The new TASC exam is a content test. In the science and social studies sections, the texts have been removed, and the questions are straight out of Trivial Pursuit: “What does red shift of light from a star indicate about that star?” If you know the answer, you pass. If you don’t, too bad.
I work with recent immigrants who need to pass this test in order to pursue life, academic, and career goals. In the old GED days, we would work on English together and improve reading and writing abilities – basically getting them ready for college, and by proxy, the test. These days we struggle to help students remember a large number of discreet academic facts and trivia, hoping that by some magic, what they learn through sitting in my class for six months will be what appears on the test.
I do not have a problem with the idea of the test of career and college readiness getting harder. I do have a huge problem with this new exam. The test has gotten stupider, and it seems to be a worse measure of a student’s career and college readiness.
Thank you again for helping to spread the word.
Mle Davis
NYC Teacher
Valerie Strauss has a fascinating column about the scoring of the Smarter Balanced assessment. It appears that the achievement levels mirror the levels on NAEP. Understanding the scoring process is not easy. Apparently only the students in the top two levels will be considered “college-ready,” as befits a very rigorous curriculum. This means that less than half of the 11th grade students will be on track to go to college. In terms of mathematics, only one-third will be college-ready. The scoring ends with the rather ominous statement that Smarter Balance has not yet figured out a scoring guide for “career readiness.” Since there is so little in the Common Core that is related to career readiness, this is understandable. Very likely, the students who are involved in career and technical education will be in the lower bands and won’t be eligible to go to college.
I served on the NAEP governing board for seven years. NAEP Proficient is not grade level. It represents a very high level of achievement; in my view, NAEP proficient is an A or A-. To expect almost all students to reach NAEP Proficient is totally unrealistic. The only state in the nation where as much as 50% of students have reached NAEP Proficient is Massachusetts. The achievement levels were set in 1992 and are periodically revised. They are set by panels of judges who make estimates about what students should know and be able to do; they are arbitrary. Many scholars have contested their validity, as well as the validity of the standard-setting method, over the years.
If NAEP Proficient is used by PARCC and Smarter Balanced as a standard for graduation, most of our students will not graduate high school.
At some point, someone will have to admit that the Common Core and the tests are so “rigorous” that the students who succeed are being prepared for elite universities, not for state universities, and not for career readiness.
Danielle Dreilinger of the Times-Picayune reports that Louisiana’s graduation rate is deeply flawed by missing data in several districts.
When students transfer out, are they leaving for private school, home school, another school, or another state?
“Education officials audited 2012-13 transfer records of 34 of the state’s 69 systems and found one third of these exits could not be properly documented.”
“Much is at stake with the record-keeping, for students must be considered dropouts if their transfers are not properly documented. That depresses the school’s graduation rate. But if the transfer papers are in order, the student is not counted in their high school’s graduation rate.
“The graduation rate counts for 25 percent of the school performance score. That score determines whether conventional schools may be taken over by the state and whether charter schools may stay open.
“The worst results in the audit were found in Jefferson and East Baton Rouge parishes, and in the New Orleans schools run directly by the Recovery School District. Only 27 percent of East Baton Rouge transfer records — and none of the Recovery-New Orleans records — had proper documentation. In Jefferson, the verification rate was 31 percent.”
Veteran educator Mike Deshotels believes that school officials might be cooking the books. The state, of course, vigorously denies that claim.
We should have learned from Bernie Madoff and Ken Lay of Enron that data are highly malleable.
In this post, Jim Arnold and Peter Smagorinsky dissect the myths and baloney of the reformers. The “reformers” love to talk about the good old days and about how schools were so much better back then. As the authors demonstrate, those “good old days” weren’t good for everyone–especially when there were grown men running around in white gowns and pointy hats. And they demonstrate with solid facts that by every objective measure, the public schools of Georgia are doing a better job now than they were over the past six or seven decades. The “reformers” aren’t solving any real problems by their constant carping about the public schools.
It’s Time to Reform the Reformers
Jim Arnold & Peter Smagorinsky
Jim Arnold recently retired from the superintendent’s position of the Pelham City, GA Schools and blogs at http://www.drjamesarnold.com/. Peter Smagorinsky is Distinguished Research Professor of English Education at The University of Georgia whose public essays are archived at http://smago.coe.uga.edu/vita/vitaweb.htm#OpEd
“The failure of public education” has become a de rigueur assumption in the public forum on public education, particularly among those who claim to possess the silver bullet for “reform.” The definition of reform signals the need to improve something for the better by removing faults, abuses, and evil ways. For there to be a need for reformers, then, those they wish to reform must be found to be as defective as possible. When the target of reform lacks sufficient dereliction, and a reformer still needs to advance his or her agenda, ideally with consulting fees, then the flaws must be manufactured and propagated as if they are real.
Arne Duncan, for instance, often cites such statistics as the need for 40% of college students to require remedial coursework. Carol Burris has shown, however, this canard has no basis in fact, but is a manufactured statistic coming from a think tank, repeated by other think tanks until it became accepted in public opinion. As part of this process of fabricating a crisis, our Secretary of Education has repeatedly promulgated this bogus claim to advance his reforms, even if the evil of shoddy education in public schools requiring remediation by colleges at the taxpayers’ expense does not exist.
As part of this perceived need for reform, many people hearken back to the good old days, back before schools began circling the drain. For instance, a Rasmussen poll found that 69% of respondents doubted whether today’s public schools provide our kids with the world class education that the rest of the world is getting. At the same time that market-based reforms are offered as our only means of salvation, the schools of socialistic Finland are provided as a model of excellence.
Perhaps this irony is not the only one at work in the public debate about our purportedly failing schools.
We went to Southern schools back in those halcyon days. Nostalgia buffs might recall scenes such as this one from those misty times of yore on the occasion of efforts to integrate The Varsity restaurant in Athens, Georgia:
Given that opposition to school integration often was more violent and virulent than were such responses to allowing Black people to each a hot dog at The Varsity, perhaps those great old schools from those good old days might benefit from a closer look. Let’s consider the public perception of US public education over time.
In 1996 E. D. Hirsch called for a return to a traditional approach to public education in “The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them.” In 1983 “A Nation at Risk” told us of the apparent failure of our system of public education. The Educational Testing Service discovered in 1976 that college freshmen could correctly answer only half of forty or so multiple choice questions. In 1969 the Chancellor of NY schools, Harvey Scribner, said that for every student schools educated there was another that was “scarred as a result of his school experience.”
Admiral Rickover published “American Education, a National Failure” in 1963, and in 1959 LIFE magazine published “Crisis in Education” that noted the Russians beat us into space with Sputnik because “the standards of education are shockingly low.” In 1955 Why Johnny Can’t Read became a best seller, and in 1942 the NY Times noted only 6% of college freshmen could name the 13 original colonies and 75% did not know who was President during the Civil War. The US Navy in 1940 tested new pilots on their mastery of 4th grade math and found that 60% of the HS graduates failed. In 1889 the top 3% of US high school students went to college, and 84% of all American colleges reported remedial courses in core subjects were required for incoming freshmen.
And in the years before the American Revolution, “Undereducated, overworked, short-tempered male schoolmasters often presided over the schools. Corporal punishment was a euphemism for outright brutality against children.” Women were not allowed an education until the Industrial Revolution took hold, a century before they could vote.
So much for the good old days.
And so much for the perception that education is perpetually in decline, if actual statistics inform the conversation. The National Center for Educational Statistics reports that educational attainment is continually on the rise. Here’s their table providing decade-by-decade figures for high school graduate rates.
HS Graduates (total %) Whites Blacks
1940 38.1 41.2 12.3
1950 52.8 56.3 23.6
1960 60.7 63.7 38.6
1970 75.4 77.8 58.4
1980 85.4 89.2 76.7
1990 85.7 90.1 81.7
2000 88.1 94 86.8
2010 88.8 94.5 89.6
2013 89.9 94.1 90.3
Georgia lags behind these national averages, as the following table shows, yet still continually graduates increasing numbers of people at the high school and college levels:
HS grad Bachelor’s Advanced degree
or more or more or more
1990 70.9 19.3 6.4
2000 78.6 24.3 8.3
2006 82.2 26.6 9.2
2009 83.9 27.5 9.9
Going back a bit farther in time, in 1940 17% of adults in Georgia had completed high school; in 1946 5% of Georgians attended college. We’re doing quite a bit better these days, even as public rhetoric and perception suggest the opposite.
But you can’t frame our current situation as a crisis in need of reform if all trends are positive. So, the Georgia Department of Education claims that state graduation rates are below 70%, in spite of statistical evidence to the contrary. We cannot ascertain their motives, but they do seem to feel that charter schools and Teach for American are the answers, even if the question remains opaque. Like Arne Duncan, they appear to require a manufactured crisis of the sort revealed by David Berliner, Gene Glass and colleagues in order to come to our rescue.
Long ago Darrell Huff exposed how people lie with statistics, helping to explain the sort of smoke-and-mirrors statistical manipulation at work in much of the educational policy world. For example, in determining graduation rates, states are allowed to count only those HS graduates each year who are awarded a diploma within a 4-year course of study. GED’s don’t count, but special education students do, and count against graduation rates, as do students who graduate by persisting through difficulties such that they take more than four years to complete their degrees.
Schools, like any complex social institutions, require continual maintenance and rethinking; we hope that in our careers as teachers and school administrators we contributed to that challenging project. But the current “reform” movement, we believe, is not solving actual problems, and in contrast is manufacturing new ones with each dedication of funds to corporations instead of schools. Reforming the ways of the reformers would make better sense to us.
I did not write the following post. It was written by a high-level official at the New York City Department of Education who–for obvious reasons–requires anonymity. The story he tells is instructive. It is about how “reformers” claim victory by manipulating statistics. This is not an accusation directed at the de Blasio administration, but at their predecessors who regularly boasted that the new small high schools got better graduation rates that the large schools they replaced. The Gates Foundation bought this lie and has lauded its “success” in New York City.
Reformers Caught Lying. Again. This Time About Graduation Stats.
High school graduations are upon us. This is the time of year when parents, students, families, educators and communities celebrate the accomplishments of our high school seniors. It is a time to honor the work the graduates have done and to collectively share their hopes and dreams for the future.
At the same time, certain players in the world of education attempt to co-opt this time of year to propagandize for their favored reform policies. The latest example of this is a story about Frank McCourt High School, a small high school in New York City that “will send 97 percent of its first graduating class to college.” The story goes on to note that this school, along with 3 others, replaced a larger high school “which suffered from dismal academic and attendance records.” The reader is asked to believe one little and one big lie.
Let’s first take a look at the little lie. Does this school, in fact, have a 97% graduation/college going rate? The truth is that, on any reasonable calculation, it does not. According to the New York State data the cohort started with 100 freshmen. By sophomore year only 88 students remained. By junior year only 80. And by senior year only 69. Of these 69 survivors 67 are graduating. Seems more like a twisted version of the Hunger Games than a school for all students. One wonders: Where did the other 33 students go? Why does the media publicize such meaningless numbers without giving the full story? By now this trick should be well-known. A school that removes large numbers of students from its cohort should not be celebrated for its test scores or graduation rate. It is an artifact of arithmetic. If a school kicks out students with low test scores, it will have high test scores among the surviving students. If a school culls the students not on track to graduate it will have a high graduation rate among the surviving students.
Let’s move on to the big lie. Does this school, in fact, show that the reform strategy of closing large schools and replacing them with other smaller schools works? The full range of data show that it does not, as a number of facts pop-out.
There are 4 high schools co-located in the building that used to house Brandeis High School. One school, Innovation Diploma Plus (a “second-chance” school), had a 50.8% graduation rate last year. Another school, the Global Learning Collaborative, had a 52.7% graduation rate last year. Yet another school, the Urban Assembly School for Green Careers had a 39.8% graduation rate last year. We have already examined the claimed 97% graduation rate of the Frank McCourt High School, which also happens to screen its students before admissions.
The schools with the lower graduation rates retain almost all of their students. Unlike the school that boasts of its 97% graduation rate, the other three schools stay committed to all their students. Why do reformers refuse to evaluate schools based on their sticking with all their students? We know the answer. It is because charter schools and “miracle” schools will then be publicly exposed as largely frauds. So the metrics used to evaluate schools are deliberately constructed in ways that do not capture cohort retention in order to keep the myth alive. And the media agrees to overlook the tremendously high attrition rates at charter schools and other so-called “miracle” schools.
It may come as little surprise that the school with the lowest graduation rate has over 22% more English Language Learners, over 14% more students entering high school already overage, and over 40% more Black/Hispanic students than the school with the highest graduation rate.[i] This sheds some light on another reformer strategy. They like to tout free-market principles as they destroy community schools and create choice systems where students end up sorted into schools based on demographic characteristics and prior academic performance. This is not a solution. It does not improve education for all students. All it does is stick students in different containers, isolated from one another, thereby perpetuating a system of haves and have-nots. It is shocking that the reformers, who proclaim education the civil rights issue of our time, would support such an inequitable approach.
The total enrollment of all the high schools in the Brandeis High School building is 1,350 students. The shuttered school, Brandeis High School, had over 2,000 students. Where did the missing 600 students go? We know the answer. The missing 600 students were the more challenging students and students who did not get accepted to one of the small choice-in high schools. These students were deliberately sent to a specific group of, usually large, high schools that were then labeled “failures” too and shuttered. The Gates Foundation, an organization that has yet to meet a free-market education reform strategy it doesn’t like, has admitted that the national small school initiative was largely a failure. Despite this, MDRC, a research group in New York City, continues to publish Gates Foundation funded reports claiming that the small schools in New York City work.[ii]
It is now clear what New York City was doing during the Bloomberg era. Given the humungous size of the district they were able to play a shell game with students by passing the buck. Instead of figuring out how to reach the most challenging students and helping them succeed, the students were passed from school to school. This inevitably led to a domino effect of school closures. A shell game like this can be played in a district with almost 500 high schools, over two and half times as many as the next largest school district. Since there is a very long chain of dominos the “bad apple” students can be isolated into a specific group of schools making the remaining schools, which don’t accept those students, look good. But, as smaller districts have found out, it is not a workable long-term strategy when there is not an endless supply of schools to be used as sacrificial lambs.
Sooner or later the lies about numbers that reformers tell will catch up to them. Educators need to continue to advocate for approaches that are equitable and genuinely seek to improve the educational experience of all students. This includes developing curricula personalized for different students and improving wraparound services that extend beyond school walls. Ultimately, when the accounting fraud that is behind so many education reform initiatives collapses upon itself
[i] Frank McCourt has 55% Black/Hispanic students, 1% ELL students, 20.4% IEP students and .7% overage students. Global Learning has 90.3% Black/Hispanic students, 14.7% ELL students, 23% IEP students and 8.5% overage students. Green Careers has 95.6% Black/Hispanic students, 23.6% ELL students, 23.8 IEP students, and 15.15% overage students.
[ii] It is worth noting that the combined graduation rate of the 4 schools in the Brandies Building is 58.5% which is lower than the city-wide average of 72%.
Julian Vasquez Heilig, a professor at the University of Texas, deconstructs another one of those miracle stories that turns out to be too good to be true.
Secretary Arne Duncan is collecting high-fives for a solid leap upwards in the high-school graduation rate, but Heilig says that what he is reporting is manipulation of graduation rate data.
Heilig uses Texas as an example. He shows how state officials played with the data, so that Texas went from 29th in the nation to 4th in the nation in only three years.
That’s a miracle, but as Heilig shows, the data don’t support the claim.
Diane Ravitch's blog 