Last Thursday the NY Sun gave the Times editorial board a well-deserved spanking for ignoring its own backyard. Buried in the piece is a description of Bloomberg's latest temper tantrum, this time over the gall of a reporter for - gasp! - asking questions about the graduation rate:

Perhaps in their coverage of the No Child Left Behind law the mandarins of Eighth Avenue have fallen victim to the law of Not In My Backyard. They'd certainly be in good company. Announcing the latest graduation rate results, Mayor Bloomberg could not for his life fathom why our reporter Elizabeth Green might inquire as to his opinion on the charge that graduation rates are inflated by schools trying to put on a good face.

"I'm sort of speechless," the mayor said. "Is there anything good enough to just write the story?"

Using enrollment data from the DOE Statistical Summaries, the graph below plots the proportion of 9th graders still enrolled in 12th grade 3 years later beginning with the cohort that entered 9th grade in 1995. Thus, we can follow the 4-year attrition patterns of every 9th grade cohort beginning high school between 1995 and 2004. Though looking at "promoting power" this way is not the best way to look at overall graduation rate levels (there are both upward and downward biases and it's difficult to figure out how they shake out), it does provide a better way to look at long-term trends than any other data available.

The graph below suggests that graduation rates in New York City did indeed increase for the cohort that entered school in 2000 and again for the cohort that entered in 2001, which four years later would have been in 12th grade in 2004 and 2005, respectively. The graduation rate has largely been flat for the last four years, which would represent the classes that entered high school from 2002 onwards.



In his weekly radio address yesterday, Bloomberg argued that mayoral control is the primary driver behind increasing graduation rates. Hmmm. The graduating class of 2004 had finished its first 2.5 years of high school before the Children First reforms were even announced in January 2003, and the graduating class of 2005 had already made it through the first 1.5 years of high school. Since the entering 9th grade class of 2002, these 4-year figures have largely been flat.

I'm happy to cheer for increasing graduation rates for New York City kids - though I wish the proportion of classes passed through credit recovery was also publicly reported - but the time ordering here makes it impossible to attribute them to mayoral control.

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The new Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a survey of 14,000 American high school students conducted annually by the Centers for Disease Control, shows that African-American and white teens are less likely to be sexually active than they were in 1991, though the declines are more precipitous for African-Americans.

* In 2007, 66% of African-American students had ever had sexual intercourse, while in 1991, 82% had.

* In 2007, 44% of white students ever had sexual intercourse, while in 1991, 50% had.

* Hispanic students are no less likely to be sexually active in 2007 than in 1991. 2007, 52% of Hispanic students ever had sexual intercourse, while in 1991, 53% had.

Even as fewer teens are having sex, teen television dramas have ramped it up. Compare the relatively tame My So-Called Life (circa 1994) with Gossip Girl, for which the "OMFG" ad campaign involved images too racy for this family friendly site.

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Ed Week's Diplomas Count report is out today, as is a warning from four distinguished academics that its figures are "exceedingly inaccurate." And having read the two papers below, I have to agree. The following is the statement issued by Jim Heckman, Paul LaFontaine, Larry Mishel, and Joydeep Roy:

In our examination of the data and methodologies available to estimate high school graduation rates we have found that insights can be gained from household surveys and from administrative data on student enrollment and diplomas granted. However, we find the measures of graduation rates in Education Week’s Diploma Counts project, computed from diploma and enrollment data, to be exceedingly inaccurate. The main problem is the assumption that the number of students enrolled in 9th grade is the same as the number of students entering high school. This assumption artificially lowers the estimates of current graduation rates, especially for minorities who are more likely to be retained (repeat 9th grade). This measure also artificially reduces the growth of the graduation rate over time because the practice of grade retention has grown over time, again, especially among minorities.

The resulting errors are sufficiently large to artificially lower the graduation rate by 9 percentage points overall and by 14 percentage points for minorities. Grade retention also differs sharply across states and localities, distorting geographic comparisons. Last, these measures do not reflect the ultimate graduation rates of a cohort of students because the data do not capture diplomas provided by adult education and other sources than schools.

You can find Mishel and Roy's paper, published today in the Education Policy Analysis Archives, here and Heckman and LaFontaine's paper here.

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KnowHow2Go has a new college access campaign encouraging kids to take tough classes like Algebra II and Foreign Languages. Think KISS x Schwarzenegger, but with Mr. Rogers' intentions. I'm going to hide under my bed now.

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To close observers of the NYC system, the "credit recovery" story is old news. But this burgeoning phenomenon had received scant media attention until Elissa Gootman turned in this important NYT article linking credit recovery to the mounting pressure to increase graduation rates by any means necessary.

For the uninitiated, credit recovery involves "letting those who lack credits make them up by means other than retaking a class or attending traditional summer school." This often involves completing a project which demonstrates "mastery" of the course. I've seen projects ranging from a packet of math problems to a 5-page "term paper," and Gootman also identified similar patterns in NYC high schools:

In interviews, teachers or principals at more than a dozen schools said the programs ranged from five-day crunch sessions over school breaks, to interactive computer programs culminating in an online test, to independent study packets — and varied in quality.

Klein argues there's no evidence that credit recovery has become more prevalent in recent years. But the incentives for schools to push students through (or to transfer them out before they count against the school) have grown with the adoption of NYC's report cards and funder-driven graduation targets for the small schools.

When a simple system tries to regulate an issue as complex as graduation rates, you end up with unintended consequences. Hopefully Madame Secretary will consider NYC's experience with credit recovery as she contemplates graduation rate measures and targets.

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High school exit exams have become a common fixture in American high school life. By 2006, 22 states had exit exams - and because larger states are more likely to have exams, approximately two-thirds of all high school students face exit exam requirements.

Proponents of exit exams often assert that these tests make the high school diploma more meaningful to employers. If this is the case, these policies should widen the gap in earnings and labor market outcomes between those who earn high school diplomas and those that don't. Despite the popularity of these policies, few papers have examined this claim empirically.

In "State High School Exit Examinations and Postsecondary Labor Market Outcomes," published in the most recent edition of Sociology of Education, Rob Warren, Eric Grodsky, and Jennifer Lee take up this question. Analyzing data from both the Census and the Current Population Survey, they found no evidence that state exit exams positively affect labor force status or earnings. Furthermore, they found no evidence that the effects of these policies vary by race or ethnicity, or by the level of difficulty of the exit exam.

In short, exit exams do nothing to increase the labor market value of the high school diploma. At the same time, other evidence suggests that exit exams (especially more difficult ones) are associated with lower public high school completion rates and higher rates of General Educational Development test taking (see Warren et al., High School Exit Examinations and State Level Completion and GED Rates, 1975-2002). Others find that exit exams increase inequality in rates of high school completion, and especially influence African-American students' odds of completing high school. (See Dee and Jacob, Do High School Exit Exams Influence Educational Attainment or Labor Market Performance?)

Of course, it is possible that exit exams help improve the quality of education in lower grades, though I've seen little evidence on this point. Readers, what do you think? Do exit exams hurt more than they help?

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In the fall, the AP reported that 1 in 10 US high schools are “dropout factories.” At AERA, Robert Balfanz provided an overview of Hopkins Center for the Social Organization of Schools' research that led to the AP article.

Central to the “dropout factory” is the idea of promoting power. “Promoting power” compares the number of 12th-graders in a high school to the number of 9th-graders three years earlier. While this is not a direct measure of the graduation rate, it is a decent indicator, and can be calculated for every school in America from the NCES Common Core of Data. Balfanz and colleagues labeled schools with promoting power of less than 60% - i.e. of 100 freshman enrolled in the fall of 2004, fewer than 60 are still enrolled in the fall of 2007 – as dropout factories. These schools are located primarily in urban centers and in the South and Southwest, and 25% of them are the only high school in their town. Schools with high concentrations of minority students are overrepresented: 56% of schools that enroll more than 90% African-American or Hispanic students are classified as dropout factories.

What I didn’t hear in the fall news coverage on dropout factories was a consideration of how out-of-school factors drive the dropout rate. Balfanz did a nice job of not only blaming schools, but the broader social policy context in which schools and students are located. As Balfanz wrote in an article available at the gradgap.org website:

The teachers, administrators, and students in these schools are often going to heroic lengths to succeed despite long odds. The fault lies not with the schools or their teachers or students but with the intended and unintended consequences of decisions made at the city, state, and federal levels to create a subset of under-resourced, over-challenged, and non-supported schools that primarily educate low-income and minority students.

Balfanz reviewed, and then generally dismissed, three popular approaches to reforming these struggling schools. Closing schools may be necessary in some cases, Balfanz said. However, many school closings replace one under-resourced, struggling school with another. And for schools that are the only high school in town, it’s a difficult sell. A second popular remedy is reconstitution, which Balfanz argued has no track record of success.

A third solution is the creation of small schools, which Balfanz was optimistic about in cities with high concentrations of human capital (New York and Boston). But he warned that these schools have the potential to displace the students who would have attended the old “dropout factory” otherwise (see here, here, and here on displacement in New York). Instead of these three silver bullet solutions, Balfanz argued that we need a “wholesale transformation” of these schools, which includes a mix of schoolwide, targeted, and intensive interventions. He didn’t go into great depth about what this transformation would look like, though he did mention an “early warning system” – one that closely monitors grades, attendance, and behavior for students who are at-risk of dropping out – as an important component of high school reform.

Of particular interest was Balfanz’s discussion of how our “counterproductive accountability system” creates pressure to hold students back so they don’t affect the schools’ scores, or to transfer students so they don’t count against the school’s graduation rate. Balfanz mentioned that an "on-track to graduate indicator" might be a better accountability metric, but didn’t go into detail about how this indicator could be used for accountability purposes.

Interesting session overall, but I was left wondering whether the dropout factory press splash actually moved this debate forward, or was just another “our schools are failing” report that paved the way for more school closings that often leave nothing better in the dropout factory’s place. I also wanted more detail about what a "wholesale transformation" looks like on the ground.

Image credit: inmagine.com

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Today's NYT article on graduation rates touches briefly on the push out problem. But there's another approach to improving grad rates that has run rampant in NYC - awarding credit even after students fail courses. Seat time credit has received some play (see these old posts from Edwize and NYC Educator), but there's an important story waiting to be written about how schools have changed failing course grades if students attended tutoring or completed independent projects.

None of these tactics is necessarily problematic from an educational standpoint. In fact, offering multiple chances may be an important way to keep a reluctant and at-risk population attached to school. But they should challenge how we view changes in the graduation rate in NYC. It's also an awkward juxtaposition with test-based grade retention in grades 3, 5, 7, and now 8.

On the pushout issue, take a look at this recent paper by Linda McNeil and colleagues, "Avoidable Losses: High-Stakes Accountability and the Dropout Crisis." The quantitative part of the study doesn't do a good job of separating the portion of the dropout problem attributable to high-stakes accountability from that which predated accountability. Nonetheless, the qualitative section has some gems about the tradeoffs principals face when they are asked to increase test scores and graduation rates simultaneously, i.e. one principal said:

It’s not a miracle to manipulate things. A miracle is saving kids actually, in reality—that’s what miracles are. To go out and get these kids who were dropped out, or to get kids who are not achieving and find ways. That’s a miracle to get all of it to do that. It’s not to manipulate things so that it appears—it’s a facade.

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Per the "Let Them Go" debate: does research have anything to say about the effects of the dropout age on subsequent life outcomes? In "Would More Compulsory Schooling Help Disadvantaged Youth? Evidence From Recent Changes to School-Leaving Laws," economist Philip Oreopoulos examines this question. Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

This paper uses these recent changes [in the school leaving age] in order to estimate the effects of further compulsory schooling. The results suggest that more restrictive laws reduced dropout rates, increased college enrollment, and improved career outcomes. Some caution is warranted, since focusing on recent law changes leads to higher imprecision. However, generally, the consistent findings in previous studies suggest that compulsory high school at later ages can benefit disadvantaged youth.

How large of a wage bump do students receive for staying in school for an additional year?

If we convert estimated annual earnings gains into lifetime gains, we see that a year of compulsory schooling increased lifetime wealth by an average of about 10 percent, including the revenue lost as a result of not working during school.

Increasing the school leaving age also decreases the dropout rate and increases post-secondary attendance:

States that increased the school leaving age above 16 witnessed an increase in average years of schooling for 20-29 year-olds by approximately 0.13 years, while high school dropout rates fell by about 1.4 percentage points. Raising the age limit also increased post-secondary school attendance by about 1.5 percent, even though postsecondary school is not compulsory.

The Oreopoulos chapter provides a nice overview of other studies on school leaving. My take: We need to create options for older students who've decided to return to school, but they should supplement, rather than supplant, the existing school leaving guidelines. I'm wary of setting 14 year-olds who would have stayed in school otherwise loose with the hope of ever recovering them. And the inequality implications of doing so are tremendous. Poor kids would be most likely to leave earlier and least likely to come back. While I acknowledge the potential benefits to the kids who stay (see Robert's post), I am more concerned about the likely damage done to the early dropouts.

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There's an interesting conversation starting in the comments below, to which Robert Pondiscio has added a longer post at Core Knowledge. The central issue: Is the goal of public education to educate the willing, or to convert the unwilling?

In other events, Sherman Dorn has issued a presidential challenge (not the kind with the mile run and pullups - but if you'd like to know how out of shape you are, click on the thumbnail above), writing:

Eduwonkette, if you're reading, I challenge you to nominate the most interesting and eclectic panel of questioners at a hypothetical fall education debate for the candidates.

Given my existing level of poop-out on the "why don't the candidates talk about education?" question, I have no good answers off hand, but will conjure one later. Anyone else want to take a swing?

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