High School Graduation Rates Research Articles

Infant Mortality in Southern States: A Bureaucratic Nightmare

Despite numerous advances in technology, medicine, and health care, infant mortality continues to reach very high levels in southern states. The purpose of this paper is to examine demographic, economic, and health care factors that are likely to affect infant mortality. In so doing, we first compare infant mortality and other critical factors in southern states to other regions of the country. Second, we use cross tabulation tables to determine if there is a correlation between infant mortality and several independent variables. Third, we use regression analysis to determine how each of these variables affects the change in infant mortality for the 1990–2003 periods. The results of the cross tabulation tables indicate relationships between infant mortality and each of the independent variables. When these variables were placed in a regression model, high school graduation rates, race, geographic region, unemployment rates, uninsured rates, teenage pregnancy rates, single parent families, and the number of doctors and hospitals were significant.

Using administrative data to estimate graduation rates: Challenges, Proposed solutions and their pitfalls.

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in understanding the levels and trends in high school graduation in the U.S. A big and influential literature has argued that the “true” high school graduation rate remains at an unsatisfactory level, and that the graduation rates for minorities (Blacks and Hispanics) are alarmingly low. In this paper we take a closer look at the different measures of high school graduation which have recently been proposed and which yield such low estimates of graduation rates. We argue that the nature of the variables in the Common Core of Data, the dataset maintained by the U.S. Department of Education that is the main source for all of the new measures, requires caution in calculating graduation rates, and the adjustments that have been proposed often impart significant downward bias to the estimates.

The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels

This paper applies a unified methodology to multiple data sets to estimate both the levels and trends in U.S. high school graduation rates. We establish that (a) the true rate is substantially lower than widely used measures; (b) it peaked in the early 1970s; (c) majority/minority differentials are substantial and have not converged for 35 years; (d) lower post-1970 rates are not solely due to increasing immigrant and minority populations; (e) our findings explain part of the slowdown in college attendance and rising college wage premiums; and (f) widening graduation differentials by gender help explain increasing male-female college attendance gaps.

Relationships Between Nurse‐ and Physician‐to‐Population Ratios and State Health Rankings

To evaluate the relationship between nurse-to-population ratios and population health, as indicated by state health ranking, and to compare the findings with physician-to-population ratios. Secondary analysis correlational design. The sample consisted of all 50 states in the United States. Data sources included the United Health Foundation's 2006 state health rankings, the 2004 National Sample Survey for Registered Nurses, and the U.S. Health Workforce Profile from the New York Center for Health Workforce Studies. Significant relationships between nurse-to-population ratio and overall state health ranking (rho=-.446, p tf?>=.001) and 11 of the 18 components of that ranking were found. Significant components included motor vehicle death rate, high school graduation rate, violent crime rate, infectious disease rate, percentage of children in poverty, percentage of uninsured residents, immunization rate, adequacy of prenatal care, number of poor mental health days, number of poor physical health days, and premature death rate, with higher nurse-to-population ratios associated with higher health rankings. Specialty (public health and school) nurse-to-population ratios were not as strongly related to state health ranking. Physician-to-population ratios were also significantly related to state health ranking, but were associated with different components than nurses. These findings suggest that greater nurses per capita may be uniquely associated with healthier communities; however, further multivariate research is needed.

Taking the Easy Way Out: How the GED Testing Program Induces Students to Drop Out

The option to obtain a General Education Development (GED) certificate changes the incentives facing high school students. This paper evaluates the effect of three different GED policy innovations on high school graduation rates. A six point decrease in the GED pass rate due to an increase in passing standards produced a 1.3 point decline in overall dropout rates. The introduction of a GED certification program in high schools in Oregon produced a four percent decrease in graduation rates. Introduction of GED certificates in California increased dropout rates by 3 points. The GED program induces high school students to drop out.

Changes Proposed to No Child Left Behind

Changes Proposed to No Child Left Behind

Admissions and Public Higher Education in California, Texas, and Florida: The Post-Affirmative Action Era

1996 was a momentous year for higher education in the United States. In that year voters in California adopted Proposition 209, a ballot measure that amended the state constitution to prohibit public institutions from discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity. That same year, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Hopwood v. Texas that it was unconstitutional for Texas public colleges and universities to use race as a condition of admission. The decisions in the two states reversed the trend among the nation’s major public universities to use affirmative action as a factor in the freshman admissions process. Prior to 1996, every public university in the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization of the nation’s leading research universities, had employed affirmative action to ensure diversity among its entering freshmen classes. Three years later, in November, 1999, Governor Jeb Bush joined Florida with California and Texas, announcing his “One Florida” initiative to eliminate affirmative action in university admissions at the state universities. With the implementation of “One Florida,” three of the four largest states in the nation and the three with the largest high school and college student populations had rescinded affirmative action for the purpose of achieving racial and ethnic diversity. Only New York’s public universities, of the nation’s four largest higher education systems, continued to use affirmative action in its admission decisions. This essay examines the impact these developments had on diversity in freshmen enrollment in California, Texas, and Florida. Thomas Espenslade and Chang Chung argued in 2005, “[E]liminating affirmative action would reduce acceptance rates for African American and Hispanic applicants by as much as one-half to two-thirds and have an equivalent impact on the proportion of underrepresented minority students in the admitted class. White applicants would benefit very little by removing racial and ethnic preferences; the White acceptance rate would increase by roughly 0.5 percentage points. Asian applicants would gain the most. They would occupy four out of every five seats created by accepting fewer African American and Hispanic students (p. 303-304).” Was this, in fact, the case for California, Florida, and Texas? To determine the results, we selected the five universities in these states that were members of the AAU in 1990 - the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the University of Texas, Austin (UT Austin), and the University of Florida (UF) – and followed freshmen enrollment patterns from that period to the entering freshmen class of 2005. We also examined state high school graduation rates in these three states and added a control group of universities to compare these five universities with five others that did not eliminate Affirmative Action in admissions. Our conclusions underscore much of what Espenshade and Chung (2005) and others have argued, but they also point out other serious and substantive developments that threaten the success of American higher education and its contribution to the success of American society.

Demographics of the Upward-Trending Murder Rate in Buffalo, New York: An Omen for the Future?

A century of murder rates is surveyed from Buffalo, New York, within the context of several demographic variables. Over the course of the twentieth century, Buffalo's murder rates have trended upward. It is argued that the dynamics of the twentieth century in Buffalo may be repeated across various cities in the twenty-first century via analogous demographics. Accordingly, increasing rates of violent crime in general, and most specifically of murder, would be under pressure to remain at the relatively high levels. Key Words: Murder rate, Buffalo, ethnic homogeneity, immigration, high school graduation rates, non-marital births, violent crime rates, unemployment. Demography is destiny. Auguste Comte Although murder in the United States is relatively rare and each case has unique properties, some patterns tend to be consistent Murder is mainly a male event (as to both perpetrator and victim) with males over-represented in the arrests. This article focuses upon the level of documented murder in Buffalo, New York. Demographic variables, over and beyond young males, will be examined in relationship to any trends, upward or downward, in the murder rates. Following the results section, the attempt will be made to augur whether Buffalo, New York, can be reasonably generalized to other similar cities in the U.S. If generalizability is justifiable, then the question emerges of whether the generalization most usefully applies to twentieth century America as a snap-shot of the past or, radier, to twenty-first century America as a prediction of the future. Backdrop of the Analysis The Township of Buffalo, New York, was established in 1810, and incorporated as a city in Erie County in 1832. Buffalo soon became important commercially both as a place for the transit of goods and as a center for manufacturing goods. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Buffalo was a magnet for immigration from Europe, and a significant wave of European immigration occurred. The percentage of Buffalo's foreign-born Whites, i.e. Europeans, peaked at 30% in 1900 and slowly declined until the Great Depression. See Table 1. As the Great Depression began and continued, the level of immigration from Europe declined steeply. World War II created a market for labor, and a second wave of immigration into Buffalo occurred. This wave contained a fairly large number of southern Blacks. In the 1980s a third wave began, consisting mainly of individuals from Mexico and Central America. See Table 1 for percentages of ethnic group by decade. It should be noted that various entities, including governmental agencies, across various years refer to this latter group with various names, e.g. Latinos, Hispanics, Chicanos, Spanish. This article will use the term Latinos and notes that the majority of the recendy immigrating Latinos originated from Mexico or Central America. Method Variables: Dependent variable: Buffalo's rate of murders (per 100,000 population) as known to the police will be the dependent variable. The Buffalo murder rates were available from the 18902003 (Buffalo Police Department 1905-1935, U.S. Department of Justice 1931-2005. To avoid an aberrant year, the mean murder rate of three years is the datum of record. The census year, plus and minus one year, developed the three-year mean. Independent variables: To complement the stipulated variables of young males, years (with decade as the unit) and levels of ethnic homogeneity are the first, if coarse-grained, set of independent variables. Although diere are variations upon the theme, the initial coding for ethnicity will be White, Black and Latino. The hypodiesis being tested is that Buffalo's murder rates will vary predictably widi changes over time and changes in edinic homogeneity.Percentages of the relevant etiinic groups in Buffalo were available from the U.S. Census (1890 - 2002). Level of ethnic homogeneity: The U. …

The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels

The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels

An Exponential Payoff

FOR MOST of us, graduating from high school is just the first step on the ladder to adulthood. And it is taken for granted. In some families, failure to graduate disrupts these expectations. A child might rebel or have learning problems that delay or even preclude walk across the stage, but for his or her family, such future was never imagined, and the resulting lack of diploma is talked about in hushed tones. The majority of parents assume that their children will complete high school and be certified to compete in the real world. But for other families, as optimistic as they might be when their 5-year-old happily trots through the big school doors to meet that first kindergarten teacher, the tradition of high school graduation is not firm. Perhaps one or both parents dropped out. Maybe Grandpa never finished eighth grade. Uncle Steve quit at 16. Aunt Terry left to take care of nieces and nephews who needed her. Such families don't care any less about their children's future. They simply reflect the conditions and expectations to which they've been exposed. We speak easily of first-generation college students. But it is less common to hear about first-generation high school graduates. Yet each first-generation high school graduate exponentially increases the odds that, for subsequent children, the expectation of graduation will be a lock. But locking in expectations can only happen when far greater numbers of students actually graduate--and do so fully prepared for adulthood. Where is the need the greatest to improve graduation numbers and build family traditions? Census Bureau statistics tell us that number of the states with the highest percentages of non-high school graduates are in the South. Ironically, southern states have often been among the leaders in education reform. In fact, because they have been so aggressive in policy making, it's difficult to single out any state in particular. For example, lawmakers in Florida have enacted an impressive slate of policies directed at improving education in the middle grades and high school. Alabama was the first state to require 4 X 4 curriculum for graduation. Mississippi currently is focusing on reducing its number of dropouts. And South Carolina just completed an in-depth study on better serving at-risk students. NATIONWIDE EFFORTS Nationwide initiatives led by nonprofit organizations such as Jobs for the Future (JFF) are focusing attention on the need to increase the number of low-income and minority young people who graduate from high school, are ready for college, and go on to earn college degree or different postsecondary credential. In October 2007, JFF brought together representatives from 41 states for conference called Double the Numbers 2007. The aim was to ask the nation to take on the urgent challenge of doubling the number of low-income students who earn postsecondary credentials. The conference addressed four strategies for improving high school graduation rates and promoting postsecondary attainment: * creating multiple pathways that enable all students, including struggling students and out-of-school youths, to graduate from high school prepared for college and work; * improving student transitions from high school to college by incorporating college-level learning experiences into the high school years; * improving college completion rates by restructuring developmental course sequences, building more bridges between K-12 and postsecondary education, and upgrading student supports; and * increasing postsecondary success for historically underserved groups through more strategic management of institutional spending and investment in expanded capacity and improved student learning. MAPPING BACKWARD IN KENTUCKY On 27 October 2007, Kentucky's Council on Postsecondary Education detailed how Kentucky plans to increase the number of college graduates to the national average by 2020: Doubling our numbers will benefit all Kentuckians. …

The Impact of the Academic Achievement Gap on the African American Family

The academic achievement gap impacts the African American family in various ways. It can influence how African American children experience school; and it has implications for their high school dropout and graduation rates, college attendance, and college completion rates. For parents, the academic achievement gap may influence their own socioeconomic status via their educational attainment, which then has direct implications for their children. The purpose of this article is to present a comprehensive review of the academic achievement gap for the African American family from school entry through college graduation. We do so by examining current trends and theoretical perspectives, under the rubric of social inequality. The article concludes with implications for practice with African American families.

Increasing Academic Motivation in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students From Low Socioeconomic Backgrounds

According to research, students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds have lower rates of high school graduation and university attendance. There is little research regarding interventions to address these issues. The current study compared the effects of two programs designed to increase academic motivation. Forty-seven high school female athletes from culturally and linguistically diverse and economically disadvantaged backgrounds participated in the study. The programs were implemented over a 12-week period, 2 days per week within the school day. One group received instruction using a program that was designed by the school's physical education faculty. The other group received instruction using the Possible Selves program (Hock, Schumaker, & Deshler, 2003). The researchers investigated the effects of the programs with regard to the students' level of hope for the future as measured by the Children's Hope Scale (Snyder et al., 1994), records of the students' grades and number of administrative behavioral referrals, students' self-reports about their participation, and researchers' evaluation of the students' goals. The results did not indicate a difference in the students' hopes for the future. There was little difference in overall grade point averages and no difference in behavioral referrals between the two groups. The students' perceptions of their participation in the programs were similar. However, the students in the Possible Selves group indicated that they received more support from an adult during their program, and they reported higher levels of effort toward academics than the comparison group. The most significant finding was a difference in the quality of goals written. The Possible Selves group wrote goals and action plans that were more specific and realistic.

The Failure of Failure

KIDS ALL OVER the country are counting the days until school's out and awaiting year-end report cards, but not too anxiously. After all, very few will fail even if teachers feel they should, leaving some to wonder what lesson that's teaching. So began a story on National, CBC television's evening news broadcast, on June 20 of this year. It went on to include brief comments from two teachers, both concerned that students were getting credits that they hadn't earned; from a spokesperson for the Canadian Teachers' Federation appearing to defend current practices; and from me, about the importance of focusing on student success rather than setting arbitrary lines of The news item was preposterous, of course. No research was done, and no evidence was presented beyond the opinion of one or two people to support any of the claims being made. But there is lots of evidence, easily available, to show that failure remains a common experience for many in Canadian schools. The point of this column is not to criticize media coverage of education; that's a subject for another day. Rather, the CBC News story reminds us of one of the most vexing and hotly debated problems in Canadian education: what to do about students who are not making the grade. It's a topic that illustrates vividly the collision between research results, school practices, public opinion, and political choices. Point 1. The research evidence is clear that retaining students in grade is not a way to generate greater effort and later success.(1) International assessments, such as PISA (Programme of International Student Assessment), show that countries with high rates of retention in grade tend to have lower overall achievement; some of the highest-scoring countries, such as Japan or Finland, have almost no failure. A large body of research, which has been reviewed and synthesized many times, shows that retention in grade is an ineffective policy. It does not improve student outcomes in the long term, even in comparison with social promotion. Students retained in the elementary grades are much more likely to become high school dropouts. In high school, failure of even a single course is associated with increased risk of dropping out. Evidence from psychology also suggests that success generates more effort, while failure tends to lead people to reduce their effort and shift their attention to areas where they can be successful. Moreover, failure and retention are also a poor use of resources, since they increase costs by keeping students in the system longer without producing any benefits in terms of achievement. Everything we know from research tells us that we should be trying to minimize failure in our schools. Point 2. Lots of kids continue to fail (or be failed) in Canadian schools. Ontario's high school graduation rate is about 75%, so at least 25% of kids are failing to the extent that they do not graduate. The highest reported provincial high school graduation rates in Canada are a little over 80%, meaning that even in our most successful jurisdictions, nearly one student in five is not succeeding. Even among graduates, a significant number--about 10% of all students in Ontario and something similar in Manitoba--take at least an extra year to graduate, suggesting that they've failed a course or more along the way. And this does not include other failures in individual courses or students who withdraw from courses. Many school systems don't even know how many students are failing various courses or what this means for their later success. In 2005-06 fully a third of Ontario students were behind at least one credit by the end of grade 10. So it's a reasonable assumption that at least a third of high school students have some pretty direct experience of academic Even in elementary schools, significant numbers of children are held back a year at some point, particularly in kindergarten or grade 1. …

The public returns to public educational investments in African-American males

This paper calculates the public savings (financial benefits) from greater public investments in the education of African-American males. Over one-fifth of each age cohort of black males in US is not a high school graduate. We identify five interventions that would—based on credible research—increase the graduation rate; we also report the public cost of each intervention. We then calculate the lifetime public benefits in terms of increased tax revenues and lower spending on health and crime. In present values, for a black male aged 20, these public benefits amount to $256,700 per new graduate and the median intervention would cost only $90,700. The benefit/cost ratio is 2.83. Simply equating the high school graduation rate of black males with that of white males would yield public savings of $3.98 billion for each age cohort. These results suggest that increased investments in education for black males at risk of dropping out of high school should be an economic priority.

Improving the Education of Children Living in Poverty

Richard Murnane observes that the American ideal of equality of educational opportunity has for years been more the rhetoric than the reality of the nation's political life. Children living in poverty, he notes, tend to be concentrated in low-performing schools staffed by ill-equipped teachers. They are likely to leave school without the skills needed to earn a decent living in a rapidly changing economy. Murnane describes three initiatives that the federal government could take to improve the education of these children and increase their chances of escaping poverty. All would strengthen the standards-based reforms at the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) by bracing the three legs on which the reforms rest: accountability, incentives, and capacity. Congress, says Murnane, should improve accountability by amending NCLB to make performance goals more attainable. The goals should emphasize growth in children's skills rather than whether children meet specific test score targets. Congress should also amend NCLB to develop meaningful goals for high school graduation rates. Congress should strengthen states' incentives to improve the education of low-income students. It should also encourage states to develop effective voluntary school choice programs to enable students who attend failing public schools to move to more successful schools in other districts. Finally, Congress should use competitive matching grants to build the capacity of schools to educate low-income children and the capacity of state departments of education to boost the performance of failing schools and districts. The grants would help develop effective programs to improve teaching and to serve students who do not fare well in conventional high school programs. Murnane estimates the annual cost of these three initiatives to be approximately $2.5 billion.

Academic and Educational Outcomes of Children With ADHD

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with poor grades, poor reading and math standardized test scores, and increased grade retention. ADHD is also associated with increased use of school-based services, increased rates of detention and expulsion, and ultimately with relatively low rates of high school graduation and postsecondary education. Children in community samples who show symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity with or without formal diagnoses of ADHD also show poor academic and educational outcomes. Pharmacologic treatment and behavior management are associated with reduction of the core symptoms of ADHD and increased academic productivity, but not with improved standardized test scores or ultimate educational attainment. Future research must use conceptually based outcome measures in prospective, longitudinal, and community-based studies to determine which pharmacologic, behavioral, and educational interventions can improve academic and educational outcomes of children with ADHD.

THE TRUANCY INTERVENTION PROGRAM OF THE RAMSEY COUNTY ATTORNEY'S OFFICE: A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH TO SCHOOL SUCCESS

Chronic truancy has far‐reaching effects, both for the youth who become disconnected from school and for society. Crime, unemployment, underemployment, drug abuse, alcohol abuse and risky sexual activity have all been linked to chronic truancy. In 1995, the Minnesota Legislature authorized the creation of diversion programs specifically for truants. That same year, in response to the growing truancy problem, Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner directed her staff to create a program for early intervention in truancy cases. From its beginning, the goals of the Truancy Intervention Program (TIP) have been to reduce the rate of truancy, to increase school connectedness, and to improve high school graduation rates. The program has accomplished these goals and, along the way, forged strong bonds of cooperation with schools, law enforcement agencies, and service providers. Ten years after the creation of TIP, the graduation rates in the city of St. Paul, the largest school district in the county, have improved by over 50 percent; the number of students missing 15 days of school of more (excused as well as unexcused) has decreased by more than 50 percent; and a large majority of chronic truants and their families have been successfully connected to services to address underlying problems.

Accelerating the Learning of Low-Achieving Students: The Transformation of a Dropout

Anthony's story was the same as that of many dropouts: he was bored in school, he had no support or encouragement from his family or his teachers, and he lacked motivation. But it was after he quit high school that his story took a different turn. Ms. Finnan and Mr. Chasin explain how Anthony has been able to succeed against all odds. ********** ANTHONY, a stocky, muscular, young African American man with a smile that exudes warmth and enthusiasm, chose a path taken by far too many of his peers: he became a high school dropout. He started down this path long before he entered his urban high school in Wisconsin in 1997. Throughout his years in school, he had never been pushed to excel, and no one had taken the time to build on his potential. Anthony quickly adopted the attitude that school was a boring waste of time. He saw himself as an academic failure, and his middle school, judging by the academic record that he had created, agreed. By the time Anthony entered high school, he was completely disengaged from classroom learning. He attended classes but did the minimum possible to pass to the next grade. His high school didn't seem to expect any more from him. And so Anthony and his school entered into an unwritten pact: we won't push you too hard, and you won't have to work; if you show up and stay out of trouble, you will pass. Anthony's primary reasons for attending school were to hang out with friends and play basketball. Eventually, he began to break the pact he had made with his high school. Rather than attending class, he began coming to campus only at lunchtime, when he could socialize and play basketball. By 1999, Anthony had officially dropped out of school. Few adults at the school noticed. As Anthony put it, saw myself as an unsuccessful student who did not belong in school. This was a view shared by my mother. I belonged on the basketball courts and with my friends. After years of going to school but not learning and being viewed as a failure, I gave up. Unfortunately, Anthony's experience is not unique. National high school graduation rates hover between 68% and 71%, indicating that about one-third of all high school students drop out. (1) When these figures are disaggregated and we look at African American students, the odds of dropping out increase to 50%, and males are more likely than females to leave school. (2) From a purely statistical standpoint, then, Anthony's decision to drop out is not surprising. But surprising or not, it still represents a terrible choice because the future for high school dropouts is indisputably bleak. (3) Anthony's story embodies several common reasons for dropping out. The school experience was boring and disconnected from Anthony's life. His family did not encourage him to do well in school. In fact, his mother actively discouraged his attendance or engagement. It appears that none of Anthony's past teachers or principals saw his potential. He felt like a failure, and no one tried to change his mind. A recent report, The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts, tells very similar stories. (4) Based on focus groups or interviews with a total of 467 ethnically and racially diverse 16- to 24-year-olds from 25 different locations across the country, this study found that most students do not drop out because of poor achievement. Seventy percent of the dropouts interviewed said that they were confident they could have graduated if they tried. Nearly half of the sample cited boredom as their reason for dropping out. This is not to say that all of these young people were star students prior to leaving school. Forty-five percent felt poorly prepared by their previous school, and 32% had already repeated a grade. Like Anthony, the young people in these interviews reported that the process of becoming a dropout was a gradual one. They started by disengaging from specific classes; then they missed a lot of school; eventually, they simply stopped attending altogether. …

Surprise — High School Reform is Working

THOSE who would reform America's education system have focused tremendous energy on improving the nation's high in the last half-decade. And the high have proved less impervious to change than many believed they would be. Spurred by sobering reports of ill-prepared students and a billion dollars in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, policy makers nationwide have embraced the issue. Political, business, and education leaders convened at a National Education Summit on High Schools in Washington, D.C., in 2005. Later that year, the National Governors Association (NGA) awarded the first of nearly $24 million in grants to more than two dozen states to develop comprehensive high school improvement plans, and every governor has signed an unprecedented NGA pact to measure high school graduation rates more accurately. Commission reports, conferences, and research briefs have made a compelling case for reform. Only 68% of the nation's high school freshmen--and only about half of African American and Hispanic students--graduate on time. (1) Just 57% of high school graduates take the core academic courses proposed by a national commission two decades ago. (2) As a result, only one-third of high school freshmen graduate on time with the academic preparation necessary to succeed in college. (3) The Gates Foundation put high school reform on the national agenda when in 2000 it launched a five-year high school initiative. The Gates initiative focused on addressing the anonymity and resulting apathy and alienation that earlier reform proponents--among them Theodore Sizer in Horace's Compromise, his influential 1984 study of public high schools; Ernest Boyer in his 1983 report High School; and John Goodlad in his 1984 book A Place Called School--had identified as so detrimental to the productivity of public high schools. The Gates Foundation has captured the major underlying principles of today's high school reform movement--and the movement's ambitiousness--with a new version of the Three R's: rigor, relevance, and relationships. Reforms, Gates and others have argued, need to focus on raising academic standards, connecting students' studies to their lives outside of school, and addressing the anonymity of the nation's many large, comprehensive high schools. The high school reform movement resembles a sprawling 19th-century Russian novel, with dozens of actors and innumerable initiatives. But reformers are focusing primarily on five strategies--improving school climate, strengthening curriculum and instruction, raising graduation requirements, helping freshmen get up to speed academically, and preventing students from dropping out. At the same time, these reform efforts have been accompanied by an equally ambitious effort to gauge the effectiveness of the reforms. Researchers have conducted a range of studies on the high school reforms of the last half-decade. The results are just now starting to emerge, and they are more promising than many would expect. PERSONAL, CHALLENGING, ENGAGING Over the past seven years, the Gates Foundation alone has invested more than $1 billion to create more than 1,500 small learning communities of, optimally, fewer than 400 students each. Some were built from scratch while others were created by redesigning existing high and breaking them up into smaller, semi-autonomous units. The new (from-scratch) are replications of promising model schools that the foundation had identified throughout the country, such as High Tech High in San Diego. The foundation also invested $5 million in a major, multi-year evaluation of the initiative, conducted by two independent research organizations, the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and SRI International. Evaluators judged how well the were doing in the following areas: personally tailored learning, relationships based on mutual respect and responsibility, high expectations, a shared focus, and teacher collaboration. …

Accurately Assessing High School Graduation Rates

Recent studies have argued that there is a dropout crisis in the U.S. But Mr. Mishel and Mr. Roy find that this contention is based on flawed analyses of inadequate data. Using a much wider range of sources, they conclude that the situation is not nearly so dire as is commonly believed. ********** CONVENTIONAL wisdom asserts that there is a newly discovered dropout crisis in our high schools. As the National Governors Association states, know that about a third of our students are not graduating from high school.... About three-fourths of white students graduate from high school, but only of African American and Hispanic students do. (1) Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute and Christopher Swanson, formerly with the Urban Institute, are primarily responsible for this claim. They have published reports showing these extraordinarily high dropout rates nationwide, for the states, and for many specific school districts. They also claim that graduation rates have been flat for several decades. (2) Greene's and Swanson's advocacy organizations, such as the Alliance for Excellent Education, the Education Trust, and the Harvard Civil Rights Project. (3) We have come to different conclusions. Both Greene and Swanson calculate dropout rates from enrollment and diploma data reported by school districts, collected by the states and forwarded to the federal government's Common Core of Data, which is managed by the National Center for Education Statistics. Using different data sources, including the U.S. Census and several high-quality longitudinal surveys, we have found that graduation rates have improved for decades, particularly for minorities, though less so in recent years. Instead of half of black students graduating with diplomas, as Greene and Swanson maintain, we conclude that three-fourths of black students obtain regular diplomas and, of the 25% who do not graduate, fully go on to obtain a GED that allows them to enroll in college, enlist in the military, or take advantage of other postsecondary training opportunities. It is a similar story for Hispanics. Rather than indicating stagnant graduation rates, census data show that the high school completion rate for young black adults (aged 25 to 29) was 42% in 1962 and roughly doubled by 2000. (4) There remains a substantial racial gap in high school completion--about 10 percentage points--but it is a far smaller gap than existed 20, 30, or 40 years ago. Trends in Hispanic graduation rates are more difficult to measure over a long period, but it is clear that graduation rates have been steadily improving over the last 20 years: the percentage of Hispanics (aged 20 to 22) who have a high school diploma (excluding GEDs) increased from 62% in 1984 to 76% in 2002. (5) In short, Greene's and Swanson's estimates are more pessimistic than ours. Ordinarily, only experts would have to make technical judgments about the relative quality of data sources and methods of analysis. But in this case, important policy implications flow from whether you believe, for example, that the black dropout rate is 50% and stagnant or 25% and falling. Neither rate is acceptable, but education policy makers would approach the problem very differently depending on which story was true. REALITY CHECK When natural or social scientists examine the reliability of data, one of their first challenges is to see whether results are consistent with other facts that they know. If data are implausible, we should be cautious about accepting them until we have carefully checked how they were derived. If, for example, we were suddenly presented with data showing a big drop in manufacturing imports and a jump in exports, we would immediately be skeptical if these data were inconsistent with unemployment figures showing large layoffs of manufacturing workers. Of course, we would still have to investigate why the import/export data were flawed, but until we did so we would be hesitant to accept them. …