Maybe there's some truth to the complaints of education officials that those who changed the graduation-rate formula did so to make public schools look bad. It's much easier to push a school-choice agenda if high schools are graduating only about 75 percent, as the new calculation says, rather than 90 percent, as the old one did. But couldn't it also be said that, using the old formula, educators were artificially inflating the graduation rate to make themselves look better than they deserved to? The response of the public-education establishment isn't encouraging. Here's someone from a Grant County school system, being about as defensive as officials in every other part of the state:
Dee Ballinger, director of guidance at Eastbrook High School, said although the new formula will help schools track students, it will be a very trying effort for school systems.
"There are a lot of issues that are hard for us to swallow," he said. "We want to explain to people why it is different. It is not that we have fewer people graduating. It's the calculation."
Both ways of calculating the graduation rate are arbitrary, and you could make good arguments for either one. It depends on whether you want to count include things such as GED takers and those who take longer than four years in the success column, and whether you assume that kids who leave for a new school system graduate in four years. The important thing is to have a system everyone understands. It would also be helpful if the formula were the same, or close to the same, in every state so we could compare our rate to that of others. Whatever the real non-graduation rate is, whether it is 10 percent or 25 percent or something in between, it represents kids who aren't completing the most basic step they will need in the future. Instead of mounting a PR campaign to tell us their side of the story, educators need to share their ideas for reaching more of those kids.
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I'd actually disagree with the assessment that the new graduation rate is arbitrary, especially in light of economic statistics.
A reason why GED certificate holders don't get included in the graduation mix is because, contrary to Chris Rock's famous joke, it isn't a "good enough diploma." Nobel laureates James Heckman and Stephen Cameron proved that overall, GED students have an economic profile similar to high school dropouts and make less than high school graduates. Which makes sense because GED recipients are high school dropouts who simply took a less-rigorous certificate program. The reality that the average amount of time spent studying for a GED is far less than the 100 hours needed for a student in high school to get up to grade level also means that the GED recipient isn't getting an education.
It isn't just Heckman and Cameron who have come to this conclusion. The armed services, in its own research, determined that GED students actually a lower performance profile than dropouts; GED holders have more of a tendency to not stick around and go AWOL than dropouts or high school graduates.
As for the special ed certificate recipients? The reality is that there is suspicion that Black male students and White male students are often sent to special education programs because they are being wrongly diagnosed with learning disabilities. The percentage of males diagnosed with learning disabilities is much higher than the natural occurence of these cognitive disorders (at the same time, young women, because they don't act out, tend to be underdiagnosed). Special education, therefore, is being used by school disticts as a ghetto for many students who should actually be in regular classes.
Then there are the kids who don't graduate in either four or five years. As pointed out by Johns Hopkins researcher Robert Balfanz, whom The Star Editorial Board consulted during the "Left Behind" series last year, such students won't graduate with sustained remediation in school. Since this usually doesn't occur, most of them will eventually drop out.
Now school officials can complain all they want. But there's been two decades of research that prove these points. As you rightly point out, they should stop bellyaching and begin addressing the reality that the modern public school system hasn't adopted to the reality: For example, research has shown that students have different learning styles, which means customizing curriculums as much as possible to those needs. Schools haven't done much to adjust to this. They should.
Of course one thing they COULD do is stop pressuring teachers into allowing children to go to religous education classes during school math class when the student is failing math.
Such classes should be extra-curricular and most CERTAINLY shouldn't interfere w/ core competency subjects...
Jeff, what are talking about?
Tim,
You might've heard about this story.
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061125/LOCAL/611250418
A similar program is in place in the FWCS district. Currently, students are released to participate in this program during school hours - I find this ridiculous when many of these schools are failing the ISTEP benchmarks.