High-Stakes Testing and Dropout Rates

...At the state level, the lax reporting and accounting system is ripe for abuse...

...States with the highest dropout rates "used minimum competency tests with higher stakes and less flexible standards than the states with the lowest dropout rates...

...According to Jobs for the Future (JFF), a nonpartisan research organization, dropping out is an "epidemic in central cities and other low-income communities, but it is not just a problem of the poor...

...Not only do actual graduation rates appear to be much lower than previously believed, and in rapid descent, but there is also evidence that many students are dropping out of school early in their high school career rather than toward the end...

...This figure is very similar to more recent data reported by Christopher Swanson of the nonpartisan Urban Institute...

...As Gerald Bracey noted in "The Perfect Law" in the Fall 2004 issue of Dissent, NCLB sets schools up to fail, making it easier for those who already dislike government control of schools to argue that what the public really needs are private alternatives...

...Students, especially those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, appear to be dropping out of school earlier and in much greater numbers than previously believed, and high-stakes testing may be a leading cause...

...This phenomenon alone is likely to continue causing high dropout rates in Texas and in other states that engage in such practices...

...Similarly, the attrition rate for white students between grades nine and ten is approximately 6 percent to 7 percent in a given year, while the comparable figure for Latino students is 14 percent to 19 percent and 18 percent to 21 percent for black students...

...DAVID SHRIBERG is an assistant professor of school psychology at Loyola University Chicago, and AMY BURKE SHRIBERG is a freelance writer in Chicago...

...Historically, the Center for Educational Statistics (CES) and the Current Population Survey (CPS) provided the most authoritative dropout figures...

...Accountability" When he first ran for president in 2000, George W. Bush made education reform one of his top domestic priorities, often citing the "Texas miracle" as a model for the nation...

...While the national graduation rate appears to have begun its decline in 1984, there is growing evidence that the current emphasis on high-stakes testing as required by NCLB has exacerbated this preexisting dropout crisis—and that this effect is particularly harmful for students from minority groups and of lower socioeconomic status...

...On the other hand, schools have perverse incentives when it comes to students with good grades, who are otherwise making progress toward graduation but who are, for various reasons (such as, language barriers, lack of exposure to test content, past history of low test scores, and so on), unlikely to pass proficiency exams...

...While there are likely a number of factors that lead to these startling figures, high school graduation exams, which are disproportionately found in states with higher percentages of minority students than the national average, are believed to be a key contributor, because many of these exit exams are first given in grade ten...

...About 20 percent of all students drop out...

...In the report, "Losing Our Future: How Minority Youth are Being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis," the authors cite Swanson's figures and describe how many states provide inaccurate graduation data...

...She reports that in 2001 there were 13 percent more ninth graders than eighth graders across the country...

...This report was followed by a 2005 report by the Civil Rights Project entitled, "Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis in the South...

...In "Losing Our Future," student narratives from states as diverse as Alabama, Florida, New York, Illinois, and Mississippi include reports of being encouraged (and this is a kind description of the practices of some schools) to drop out with little regard for their future prospects...

...Now, suppose that the fifty students who did not pass the seventh grade test either transfer to another school or drop out prior to the eighth grade exam the following year, and suppose that the fifty students who passed the exam in grade seven stay in school and pass the eighth grade exam...

...In Texas, for example, according to the Civil Rights Project, any student that cannot be accounted for is removed from the dropout calculation, as if that student never existed...

...According to his research, whereas approximately 76.8 percent of Asian students and 74.9 percent of white students finish high school, these figures drop to 53.2 percent for Hispanic students, 51.1 percent for Native American students, and 50.2 percent for black students...

...For example, for black students in the high school class of 2001, Texas reported a 2.6 percent dropout rate, Florida reported a figure of 3.9 percent, and Missouri reported 5.4 percent...

...Further, it puts accountability measures in place for schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress in this area...

...When Swanson's figures are broken down by race and ethnicity, the numbers become even more distressing...

...A lesser-known provision of NCLB requires that every state set goals for high school completion and that graduation rates (defined as the percentage of students who finish high school on time) of all groups of students within a school must be made publicly available...

...The end result is that many children, disproportionately those from minority and lower socioeconomic backgrounds, are either shuffled around or encouraged to drop out of school, creating yet another generation of a permanent underclass left to fend for itself in a nation where earning wages sufficient to support a family increasingly requires not only a high school but a college degree...

...Under current practices, states are not taking graduation provisions seriously, and schools are only held accountable for students who are present at the time of the proficiency test...

...For example, data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) in 1998 indicated that approximately 35 percent of the senior cohort 76 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 was no longer enrolled when the TIMMS was administered in the spring of what should have been these students' senior year...

...Dropout Data High school graduation rates are notoriously difficult to calculate, and for decades there has been no national commitment to tracking them and no consensus about how best to do that...

...In this testing-crazed era, school test scores are published each spring, and parents and politicians scrutinize these scores in the same way that hard-core sports fans follow the performance of their favorite teams...

...When Bush became president in 2001, he appointed Rod Paige, former superintendent of the Houston Public Schools, as his secretary of education and rigorously promoted the Texas model as the prototype for the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001...

...The stated goal of NC LB is for all students to achieve 100 percent proficiency in language arts and math by 2014...

...Although not every school pushes students at risk of failing either to drop out or transfer, the above example is not just theoretical...

...Hall noted that in 2005, three states and the District of Columbia did not provide any graduation data at all, seven states did not report data broken down by the appropriate demographic categories, and several states reported rates that are well above the rates reported by independent analyses...

...Voila...

...The "miracle" was the narrowing of the gap in test scores between white and nonwhite students on a particular high-stakes test given in Texas during the 1990s...

...Rather than trying to support these students, schools do better, under current law, by encouraging them to drop out or transfer so that their test scores do not trigger draconian penalties...

...Schools are under tremendous pressure to raise their scores every year or face strict accountability provisions...

...The study's analysis, however, found actual dropout rates for black students in excess of 40 percent in each of these states...

...Such data have led many to conclude that the nation faces a dropout crisis of staggering proportions...

...Yet, the practical reality—as is so often true for this administration—gives the lie to this stated goal...

...As a result, many school districts and states fail to keep accurate graduation data...

...In "Getting Honest About Grad Rates: How States Play the Numbers Game and Students Lose," Daria Hall of the Education Trust questioned the accuracy of state-reported rates and the commitment of the federal government to enforce this component of NCLB...

...Several independent analyses confirm that the nation's graduation rate has been in decline since at least 1984 and has plunged even further since the 1990s (a decade when many states began implementing high-stakes exams as a graduation requirement...

...In a 2000 report, "High Stakes Testing and High School Completion," Marguerite Clarke, Walter Haney, and George Madaus of the National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy concluded that high-stakes testing does indeed increase dropout rates—although they note that there is room for further study to determine exactly how this relationship works...

...This trend is particularly discouraging because, according to the study, blacks in all southern states have experienced increasing segregation since 1990, and approximately 90 percent of highly segregated black and Latino schools are located in areas of concentrated poverty...

...Let us suppose that School A has a hundred seventh graders taking their state-level math exams in a given year...

...If a school does not demonstrate AYP (again defined at the state level) in its test scores for all grades and demographic groups, the school is subject to accountability measures that begin with public warnings and ultimately can escalate to school restructuring and removal of administrators...

...While they caution that there may be more to the story, the finding is significant...

...Similarly, ninth grade enrollment was approximately 11 percent to 12 percent higher TESTS AND DROPOUT RATES than tenth grade enrollment and, in several states, as much as 20 percent higher...

...In addition, she showed that thirtyfour states set graduation "goals" that are below the rates they already reported in 2002 and 2003 and that thirty-seven states define "progress" toward their stated goal in absolutely minimal terms—as any progress at all, or progress of at least .1 percent, or even as a steady state (which means no progress at all...

...This combination of strict penalties and public accountability measures related to test scores, together with the games that can be played with graduation numbers, send a notsosubtle message to public schools...

...In confirmation of Wheelock's findings, these authors also found that Texas schools hold more students back in grade nine—the year before the state's high-stakes graduation exam is administered...

...Moreover, they found a connection between MCT in the eighth grade and early high school dropout rates, findings similar to Wheelock's data on the ninth grade enrollment bulge...

...These numbers do not appear to be unique to the high school class of 2001...

...The White House ignores rapidly declining graduation rates, inaccurate and inconsistent reporting, and a lack of accountability for states that report inaccurate figures or simply fail to report any graduation rates at all...

...And in a joint release issued in March 2004, Harvard University's Civil Rights Project, the Urban Institute, Advocates for Children of New York, and the Civil Society Institute urged the nation to focus on the graduation crisis—and particularly on the large numbers of minority students who never finish high school...

...In what they describe as a crude but telling correlation, the authors found that state dropout rates in 1986 were highly correlated with minimum competency testing (MCT...

...The authors cite Texas as further evidence of the link between high-stakes testing and dropout rates...

...By examining test score patterns in Texas, the researchers found that, after the state adopted a more challenging graduation exam in 1991, high school completion rates dropped across all racial and ethnic groups at a rate not seen in more than twenty years and that this increase in dropout rates was particularly pronounced for black and Latino students...

...Results show that in schools with proportionately more students of low socio-economic status that used high stakes minimum competency exams, early dropout rates—between the eighth and tenth grades— were 4 to 6 percentage points higher than in schools that were similar but for the high stakes test requirement...

...8o n DISSENT / Fall 2006...

...The law harms the most those whom society should most protect...

...In Florida, however, the researchers uncovered a more complicated situation...

...This represents close to 40 percent of students in the nation's lowest socioeconomic group but also 10 percent of young people from families in the highest two socioeconomic status levels...

...Fifty of these students pass the test, yielding a 50 percent pass rate...

...The victims of this latest round of educational reform are the increasing number of students leaving school without a high school diploma...

...Moreover, schools overestimate graduation rates, and NCLB actually provides incentives for schools to encourage students, particularly students expected to perform poorly, either to drop out or transfer before taking their proficiency exams...

...Based on eight years of data, Wheelock reports that, in a given year, enrollment figures for white ninth graders are consistently 6 percent to 8 percent greater than the enrollment of white eighth graders, whereas there are 23 percent to 27 percent more black ninth graders than black eighth graders and 24 percent to 28 percent more Latino ninth graders than Latino eighth graders nationwide...

...Moreover, schools are more likely to hold students back to increase the proportion of students who pass competency exams—and the fact of being held back has been shown to increase a student's risk of dropping out...

...Every state sets its own benchmarks, and all schools that receive Title I funds are required to demonstrate "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) in test score performance for every subgroup of students...

...Independent educational researcher Anne Wheelock has chronicled a startling increase in students attending ninth grade: eighth graders come in while many of the previous year's ninth graders have been held back...

...However, in recent years, a growing body of evidence suggests the nation's actual high school graduation rate is much lower than the 85 percent figure reported by CES and CPS for decades...

...Yet much recent research and anecdotal evidence suggest at least a correlation between high-stakes testing of the sort mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and dropout rates...

...Another widely reported practice is the targeting of a disproportionate amount of a school's resources DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 79 TESTS AND DROPOUT RATES toward borderline students, who can be pushed to pass the state's high-stakes exam...

...While minority students are no more likely to drop out than their white counterparts, according to JFF, they are disproportionately represented in the nation's dropout rate because they are more likely to be poor...

...The school now has a 100 percent pass rate...

...This pressure is particularly pronounced for schools that are confronted with the muchmaligned "diversity penalty" by which schools and districts with greater diversity (and, hence, more subgroups that need to show improved test scores every year) are at greater risk of being publicly labeled as failures...

...Few people realize that an estimated 99 percent of schools are expected to be labeled as failures by 2014 if NCLB remains as written...

...It is in their interest to encourage students in danger of not passing their proficiency tests either to transfer to another school or to drop out entirely...

...There are, for instance, accounts of students with low test scores but otherwise respectable school records who are actively discouraged from and, in many cases, literally barred by school officials from reenrolling—and then officially categorized as having withdrawn from school because of lack of interest...

...Let us also suppose an identical pass rate for the eighth graders in that same school on the math exam that same year...

...As for the fifty students who were encouraged to transfer or to leave, they are now either another school's responsibility or society's problem...

...The children who left school prior to taking the state-level exam were not counted in the state proficiency scores, which has led to a number of accusations that students in Texas were explicitly encouraged to leave school prior to taking the exam...

...For example, Civic Enterprises, in association with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, released a report entitled "The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts" in March 2006...

...Simply encouraging these students to be absent on exam days is not an option, because 95 percent attendance rates for all student subgroups is required by NCLB—and failure to achieve these rates can subject schools to penalties as well...

...The DISSENT I Fall 2006 n 77 TESTS AND DROPOUT RATES results are tabulated and broken down by demographic category for each school...

...When Bush touted the "Texas miracle" of the 1990s, he left unmentioned the large number of students who had dropped out of school during those years and TESTS AND DROPOUT RATES the demographic makeup of the dropouts...

...Specifically, they reported that, by the late 1990s, there were close to 30 percent more black and Hispanic students in ninth grade than had been in eighth grade the year before...

...Swanson's tabulations place the graduation rate for the high school class of 2001 at 68 percent nationally...

...Southern states have some of the lowest graduation rates in the nation, and this study, which focused specifically on the states of Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and North Carolina, cited research that has identified a high correlation between racially and socioeconomically segregated schools and very low graduation rates...

...Students who don't do well on the state's graduation test are more likely to drop out—but this is true only for those students with "moderately good grades...

...Making the Connection Rhetorically and according to the NCLB man78 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 date, Bush is committed to leaving no child behind...

...That is, with the onset of high-stakes graduation exams, students with low grades were no more likely to drop out, but students with moderately good grades who did not pass the exam—students who would have graduated from high school in the absence of high stakes testing—were significantly more likely to leave school without earning their diploma...

...What "proficient" means is determined at the state level, and all students in grades three through eight take proficiency tests in these subject areas every spring...

...Like so many of Bush's initiatives, NCLB's legacy may be exactly the opposite of what its title promises...