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Why Graduation Rates Are Rising But Student Achievement Is Not

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The nation’s high school graduation rate has reached an all-time high, but new data suggest much of that “progress” has been achieved by funneling underprepared students into watered-down online courses.

Politicians and education officials have long been under pressure to get more students graduating from high school. But since 2010, the pressure has increased. That year, the federal government—in an effort to lower the number of dropouts—required states to track the percentage of students who graduated within four years. If schools failed to make “adequate yearly progress” in raising the four-year graduation rate, they would face sanctions under No Child Left Behind.

The expectation was that graduation rates would drop as a result, perhaps sharply: when Washington, D.C., first switched to the new kind of measure, for example, its rate dropped from 73% to 59%. But somehow that didn’t happen on a wide scale. In fact, the national four-year graduation rate rose from 79% in 2011 to 84% in 2016.

At the same time, there was little evidence student achievement was improving. And it became clear that officials were resorting to dubious stratagems to ensure graduation rates went up, come hell or high water—for example, eliminating high school exit exams or transferring students to “alternative” schools where graduation rates didn’t count.

One increasingly popular gambit is to adopt a “credit recovery program.” The idea is that if students have failed a course required for graduation, they can make it up by taking a substitute course. While some of these make-up courses are of the old-fashioned summer school variety—delivered in a classroom by a teacher—the vast majority are taken online, perhaps with an adult nearby to facilitate if necessary.

Until recently, there’s been little data about these programs beyond the anecdotal, from a number of states—and the anecdotal has been far from encouraging. For example, at one Florida school where the graduation rate zoomed from 43% to 68% in six years, students enrolled in credit recovery courses sat in front of computers largely unsupervised, some streaming sports on YouTube while others pasted in answers they’d found through Google.

“I want to go ahead and get done with this,” one student said. “If I have to cheat, I will.”

Some education officials have apparently adopted the same attitude. A report in D.C. last year revealed that school-level administrators often ignored a district policy stating that students couldn't take the online version of a course until after they'd failed the traditional one. Most of those enrolled in credit recovery—22% of all 2017 graduates—had never taken the original course. Students weren’t interested in showing up for class, teachers told investigators, because they knew they could easily get credit for it online.

How many schools are offering these programs, and what kinds of students are most likely to be enrolled? Until recently, it was hard to say. But two recent reportsone released today—provide some answers. The vast majority of American schools—around 70%—have some kind of credit recovery program, with average participation rates under 10%. But a subset enroll far higher proportions of students in credit recovery, some as many as 60%.

Even more troubling, those high-fliers serve the most vulnerable students: minorities and those from low-income families. And, according to one study, the students who end up in credit recovery generally have high rates of absenteeism and suspension and arrive in ninth grade “with preexisting reading and math deficiencies.”

And therein lies the rub. While credit recovery might be just the thing for a motivated, well-prepared student who happens to fall behind—perhaps because of illness or a surfeit of extracurricular activities—that’s hardly the typical participant. Students who have behavior problems or lack basic knowledge are the ones most in need of the personal attention that a software program—or even a facilitator in a computer lab—is unlikely to be able to provide.

Both recent reports call for more data on credit recovery programs—for example, what kinds of courses are offered and their quality—and better school district policies on their use. Those things would be nice, but they’re unlikely to solve the basic problem, which is that we’re asking high schools to do the impossible—or at least the extremely difficult.

We’ve been here before. In the early 20th century, for a variety of reasons, the high school population exploded. Previously, high school had been reserved for the elite, offering an academic curriculum. Now it was suddenly a mass institution. And many entering students were unprepared to do the work.

The solution educators came up with was tracking. A minority of students—generally the wealthier ones—got a curriculum that prepared them for college, but the rest were funneled, on the basis of socioeconomic status and IQ tests, into vocational training and classes on subjects like “social living.” The justification was that it was better for them to have some kind of high school diploma than none at all.

Fortunately, that kind of outright tracking is no longer acceptable. But thanks to subterfuges like credit recovery programs, we’ve still got a dual-track system, and the most vulnerable students are still getting the short end of the stick.

Arguably, the current regime is even worse. For one thing, we’re pretending it doesn’t exist. For another, students who graduated from the vocational programs of the past were at least gaining marketable skills. Struggling students who acquire diplomas through credit recovery programs—or even via the traditional route—have often learned little or nothing of value. And the fact that they’ve nonetheless been able to acquire a diploma diminishes the value of that credential not just for themselves but for everyone.

That’s not to say we should return to the more open tracking of the past. It would make sense to offer programs that put students on job trajectories that don’t require four years of college, but we can’t let such programs become excuses for failing to provide a meaningful education to kids who happen to have been born into lower-income, less-educated families.

There is a way out of this dilemma, but it doesn’t involve holding high schools accountable for getting kids into a cap and gown in four years, regardless of whether they’ve learned anything. Unfortunately, the replacement legislation for No Child Left Behind, which went into effect in 2016, perpetuates that approach.

The long-term solution is to beef up elementary education, and particularly the crucial early years, so that all students have a fighting chance of being equipped to do high school work by ninth grade. That means using a systematic phonics program to teach children how to decode words, while simultaneously building their knowledge and vocabulary through history, science, and the arts—instead of wasting precious hours on empty “reading comprehension skills.” High school is where educational inequities become too obvious to ignore, but it’s not where they begin—and it’s not necessarily where they can be corrected.

Still, there’s some hope for today’s middle and high school students. Teaching them to write about what they’re learning—explicitly, across the curriculum, beginning at the sentence level—can have powerful effects. [Disclosure: I'm the co-author of a book about such a method, and chair of the board of a nonprofit that disseminates it.] So can tutoring, although it’s hard to provide that on a large scale.

Of course, both of these approaches are a lot more complicated than sending struggling students off to a computer lab and looking the other way. As long as we continue to incentivize that behavior, we’re unlikely to see meaningful change, no matter how much data we unearth or how many district-level policies get promulgated.

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