Is High School Too Late?

Bob Herbert has another woe are our schools piece in the Times today. In it he decries the performance of our high schools -- particularly our low graduation rates. He argues that we need to intervene in order to ensure that our high schools are on par with the rest of the world's. The most interesting statistic he cites (and I'd like to see the source for this) is that the U.S. ranked second in the world in four-year college graduation rate in 1995 while we now rank 15th.

I buy the premise of the op-ed: too many students are leaving our schools unprepared for college and/or the workforce, and change is needed. But I have on question: is high school too late?

In other words, are high schools really creating the problems, or are they just where we're noticing them. High school teachers I've talked with tell me that students come to school woefully underprepared and far behind in their abilities. In these cases, is high school really the right point of intervention?

I'm under the impression that most problems take root much earlier than high school. For example: one research article found that, in Baltimore, each absence in first grade was related to an increased likelihood of about 5% that the student would drop out of high school. Does this mean that intervening in first grade might be more fruitful than intervening in high school?

Measuring Graduation Rates

High school graduation rates always come up in the news. People are worried about them. People decry how low they are. People celebrate when they improve. Short of test scores, graduation rates are probably the most used indicator of educational success/failure in this country.

It makes sense to worry about graduation rates, but they're far from perfect. Two of the biggest problems are that it's almost impossible to calculate an exact rate for a school and that everybody calculates graduation rates differently.

I first learned about this a couple years ago when some folks from RAND did a study for Pittsburgh on their graduation rates. All calculations of graduation rates start with the same statistic: the number of new freshman who enroll in a given year. But how do we determine how many of these people have graduated and what the graduation rate should be? Do we check on them after four years? 5? 6? What about students who move out of the district? What about students who move into the district or otherwise enroll after the start of 9th grade? What about people who just stop showing up -- how do we know if they dropped out, moved away, or something else? Can we tell which students are in the 9th grade for the first time and which ones are repeating?

A large part of the difficulty is that there is no national database of students. If a student leaves and enrolls in a different city or state, there's no firm way of knowing that they're still enrolled. Similarly, if a student simply stops showing up at school rather than declaring themselves a dropout it's hard to tell if they've dropped out or enrolled in another district.

Anyway, the point is that it's not possible to compute an exact graduation rate. And the fact that every state and district seem to use different formulas means that it's hard to compare these inexact numbers. But, apparently, the Dept. of Ed. is going to step in and standardize the way that graduation rates are calculated. An article in the NY Times today says that the details of the new formula have not been released, but that all states will be required to use the same one.

The technicalities of which formula a state uses seems so trivial and boring that most people probably don't really give it much thought. But the article details people reacting quite strongly to the announcement. This makes sense because although the change is small, the effects of the change might be huge. The federal govt. is ostensibly holding states accountable for graduation rates, but they all calculate them differently (a recent change in North Carolina's formula led the official rate to drop from 95% to 68%). Sometimes the smallest changes are the ones that matter most.

More on Alternative Schools

The final session that I attended was a symposium of researchers from CA that investigated alternative schools (previous post), which Milbrey McLaughlin said were essentially "invisible."

Alternative schools in CA started around 1917 when the Smith-Hughes Act established federal funding for continuation high schools which, at that time, were designed to provide vocational training to people with other jobs. They eventually morphed into places for "over-aged, under-credited" students to go in a last ditch attempt to avoid dropping out. Today, the 520 continuation high schools in CA vary widely in every way; from pedagogy to the students they enroll.

Among the largest challenges these schools face (other than that most people are unaware of them) are that about half of students enroll for less than 90 days, that they often serve as dumping grounds for both unwanted students and teachers, and that they are often last in line for funding. Indeed, one superintendent told the researchers that it was acceptable for 10% of the students to fail and end up at the local alternative school b/c nobody would notice.

It is my perception that alternative schools are usually started to remove "problem" kids from classrooms in order to better facilitate learning for the rest and/or to "fix" these problem kids. According to the panel, the most successful schools were ones who tried to fix the school environment to suit the kids instead of fixing the kids so that they could fit in a typical school environment.

McLaughlin said that the system was basically "Balkanized" -- there was little communication with other county services, everybody seemed to envision different missions for the schools, etc. What they did find, however, was that the most successful schools were led by "supermen/women" who treated their job as a calling and worked tirelessly to make their school the best place possible.

The work of some of those individuals impresses me, but I do wonder if that is really replicable or scalable -- in other words, if there are enough people willing to sacrifice their lives to these schools in order to run all alternative schools in the country. It's the same question confronting KIPP and other successful schools. Many of them are built on the backs of supermen/women who work tirelessly for their schools and essentially sacrifice years of their life to make their school successful. I am in awe of what these people do, but is it really a solution for the nation? Can we find enough qualified people to treat schools as missionary work to make all schools uber-successful?

The Costs and Benefits of Schooling

The first session I attended at AERA was an overview of a recent book, The Price We Pay. The book was published by a team of noted economists as an attempt to quantify the benefits of schooling to society and conduct a cost-benefit analysis of some education reforms with proven track records.

They concluded that a person who drops out of high school pays about $100,000 less in taxes (in today's dollars) over the course of their lifetime than does a person who completes high school (only high school, not college) and that, overall, each high school dropout costs the country about $209,000 in lost taxes, welfare, court costs, etc.

Given this figure, they look at how much various interventions cost per additional student that graduates from high school and find that most cost about 1/3 of the amount that society benefits from their graduation. I didn't read the book -- I only heard a 90 minute summary of it -- so I'm not sure exactly what they take into account, but two things that would bias these estimates jumped into my head.

1.) They only look at the additional benefits from the students who graduate from high school that otherwise would not have. What about the students who attended college or graduated from college that otherwise would not have? Taking this into account might mean that their estimates were biased downward -- that there are more benefits than they thought to the interventions.

2.) A shift of a couple percentage points probably wouldn't affect the benefits of a high school education much, but a large increase likely would. If, say, half as many students dropped out each year then it's likely that the benefits of graduating from high school would be smaller. This would mean that their estimates were biased upward -- that the benefits of the interventions were not as large as they thought.

Henry Levin assured a questioner who raised a similar issue that they had taken a lot of things into account and that their estimates were very complex, so it's quite likely that these concerns are addressed in the book. Especially without having read the book I hesitate to believe that these estimates can possibly be very precise, but I think there is some value to them nonetheless. I think a financial analysis of the costs and benefits of school interventions is valuable information to have before making a decision. That said, Henry Levin made sure to emphasize at the very beginning that the primary reason for helping the poorest children is a moral one rather than a financial one.

Also: perhaps the most notable tidbit I gathered from the session was the projection that in 2020 the workforce will be less educated than the workforce in 2000. I had always assumed that the number of people attending college was and will continue to steadily increase, but I had noticed in previous research that the % of 25-29 year olds with a bachelor's degree in 2006 is actually lower than it was in 2000. Given the changing demographics of the country, Marta Tienda concludes that this trend will continue into the future.

How to fix the dropout problem?

I try to be open-minded and unbiased when I read a new policy proposal, but I can't help but be excited when I read something that's "outside the box" -- something about new ideas just appeals to my creative side regardless of how good they are.

This blog post and this blog post both pointed me to this article in the Washington Post from Monday that is nothing not "outside the box" (the two blog entries seemed to take opposite sides on the article).

In short, his idea is this: let kids drop-out of high school instead of trying to keep them in, but take the money that would've been spent on their education and put it in an education trust fund that they can access at a later date. Then, at some point in time they realize that dropping out was a dumb idea and they have the resources to finish their education.

The fact that idea, at least in its current form, is politically infeasible makes me hesitate to spend much time analyzing it. One of the biggest problems is that schools don't currently spend the x dollars that it takes to educate one kid when they drop out, so they'd have to raise spending in order to put that amount in a savings account each year. Secondly, they don't save x dollars when a kid drops out -- there are too many fixed costs. Lack of economic feasibility aside, I like the effect such a plan would have on the environment in high schools (all the kids who don't want to be there would be gone) but am doubtful that the later-in-life education would be a panacea or that all problems can be solved simply by giving somebody more options. That said, I do find the idea absolutely fascinating simply because it is so different.