Yesterday the editors of Raising Kaine participated in a phone call with our Governor Tim Kaine (about which you can read more here). In my exchange with the Governor he offered an important justification for spending money on early childhood programs - they tend to address the issues that later cause children to have to repeat grades. Tim Kaine offered some numbers to consider: each year in Virginia approximately 50,000 students repeat a grade. This costs the Commonwealth and the local school systems $400 million (which presumes an average cost of 8,000/student, which is part of the problem, but I will address that anon). I want to use that as a starting point for a discussion about retention, dropouts, early childhood, and other interventions. And I will do so in the context of the beast known as No Child Left Behind.
Yesterday Rice University in Houston issued a news release which begins
As graduation rates go down, school ratings go up
New study shows the negative implications of No Child Left Behind
A new study by researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas-Austin finds that Texas' public school accountability system, the model for the national No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), directly contributes to lower graduation rates. Each year Texas public high schools lose at least 135,000 youth prior to graduation -- a disproportionate number of whom are African-American, Latino and English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students.
By analyzing data from more than 271,000 students, the study found that
60 percent of African-American students, 75 percent of Latino students
and 80 percent of ESL students did not graduate within five years. The researchers found an overall graduation rate of only 33 percent.
"High-stakes, test-based accountability doesn't lead to school improvement or equitable educational possibilities," said Linda McSpadden McNeil, director of the Center for Education at Rice University. "It leads to avoidable losses of students. Inherently the system creates a dilemma for principals: comply or educate. Unfortunately, we found that compliance means losing students."
That is the tail end of the entire accountability mess. And it is heavily related to the issue about which Tim Kaine was speaking, because the statistics are overwhelming that students who are retained (held back a grade) are far less likely to ultimately graduate from high school. I will not here argue the merits of such retention - it is a complicated issue, and clearly a student who has failed to master the necessary skills is not prepared to move on to a higher level. But let's back up for a moment.
Children from the lower socioeconomic status (SES) families often arrive at school much less well prepared than those from the middle class and above, and thereafter never catch up - the educational inequity is simply too much. Early childhood provides a way of intervening BEFORE that inequity becomes set. Other interventions, such as a program for summer enrichment to make up for the inequity of opportunity and the concomitant loss of learning over the summers later in school, also can help address the kinds of problems that can lead to retention and drop outs. I note in passing that Barack Obama, who has worked in such neighborhoods, has a proposal for such summer interventions in his educational plan.
The Rice news release discusses a study that has been published in a major peer reviewed journal, and before I go on, let me quote the end of the press release so you will se the scope of the study and can - if interested - gain access to the executive summary and to the entire study
The study analyzes student-level data of 271,000 students in one of Texas' large urban districts over a seven-year period. It also includes analysis of the policy and its implementation, extensive observations in high schools in that district and interviews with students, teachers, administrators and students who left school without graduating.
The study has been published in the peer-reviewed policy journal
"Educational Policy Analysis Archives" and is the first research to track the impact of high-stakes accountability on students, employing individual student-level data over a multiyear period. The executive summary is available at Rice University's Center for Education, http://centerforeducation.rice.edu/... The study can be viewed at
http://epaa.asu.edu/...
Let me now quote the heart of the press release (slightly reformatted) and then offer some commentary of my own:
This study has serious implications for the nation's schools under the NCLB law. It finds that the higher the stakes and the longer such an accountability system governs schools, the more school personnel view students not as children to educate but as potential liabilities or assets for their school's performance indicators, their own careers or their school's funding.
The study shows a strong relationship between the increasing number of
dropouts and school's rising accountability ratings, finding that:
Losses of low-achieving students help raise school ratings under the accountability system.
The accountability system allows principals to hold back students
who are deemed at risk of reducing the school's scores; many students
retained this way end up dropping out.
The test scores grouped by race single out the low-achieving students in these subgroups as potential liabilities to the school ratings, increasing incentives for school administrators to allow those students to quietly exit the system.
The accountability system's zero-tolerance rules for attendance and
behavior, which put youth into the court system for minor offenses and
absences, alienate students and increase the likelihood they will drop out.
A piece of history that ties this study even more closely with some of the issues Gov. Kaine tries to address is this: the so-called Texas miracle on which NCLB was based was false, and was known at the time. Texas showed improvement on various versions of its state tests because it tested in 10th grade, and lower performing students were held back in 9th grade, either multiple times until they dropped out (with the dropouts masked by manipulation of the reporting system) or else then skipped directly to 11th grade so that they did not have to sit for the tests, although many of the latter group also never graduated. That already demonstrated the dangers of escalating "standards" and making accountability more "rigorous" - that low-performing students would be viewed as threats to the school's performance rating and rather than being given additional support (about which more just below) they would effectively be pushed out. That is certainly contrary to the mantra of leaving no child behind.
By high school it is usually too late to make a significant dent in the learning gap, which itself is often a product of many factors, and which is reinforced by children who arrive behind never being given the resources necessary to allow them to adequately "compete" (in the sense of having an equal chance to learn) with their more affluent contemporaries. Early childhood education is a start, but as we know from the history of the Head Start program, we need to follow that up with ongoing support or the gains from early childhood will not be sustained.
And this leads to another key point - we can do only so much within our schools to address the ongoing inequity that so many of our children face: in nutrition, in stable homes, in having access to resources to support education outside of the school. Unless and until we are willing to more fully address the economic inequity that seems to be increasing in our society, what we can do in schools will never fully address the problems of many of our students. Still, we must do what we can as educators, but as a members of our society we must also raise the alarm about the other needs and issues that we cannot address.
Gov. Kaine is right - early childhood education is an important step in reducing the problems that lead to retention further up the schooling ladder. And reducing retention can also reduce dropouts, even without the exacerbation of that phenomenon caused by the insanity of our current approach to school accountability.
Remember - even the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Peace.