A formula for all

This from the Daily-Independent:

Standards for reporting high school dropout rates needed

Not waiting for Congress to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush has directed Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings to establish by edict a common formula for schools in all 50 states to use to calculate high school graduation and dropout rates. Such a formula is long overdue because using data released by different states and different school districts within the states makes it currently impossible to determine just how many students are not graduating from high school.

Nationwide, the graduation rate is assumed to be 70 percent, with as few as half the students completing high school in many urban areas. But to read the numbers reported by individual schools, the graduation rate is much higher than that.

The Southern Regional Education Board reports that when the number of graduating seniors reported by Kentucky high schools in 2003 is compared with the number of high school freshmen four years earlier, Kentucky’s graduation rate was 73 percent, or just below the national average of 75 percent. However, at the same time individual high schools in the state were reporting very low dropout rates.

Why the discrepancy? Well, some school systems count only the percentage of seniors who graduate, omitting everyone who dropped out in the ninth, 10th or 11th grade. Some states count GED recipients as graduates, and others counted as graduates are dropouts who only promised to get a GED.

Suppose a student informs his high school that he is transferring to another school, but he never enrolls in the new school. Instead, he drops out. But his old school counts him as transferring to a new school instead of dropping out, and his new school doesn’t count him as a dropout because he never enrolled there.

After a period of public comment, Spellings plans to announce a common formula for calculating graduation and dropout rates that all schools must implement by the 2012-13 school year. Of course, by that time Spellings will no longer by secretary of education and the formula her department devises may be long forgotten. Nevertheless, we commend her for belatedly attempting to establish a universal formula.

A common formula will make for transparency, a reliable database and state-by-state comparisons. And it is hardly a new idea. In 2005, the National Governors Association endorsed a common formula and proposed the relatively simple measure of dividing the number of graduating seniors by the number of ninth-graders who entered the school four years earlier.

In some ways, No Child Left Behind encourages school districts to fudge on graduation rates in order to look good. However, in an era in which those without high school degrees are not even likely to qualify for the most basic of jobs, it is important to know just how serious the nation’s dropout problem is. If we can’t even define the size of the problem, we are not likely to solve it.

Assessment Standards Deja Vu ....All Over Again

Early in 2001 when NCLB was beginning to unleash its "new and improved" assessment requirements on our nation's schools, I expressed my fears to the Herald-Leader this way:

Richard Day, principal of Cassidy Elementary School in Fayette County, fears another test will create a "crazy quilt of assessment.""I would like to see a seamless, comprehensive testing system that flows from local to state [to] federal levels; that doesn't interfere with each other," Day said. "I'm afraid that what we're going to get instead is just another test layered on top of what we already have."

So please forgive me for reacting to this lead from an Education Week (subscription) story this week.

Is it possible that Kentucky's assessment problems might be improved, in part, by international standards?

Benchmarks Momentum on Increase
Governors’ group, state chiefs eyeing international yardsticks.

No longer content with the patchwork quilt of assessments used to measure states’ K-12 performance, top policy groups are pushing states toward international benchmarking as a way to better prepare students for a competitive global economy.

The National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and
the standards-advocacy group Achieve are working both independently and together to examine how well states are doing compared with other countries and to weigh which yardsticks would prove most useful. It remains to be decided whether states would participate in well-established international tests such as the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, or would measure their academic standards against those of other countries...

The PISA covers math, science, and reading literacy, is given to 15-year-olds in 69 countries, and focuses on problem-solving and work- & college-ready skills. In 2006, American students ranked lower 17th out of 30 in science and fifth from the bottom in math.

• NGA wants to present the case for international benchmarking to the governors this summer.
• NGA & CCSSO are recruiting states for participation in PISA.
• 32 states presently work with Achieve to align with international standards.
• Some fear that comparisons based on international standards would be overly sensitive to poverty in a state rather than the quality of its teachers.
• International workforce competitiveness is a concern for governors who see big jumps in the number of post-secondary degrees in other countries.
• Former Kentucky Education Commissioner Gene Wilhoit is now the executive director of the CCSSO.

But with many parents, teachers and legislators suffering from assessment fatigue already, as demonstrated by passage of Senate Bill 1, the idea of international standards might cause a political meltdown.

Governors Enter Fray Over NCLB

The National Governors Association, which largely took a pass on the debate over the No Child Left Behind Act as it was being crafted six years ago, released recommendations this week for its renewal that aim to preserve the federal role in holding states accountable for student learning, while seeking greater flexibility in several key areas.

Under the recommendations, which were also endorsed by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Association of State Boards of Education, states would get greater leeway in how they intervene in schools not meeting annual achievement targets, define highly qualified teachers, and measure the progress of English-language learners.

This from Education Week.