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Kentucky Tonight: Afterthoughts #2 – A Look at Disaggregated Data

Education, NewsBy Richard Innes January 30, 2013

I was honored to be a guest on Kentucky Tonight on January 28, 2013 to talk about proposals to raise the minimum high school dropout age in Kentucky to 18.

A number of interesting things came up during the discussions, and I have been doing some follow-on research as a consequence.

Around 13 minutes into the show I had a chance to introduce a graph like this one below. This shows the trend in high school graduation rates for 14 states plus Washington, DC where an Age 18 law has been in place for an extended period of time, thus providing a good set of trend lines.

I pointed out that the graph shows Age 18 isn’t working well in most of these states, with five states actually showing a decline in their graduation rates over time, and most of the rest not matching the overall national average annual rate of improvement, either.

My little study was immediately criticized during the show by Kentucky Representative Carl Rollins and Prichard Committee Chair Stu Silberman. Both pointed out that such an analysis needed to look deeper, examining different demographic characteristics in the different states.

Actually, that is a fair criticism. I just wish groups like the Prichard Committee would follow through on that with some of their own studies like their recent “Top 20 by 2020” update they posted in December, which only looks at overall NAEP scores for the states without breathing a word about how Kentucky excluded a ton of learning disabled kids from the reading assessments or that things do look a lot different once you disaggregate the data by race.

In any event, I did a little disaggregating of the graduation rate data from the National Center for Education Statistics, breaking out the graduation rates for both whites and blacks for the Age 18 education jurisdictions I’ve been following. This first graph shows how the 15 education jurisdictions performed for white graduation rates.

As you can see, the whites-only graph does not look much different from the graph where all students are averaged together. Whites in only five of the states had a graduation rate improvement that exceeded the overall US average rate of improvement, and five states actually saw declines in their white graduation rates even though they have Age 18 laws on their books.

By the way, Kentucky’s white-only graduation trend has been an annual rate of improvement of 0.55 percentage points per year, which is just slightly better than the overall US average rate of change. Only four Age 18 states did better than we did with our current Age 16 law.

Now, here is the blacks-only graph.

This actually looks somewhat worse for the Age 18 states. Seven of them show declines over time in their black student’s high school graduation rates. Only four states outperform the national black average, and two of those are virtual ties.

Kentucky’s blacks did notably better than almost every education jurisdiction shown on this slide, with an annual rate of improvement of 1.32 points per year. Only Oregon and Wisconsin topped us, and I have some reservations about Oregon due to the limited data available on that state’s black graduation rates (click the read more link if curious).

In any event, disaggregating the graduation rate data by race does not change the conclusion from my original graph. Age 18 does not have a good track record over time of helping improve high school completion.

Kentucky Tonight: Afterthoughts #1 – Getting the numbers wrong

Education, NewsBy Richard Innes January 29, 2013

I was honored to be a guest on Kentucky Tonight on January 28, 2013 to talk about proposals to raise the minimum high school dropout age in Kentucky to 18.

A number of interesting things came up during the discussions, and I have been doing some follow-on research as a consequence.

If you listen starting about 20 minutes and 43 seconds into the KET Webcast linked above, you can hear Stu Silberman, the President of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence and a fellow guest on the show, claim:

“If you looked at the top 20 states with the highest graduation rates, 60 percent of them have dropout ages higher than 16.”

Really? Well, not based on the most current data.

I matched up the 2009-10 Averaged Freshman Graduation Rates (AFGR) for each state as reported by the National Center for Education Statistics with that state’s minimum dropout age as of one year earlier in 2008 (after all, there has to be at least a little time for increased dropout ages to take effect), which came from a new Brookings Institute report.

This table shows what I found for the top 20 states.

If you count them all up, a total of 11 states still had a minimum dropout age of 16, including five of the top six states. A combined total of only 9 states in this listing had a higher minimum age.

So, a clear majority of the top high school graduation rate states in 2009-10 still had an age 16 dropout minimum. That is 55 percent.

Only 45 percent, not 60 percent, of the states had a higher minimum age.

But, there is more.

Here is what happened when I looked at the average graduation rates for the states organized by their minimum dropout age. What a surprise!

It turns out that the states still using Age 16 for their minimum dropout age had a higher average graduation rate than Age 17 states had. In turn the Age 17 states had a better rate than the Age 18 states! Wow!

To be fair, I don’t know what numbers Mr. Silberman might have referenced. Perhaps they were from a prior year. However, the very latest data does not support his contention. The data in the tables raises very strong concerns about how well Age 18 laws really work.

By the way, I was criticized on the show last night for some other data I discussed (also discussed in this blog) because I didn’t disaggregate it for demographic differences. That actually is a legitimate concern, so I have now done some disaggregating. Stay tuned tomorrow for more on that.

State Senate plans secret meeting on Wednesday: No way! Really?

Transparency and AccountabilityBy Jim Waters January 29, 2013

Did you know that the full Kentucky Senate planned to meet on short notice – behind closed doors – Wednesday to discuss the Bluegrass State’s public pension crisis?

Right. No one else knew, either. Not even the Legislative Research Commission knew — and the LRC is the entity that keeps the calendar for public legislative meetings.

Oh, that’s right though. Since the public is NOT INVITED to this meeting, it doesn’t get scheduled.

Still, the senators are planning on holding it — tomorrow at 1 p.m. in Room 327 of the Capitol Annex. Be reminded: taxpayers are paying for this meeting, too.

I am told that thePewCenteron the States has been invited to testify. That alone should make taxpayers wary. In the past Pew failed to adequately address (or, in some cases, never addressed at all) the important issues of the lack of transparency in the pension system, abuse of the legislative pension process or the outrageous benefit creep that now even allows workers at nonpublic entities – including employees at the Commonwealth Credit Union in Frankfort – to mooch at the public pension trough.

Pew’s unwillingness to address these controversial issues in order to continue to curry favor with the political leadership of the state raises serious questions about the group’s credibility and purpose in being inKentucky.

Is Pew here to provide real answers or just to provide a smokescreen to continue maintaining more or less the status quo?

A statement from the Senate President’s Office stated that the reason for holding the meeting out of the public purview was that senators “wished to have an open discussion with legislators asking questions and making suggestions outside the filter of gotcha politics. The purpose is education.”

Beyond the question of how fully and adequately senators will be educated by an organization that prefers to deal in secrecy is another question: Should taxpayers give up transparency just so politicians can feel comfortable horse trading behind closed doors?

Right-to-work correlated with higher per capita income among the states

Right to WorkBy Jim Waters January 29, 2013

In the wake of autoworker union giant Michigan passing right-to-work legislation, numerous reports have been released comparing incomes in right-to-work states with forced unionization states.

But until recently, a key ingredient in determining the efficacy of the right to work without being forced to pay union dues has been ignored – cost of living adjustments. A new report from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy finds that when comparing apples to apples by correcting for different costs of living among the states, per-capita incomes are actually higher in right-to-work states than in forced unionization states.

Correcting for cost of living becomes very important when one realizes a dollar in Kentucky will buy you significantly more than a dollar in New York or California. Thus, an individual making $30,000 per year in Kentucky is significantly better off than an identical individual making the same nominal income in New York. In short, $30,000 in Kentucky has significantly greater purchasing power than $30,000 in New York. Dollars are worth less in New York simply because there’s so many of them floating around in that densely populated financial capital of the country.

Thus, to truly ascertain how right-to-work legislation affects the quality of life for individuals in different states, we must correct for the different costs of living across the country. And once we do, it turns out right-to-work states have 4.1% higher per-capita incomes than those in forced unionization states.

In additions, since 2001, right-to-work states have added 1.7 million jobs while forced unionization states have lost 2.1 million jobs. Right-to-work states also boast unemployment rates a full percentage point lower than their unionized counterparts.

So why is Kentucky not giving its citizens the same right to work that our neighbors in Tennessee and Indiana have? The mystery continues.

Significant Decisions: Exit Interview with Billy Harper: Part Three

EducationBy bipps January 29, 2013

The Bluegrass Institute recently sat down to talk about public education in Kentucky with Billy Harper, who is president of Harper Industries, a Paducah-based construction company.

Harper has a long record of involvement in education in the Bluegrass State. He recently completed a four-year term on the Kentucky Board of Education, which develops policy and adopts the regulations that govern the commonwealth’s 174 school districts and the state Department of Education.

Gov. Steve Beshear appointed him to the state education board shortly after taking office in 2008. Harper previously was a member of the McCracken County School Board.

The institute is releasing a series of videos based on our interview with Harper as part of National School Choice Week.

In this segment, Harper discussed significant decisions made while he was on the state board – including the hiring of Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday, Ph.D.

Harper commended Holliday for his commitment to working with the commonwealth’s higher education community to improve Kentucky’s public schools, and for his desire to leave a positive mark on the Bluegrass State.

He also praised Holliday – who was hired as the commonwealth’s education commissioner in July 2009, during Harper’s tenure on the board – for his skill at relating both with state lawmakers and local superintendents. (Holliday was a local superintendent in Statesville, N.C. when hired as Kentucky’s commissioner.) Harper says Holliday definitely wants to make a positive mark for change in Kentucky.

Holliday is the only local school superintendent to ever to receive the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which recognizes companies, organizations, businesses and other entities that have shown long-term improvement in quality and productivity.

The honor is an “award for business models, not education (paradigms).”

Age 18 dropout legislation still doesn’t work

Education, News, Transparency and AccountabilityBy Richard Innes January 28, 2013

Yet another attempt to raise the minimum high school dropout age in Kentucky to 18 is going to be debated during the current legislative session in Frankfort. This idea stalled at least twice before, but that doesn’t seem to stop some non-data oriented, feel-good folks from wanting to try again.

Several years ago when this idea first surfaced, I did some research based on how this policy has actually worked in states that had extensive experience with Age 18 minimum dropout age laws.

Fourteen states plus Washington, DC have had such policies in place since 2004; in fact all but Nebraska actually had such policies on the books back to at least 2001.

Since this dubious idea is coming at our legislators again, I have now updated my original study with the latest data from 2010, which just released a week ago.

This new graph shows how that looks.

One of the most shocking things on this graph involves the five educational jurisdictions shown on the right with the red data bars. All have had Age 18 laws in place since at least 2001 except for Nebraska, where this policy became law in 2004. Each of these five states has actually seen a DECLINE in its high school graduation rate over this period. That certainly shows Age 18 laws by themselves are no magic answer.

Also of interest is the dashed red line, which shows the overall annual increase per year in graduation rates across the whole country since 2001. That rate of increase was just shy of a half a percentage point a year.

Notice, however, that nearly all the Age 18 states on the graph have not performed as well as even the national average.

So, Age 18 laws don’t even guarantee a state will see graduation rate improvements at least as good as the overall national average.

One last point: As I recently mentioned, Kentucky’s graduation rate improvement in the new 2010 data looks pretty nice. We still have a way to go, but we are making progress. In fact, over the past 10 years, Kentucky outpaced EVERY ONE of the Age 18 states shown on the graph – EVERY ONE of them. And, we did it without an Age 18 law.

Could an Age 18 law add disruption in our schools with kids who absolutely don’t want to be there? Could that actually cause our current rate of progress to decay, just like has happened in some of the states shown on the graph?

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