No, I didn’t write that. It is the title of this Washington Post article from reporter Jay Mathews about the lack of effectiveness in many past reform fads.
Of course, I did write “KERA (1990-2010) What Have We Learned.”
My report outlines specific failures in Kentucky of many of the reforms that Mathews writes about.
Will graduates have the skills they need?
The Courier-Journal reports that up to 6,000 students may graduate from Jefferson County high schools this June.
Actually, that’s not very good news. You see, the Jefferson County Class of 2013 entered high school four years ago as ninth graders with 8,391 members in attendance.
One year later, this class had already been whittled down to just 7,728 students in the 10th grade.
Even if 6,000 of the Jefferson County survivors of this class graduate, an Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate calculation like that currently used for school accountability in Kentucky shows less than three in four of the first time students in this class will survive to graduation.
Furthermore, one must wonder if the students who do graduate will have more than a hollow piece of paper in their hands after they cross the stage.
The Class of 2013 took the ACT college entrance test one year ago as 11th grade students. With the class further whittled down to only 6,228 students as of the March ACT testing last year, the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education’s ACT Benchmark Score results showed that less than half of the class was ready for Freshman English at a Kentucky university or two-year college. Little more than one out of three were ready in math and reading. The rest of these students will likely require non-credit bearing remedial course work if they do move on to postsecondary education, assuming they actually do graduate this June.
The fallout continues from Sunday’s shocker news story where Kentucky Commissioner of Education told the Louisville Courier-Journal that problems in that city’s school system were “academic genocide.”
Yesterday, the Jefferson County Board of Education held scheduled meeting where the city’s education leaders continued to conduct business in a way Holliday characterized today as being “still all about the adults.”
Today, the Courier-Journal’s editorial board met with Holliday and Allred in an hour-long webcast interview you can access here. There are many important points discussed in the interview, but here are a few highlights to look for with the approximate time in the webcast where you can find them:
09:50 Principals in the first cohort of schools did not apply the ReStaffing option properly. Also, principals were supposed to have lots of autonomy in making staffing decisions, but that didn’t happen. 30-60-90 day plans to evaluate improvement and make changes were required, but not consistently implanted. At around 17:30 into the interview it is pointed out that 30-60-90 day plans “lapsed” in some of the schools, which hampered further improvement.
13:06 Allred starts discussion of the interference principals in the first cohort schools faced during hiring of new teachers, making reference to a report from the Kentucky Office of Education Accountability for a reference. Instead of having full flexibility, principals were restricted to hire only from an “overstaffing list.” As a consequence, Allred said that principals could not go recruit the teachers they needed. There is more discussion on this topic around 48:12 into the interview. The bottom line was a lot of first-year intern teachers wound up in these very low-performing schools. Per the OEA report, that did not meet the requirements of House Bill 176 from the 2010 Regular Legislative Session, which established the Persistently Low-Achieving Schools program.
13:48 Allred says it was difficult to get state provided guides and coaches into the classrooms of the Cohort 1 schools. She goes on to say there is better collaboration now, but progress was slow as a consequence.
24:30 Holliday’s reaction to a question about why the Jefferson County Board of Education didn’t even get to a discussion of the issues in the Persistently Low-Achieving Schools until an hour into the meeting: “It was still all about the adults.” He goes on shortly after to point out that the board didn’t ask the right sorts of questions, either.
28:50 Holliday points out one “adult issue” is that teachers talk about working hard, but there is no apparent attention to the fact the kids are still not learning.
33:20 Asked about what could be done right away to improve things, Holliday says the schools need to set up extended days and differentiated instruction that meets individual student needs. (Of course, the union contract does not allow that.)
34:50 Another example of “adult interests” is the issue of it should not be what teachers want to teach but what students need to learn.
35.13 Holliday mentions one reason for low parent involvement is that parents get poor treatment from the schools when they do try to get involved. (Echoes things the Bluegrass Institute has also heard from many parents over the years)
37:31 Holliday says he supports parent choice.
38:33 Holliday says he supports charter schools that have clear performance requirements and that get closed if they don’t meet those goals.
44:35 Holliday says one way to engage parents is to tell them the truth, making it clear their kids are not currently being prepared. He supports outreach efforts that go into churches and community organizations to reach parents. At 52:25 Allred says she is not sure there has been significant outreach like this in Jefferson County.
46:40 Asks if school is 10 miles away, how can parents get involved?
50:00 Asked if union is a problem, Holliday says No. But, he immediately says the contract needs to be reworked and the process takes too long. (Sounds problematic to me)
57:05 Holliday says final decision on takeovers in Jefferson County will come after spring testing and graduation rate data are available, probably in August.
One of the big question marks in the proposal to increase the minimum dropout age to 18 is how much it will cost to keep those students in school for two more years.
The problem starts with figuring out exactly how many dropouts we are talking about.
Officially, the dropout figure has been running around 6,000 students or so for some time. But, most researchers working with dropout data have little confidence in any state’s dropout reporting. Schools have no real inducement to report this accurately and obviously are happy with the lowest number possible. The fact that the dropouts are gone makes them difficult to impossible to track, which frustrates attempts to audit the situation.
There was an audit on the accuracy of Kentucky’s dropout rate reporting – way back in 2006.
No surprise to anyone doing research in the area, this now rather dated report found the state’s published dropout rates were considerably under-reporting the true situation.
I’d love to be able to use really recent data to do a better estimate of how much the Age 18 bill might cost, but I am finding some issues with the data on enrollment, dropouts, retentions and reported graduations for the Classes of 2010 and 2011. High-accuracy data is promised to us when the Class of 2013 graduates, but that is months away.
So, I am going to go with data I developed in a 2011 paper for the Class of 2009 as a way to get some sort of handle on what this legislation could cost. I wish I could use something more current, but that isn’t reasonable at this time.
If you look at Figure 1 in that 2011 paper, it shows that as the Class of 2009 wended its way through Kentucky’s public high schools, it accumulated a total of 6,272 officially reported dropouts.
However, in order to make the reported data for fall membership (enrollment), dropouts, retentions (students held back in the same grade at the end of the year) and total diplomas and certificates work out, there had to be an additional unreported loss of students summing 5,150 more students.
Now, other calculations found in the report show that some of those unknown 5,150 students were actually accounted for as 787 students who graduated early, in less than four years.
Put this all together, and I estimate we are talking about an extra 10,635 students who probably would have been retained in the school system if an Age 18 bill had been in place for this class.
The latest audited school finance data I have comes from the 2010-2011 Receipts and Expenditures Report (Excel) from the Kentucky Department of Education. That document says per pupil funding from local tax sources was $3,733. The state per pupil funding, which is mostly from SEEK, amounted to $4,442 per pupil. Finally, federal support averaged $1,935 per pupil.
If these kids remain in school, all those funding sources get zapped, not just state SEEK. It’s as if the Kentucky legislature can launch an unfunded mandate on both local school districts AND the US government!
For example, if the local tax dollars don’t track, locals risk a reduction in their SEEK dollars, for example. And, the feds are committed to support students in school, too.
So, let’s put all of this together.
As you can see, the increase in state funding is only part of what will happen to the taxpayer. Overall, taxpayers will have to have to cough up a pretty tidy sum – well over $100 million.
By the way, loading more than 10,000 students back into the system is probably going to burst the seams at some high schools. I don’t have a good handle on how to estimate that, but school facilities are not cheap.
Now, with all of this said, the expenditures would still be a good investment, IF IT WORKED! But, the research we’ve mentioned in a number of earlier blogs indicates this feel-good-for-adult-liberals idea that forces their will on unwilling kids doesn’t work. It just makes those kids more expensive dropouts at age 18 instead of age 16. It might even lead to more violence in school as these entrapped kids will be a lot older, a lot madder, and a lot more capable of causing mayhem.
What we really need to focus on here is how to re-engage these kids to make them want to stay. How can we re-fire their self-confidence and provide real hope they can get back on track. Just turning our schools into some sort of daytime stalag won’t do that. I want to see some imaginative programs that really work before we even think about going to simple coercion that apparently doesn’t function as intended.
With the governor hot to waste a lot of legislative time on a proposal to raise the minimum high school dropout age to 18, I thought it would be worthwhile to outline some of the extensive evidence that this idea does not create better high school graduation rates.
In “Will increasing Kentucky’s minimum high school dropout age to 18 improve high school graduation rates – Updated,” I introduced my own analysis of the trends in high school graduation rates in 14 states and the District of Columbia that had the law in place long enough to develop notable trend data. The results in these 15 educational jurisdictions showed that the Age 18 law had not led to notable graduation rate performance. In fact, graduation rates actually were declining in nearly half of these educational jurisdictions.
Shortly after I did the analysis above, the US Department of Education’s National Center for Education Research released the 2009 graduation rate data, and I provided everyone an updated analysis in “New data still raises questions about raising dropout age to 18.” Having an additional year of data changed nothing. Age 18 still wasn’t working.
It was interesting that Governor Beshear recently claimed that our existing school systems had enough resources to handle the kids who would be trapped in school by the Age 18 ruling. That does not exactly agree with comments made by Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday, as I point out in “If kids are forced to stay in school, will they just be ‘warehoused?’” Holliday indicated there are a lot of unknowns about how well our alternative programs are really working. Absent such information, how can we know if we have the right programs, and enough of them, in place?
I made an estimate of the extra resources we would need to serve the thousands of extra students who would be trapped in our schools against their will with an Age 18 law in “Bluegrass Institute age 18 dropout research cited.” The governor says we have the resources. I doubt that. I estimate we need around $166 million more, about half coming directly from state sources, to support the thousands of extra students that would be trapped in schools by Age 18 legislation. And, that estimate does not include any costs for possible extra facilities construction that might be required.
In “New high school graduation study provides still more evidence: Minimum Age 18 for dropping out does not matter” I cited work from other researchers at the America’s Promise Alliance which shows states with the highest increases in high school graduation rates tended to have an Age 16 dropout law and, more importantly, the states with the largest DECREASE in high school graduation rates tended to be Age 18 states.
None of the comments above should be taken as my approval of anyone dropping out of school – far from it! In fact, I was credited years ago by the education analyst at the Kentucky School Boards Association for being one of the first in Kentucky to draw attention to our deplorable graduation rate situation.
However, having looked at this for a while, I understand that just trapping kids in school for more years will probably do little more than change dropouts at the age of 16 into dropouts at the age of 18. The students will still be seriously under-educated, and little, if anything will be gained. In fact, by forcing these kids to stay in school instead of putting a serious focus on finding ways to entice them to want to stay will probably just cause more disruption in classrooms and maybe even worse mayhem.
And, as I must point out again, we don’t need more seriously disgruntled youngsters causing mayhem in our schools. That can lead to tragedies such as recently happened in Connecticut.
I don’t understand what part of “it isn’t working in other states” the governor does not understand, but it’s reported that Kentucky’s governor, Steve Beshear, is again going to propose legislation to raise the minimum high school dropout age in the state to 18.
I researched the performance of Age 18 legislation in 14 states and Washington, DC that have had such a rule for a significant number of years.
This graph shows what I found.
In general, in most of these states with significant Age 18 experience, the trend in high school graduation rates has been worse than the overall national average trend.
I repeated this research again when the 2009 graduation rate data came out, and nothing really changed for these 15 education jurisdictions.
In other words, just raising the minimum age to drop out to 18 does not improve graduation rates. It just means kids drop out at an older age.
But, if we keep them in school longer, we will have to find classroom space for these kids, and there are a ton of them, a lot more than the state has ever wanted to officially admit. So, enacting Age 18 legislation could require new school construction at a time when the state budget is in crisis and many aging school buildings are on hold for repair or replacement.
We will also need more teachers, as well. They don’t come cheap, either.
The governor should know all of that, of course.
Now, if we really want to solve the dropout problem, we must find ways to reignite interest in kids who have become disheartened and turned off by our existing schools. Forcing them to stay inside the school walls is no way to do that.
Creating innovative charter schools could help, as it has done in places like Chicago, Boston and New York City.
Getting really creative with digital learning programs can help, too.
But, turning schools into Age 18 stalags is unlikely to do anything more than create problems like more super frustrated and angry teens. And, after what recently happened in Connecticut, creating frustrated and angry teens is the last thing Kentucky needs.
This time, it’s with the Feds!
Without question, the “Academy as Shawnee” is one of the state’s most troubled high schools.
Shawnee was one of the very first schools in the state to land itself on Kentucky’s Persistently Low-Achieving Schools list back when the program first started several years ago.
The school’s high school graduation rate in 2011 in the new Unbridled Learning release package is a truly abysmal 42.3 percent. That is solidly in what a research team from the Johns Hopkins University has termed a “Dropout Factory.”
Shawnee’s new Unbridled Learning rank is way down at the lowest possible rating, the 1 percentile level.
However, The Academy at Shawnee is listed as a magnet school because of its aviation maintenance programs. Students at Shawnee can actually earn FAA licenses in airframe or power plant maintenance.
Uh, maybe.
It seems records-keeping at The Academy has been a bit hap-hazard. The FAA is fussy about records keeping for schools that train aircraft mechanics, and the Courier-Journal reports the:
“FAA found record-keeping discrepancies that included faculty forgetting to sign forms, students forgetting to sign in and out of classes, and students using the wrong forms to document their course work.”
The article does mention that students have a 100 percent pass rate on FAA exams, but as our schools often like to tell us, real education involves a lot more than just test scores. In this case, the reason the FAA is so hard over about records-keeping is that habits of sloppy records keeping can lead to missed aircraft inspections and maintenance that does not get done properly. That, in turn, can lead to innocent passengers and flight crew getting into a whole lot of trouble.
Sloppy paperwork and the slipshod maintenance that results also lead to aircraft companies getting hit with multi-million-dollar fines to encourage them to keep records accurately and do things properly, too.
So, the kids at The Academy didn’t learn an important lesson.
And, since the Courier says the school got in trouble over paper work ten years ago, it looks like the faculty needs to learn some lessons, too.
At present, the Jefferson County School District and the Jefferson Community and Technical College, who jointly operate the Shawnee program, have voluntarily shut it down. They hope to get recertified next year. For the sake of the students and the aviation industry, I hope they finally get it right, next time.
The Bluegrass Institute’s staff education analyst, Richard Innes, provided an update on Kentucky’s education performance to a meeting of 25 people hosted by Shelby County Republicans on October 25, 2012.
Updated with the very latest information available, Innes’ presentation makes it clear why the first test results from Kentucky’s new K-PREP assessments are expected to be, and should be, quite low.
A few of the topics Innes discussed include:
• Why state to state education data comparisons must be broken down by race, and how that looks both on the NAEP and the ACT college entrance test,
• Very low performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress mathematics and science assessments by Kentucky’s white students,
• Low performance by Kentucky’s students compared to other states which now test all graduates with the ACT college entrance test,
• A realistic picture of Kentucky’s troubling high school graduation rates, which included this new information showing US graduation rates actually were higher back over 32 years ago
and
• Kentucky’s chronic and disturbing youth unemployment situation.
Innes is available to talk to any group statewide that would like a better understanding of how Kentucky’s education system is actually performing.
Innes’ presentation slides can be viewed by clicking here.
He is available to speak to any group that would like to learn more about Kentucky’s real education performance.
I’ve been running a little survey today, very impromptu, about when the US had its largest high school graduation rate. Years to select from start at the 1969-70 school year and run to 2008-09.
So far, no-one has answered correctly.
This graph, which I developed from data presented by the National Center for Education Statistics in Table 111 in the recently released “Digest of Education Statistics 2011” tells the tale (click on the graph to enlarge, if necessary).
You can see how many younger adults today, who simply don’t recall anything much farther back than the late 1990s, are confused and misinformed.
Also note there have been several up and down cycles in the rates over time. At least the current trend is in the right direction, but it still has a way to go just to match 1969-70.
This graph provides one reason why all us more “seasoned” folks who were around way back in the 1960s are concerned about today’s education system. We know it really was better way back when. Now, you know it, too.
Non-readers are getting regular high school diplomas
A disturbing issue inadvertently came to light during a contentious August 14, 2012 meeting of the Kentucky Legislature’s Education Assessment and Accountability Review Subcommittee (EAARS).
The news spilled out during a sharp discussion about a regulation that would end reading of the state’s reading assessment to many students with learning disabilities.
In the process of that discussion, multiple comments from educators and legislators revealed that students with learning disabilities in Kentucky who basically cannot read are being given regular – not alternative – high school diplomas.
That’s the same class of diploma now awarded to all the students who successfully complete the normal, full course of study – which certainly includes learning to read (Note: the Commonwealth Diploma was recently discontinued).
As a consequence of this policy for learning disabled students, an employer may not be able to tell if a student can read just by checking for a high school diploma.
