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Education Dive
Data shows greater disparity between grad
rates, test scores
Shawna De La Rosa
Feb. 1, 2019
Dive Brief:
Data released last week indicates state test scores are less likely to
represent graduation rates — those with low tests scores don’t
necessarily have low graduation rates, and vice versa — indicating that
grad rate gains may have more to do with changing standards than with
learning, according to a Chalkbeat analysis.
The U.S. public high school graduation rate rose from 79% in 2011 to
84.6% in 2017, despite flat test scores, and some states' grad rates
and test scores vary significantly: Washington state and Colorado have
high test scores and low grad rates, for example, while Texas and West
Virginia have low test scores and some of the nation’s highest grad
rates.
There could be many reasons for this discrepancy, including differences
in graduation standards across states, with some requiring students to
pass a set of exams to graduate, or that tests taken by 8th-graders
don’t necessarily reflect what they learn in high school. The
disconnect is growing, however, with 8th-grade NEAP math and reading
scores having been more closely tied to a state’s grad rate six years
ago than today.
Dive Insight:
This report is another piece of evidence that districts could be
inflating their graduation rates by either pushing unprepared students
through graduation or pushing them out of school because it’s likely
they won’t graduate. According to NPR, the incident rate of these
"pushouts" has increased since 2002, when grad rates became an
accountability measure at the federal level.
Part of the problem is that the district’s success is based on its grad
rates. In a report, NPR identified factors that would help improve
those rates, or at least make them less deceptive. Insisting that
students master the required material before graduating is one
recommendation. Graduating means little if a student doesn't understand
the material.
The credit recovery trend may also be tied to this phenomenon. Credit
recovery courses are not always well-vetted, and there have been
examples of some students taking these courses without taking the
original course first. There are suspicions that credit recovery
courses are helping districts game the system by graduating students
who may not have a full grasp of the material and would otherwise not
graduate.
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