US News: DC Schools Brace For Catastrophic Drop In Graduation Rates. “Catastrophic” isn’t hyperbole; the numbers are expected to drop from 73% (close to the national average of 83%) all the way down to 42%.
There’s no debate about why this is happening – it’s because the previous graduation rate was basically fraudulent, inflated by pressure to show that recent “reforms” were working. Last year there was a big investigation, all the investigators agreed it was fraudulent, DC agreed to do a little less fraud this year, and this is the result. It’s pretty damning, given how everybody was praising the reforms and holding them up as a national model and saying this proved that Tough But Fair Education Policy could make a difference:
But the interesting bit isn’t just that DC schools are doing worse than we thought. It’s that DC schools are doing amazingly, uniquely, abysmally bad, below what should even be possible. We make fun of states like Mississippi and Alabama, but both have graduation rates around 80%. The lowest graduation rate in any of the fifty states is in Oregon, which still has 69%. And we are being told DC is 42%!
When we discussed this in the last links thread, people had a couple of explanations:
1. Washington DC has a terrible school system, with uniquely incompetent administrators.
2. Washington DC is poorer, blacker, and more segregated than any other state, and that leads to unique challenges other school systems don’t face. Even though everyone is doing their best, they face insurmountable structural difficulties.
3. Maybe the fraud was so bad that DC over-corrected, and now has stricter standards than anywhere else.
Which of these is most important?
[Addendum/Edit: More discussion at Highlights From The Comments On DC Graduation Rates. Main update is that I underestimated the importance of absences, which are what’s causing a lot of the non-graduations, which there might be more of in DC, and which DC might be stricter about than other areas.]
There’s no debate about why this is happening – it’s because the previous graduation rate was basically fraudulent, inflated by pressure to show that recent “reforms” were working. Last year there was a big investigation, all the investigators agreed it was fraudulent, DC agreed to do a little less fraud this year, and this is the result. It’s pretty damning, given how everybody was praising the reforms and holding them up as a national model and saying this proved that Tough But Fair Education Policy could make a difference:
As far as scandals in the education policy world go, D.C. schools so profoundly miscalculating graduation rates at a time when the high-profile school district had been so self-laudatory about its achievements may be difficult to top […] Indeed, when Michelle Rhee took the reins of the flailing school system a decade ago, it galvanized the education reform movement, which had just begun blossoming around the country, and ushered in a host of controversial changes that included the shuttering of multiple schools, firing of hundreds of teachers and the institution of new teacher evaluation and compensation models.
The changes not only dramatically altered the local political landscape in Washington but also shined a national spotlight on D.C. schools that prompted other urban school districts and education policy researchers to consider the nation’s capital a bellwether for the entire education reform movement.Well, darn.
But the interesting bit isn’t just that DC schools are doing worse than we thought. It’s that DC schools are doing amazingly, uniquely, abysmally bad, below what should even be possible. We make fun of states like Mississippi and Alabama, but both have graduation rates around 80%. The lowest graduation rate in any of the fifty states is in Oregon, which still has 69%. And we are being told DC is 42%!
When we discussed this in the last links thread, people had a couple of explanations:
1. Washington DC has a terrible school system, with uniquely incompetent administrators.
2. Washington DC is poorer, blacker, and more segregated than any other state, and that leads to unique challenges other school systems don’t face. Even though everyone is doing their best, they face insurmountable structural difficulties.
3. Maybe the fraud was so bad that DC over-corrected, and now has stricter standards than anywhere else.
Which of these is most important?
by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex | Read more:
[ed. Do read the Comments link above, it's a no-win situation. See also: Labor Renaissance in the Heartland]
