SLO Going

High School Graduation Rates: Not a Measure of Student Achievement

By Hank Morgan, Special to Progressive Charlestown

Commissioner Gist (NEARI photo)

Maybe Education Commissioner Deborah Gist was justified in sounding triumphant when she reacted to the Rhode Island Kids Count news that the graduation rates of students in the state’s poorest cities – Central Falls, Pawtucket, Providence, and Woonsocket – have increased 10% since 2007. 

After all, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education, if the nation’s 2011 dropouts had earned a diploma, they, over the course of their lifetimes, would have saved taxpayers $154 billion. This is because dropouts are more likely to be unemployed, receive welfare benefits, abuse substances, commit crimes and land in prison.

Dropouts also generally earn less money than students who earn diplomas; therefore, they generate less tax revenue. 

Reacting to the latest graduation rates, Gist told the Providence Journal’s Lynn Arditi (11/26/13), “We can no longer support a system in which students graduate but are not ready for success in college and careers.” 

Therein, if Gist were true to her words, she’d make immediate and wholesale changes to many of the educational policies she proudly champions under the misnomer of “reform,” including but not limited to the Rhode Island Model Evaluation System for teachers. 

High graduation rates may be desirable, but they are misleading, especially when it comes to student achievement and college and career readiness.   Implicit in the imposition of high standards is the realistic expectation that fewer people are going to reach them, thus the U.S. Marine Corps motto: “The Few, The Proud,” and the fact that out of the thousands of players in Major League Baseball history, only 208 have made the Hall of Fame. Not just any musician gets to perform at Carnegie Hall. 

Education is no different, even at the high school level, which is why the graduation rates are misleading vis-a-vis student achievement. It also explains why a group of Providence students, calling themselves Young Voices, surveyed 635 high school students and found, according to Arditi’s article, that discipline was a “major issue negatively impacting school culture.” How can the apparent incongruity of increased graduation rates, pervasive behavioral problems, and continued student underachievement co-exist? 

Let me enumerate the ways.

1. Summer School: To boost graduation rates, many high schools offer students who fail one or more classes -- for fees ranging anywhere from $200-300 -- six weeks of summer school and consider it adequate restitution for 36 weeks of the regular curriculum.  Although the summer school curricula are not as simplified as they once were (English students in at least one district now must write a thesis essay.), many students continue to consider the considerably less rigorous 30 days of summer learning much more desirable than the 180  mandatory days from September to June.  Consequently, when those chronically absent and often tardy summer school bound students do attend classes, they have nothing to lose from disrupting and sabotaging lessons. In fact, many derive great pleasure in doing just that.  The diplomas they eventually earn in no way attest to their college and career readiness, or lack thereof. 

2. Credit Retrieval Program: This program allows students who failed courses to take on-line, self-taught, and watered down courses to make up those they failed.  It is a disincentive to work hard, or even moderately, in the classroom.

3. Home Tutoring: Neither of the two aforementioned bail-out options may be as tempting as home tutoring, which requires a student to make up a failed class after only 15 hours of one-on-one tutoring with a teacher.  It is yet another disincentive to work in the classroom.

4. The Rhode Island Model teacher evaluation system and, most notably, the Student Learning Objectives:  Maybe the most egregious, at least for teachers, manner in which RIDE and Gist have undermined teacher efforts and classroom effectiveness is by implementing and requiring the Student Learning Objectives (SLOs). Every Rhode Island public school teacher must explicitly state SLOs on his or her evaluation form at the beginning of each school year and must strive to meet them before that year is finished. 

According to RIDE and district administrators, the SLOs must be rigorous and indicate adequate challenges for teachers and students alike.  They are designed to motivate teachers to work hard and effectively.  However, only teachers are held accountable if students don’t do their part, and the vast majority of students could not care less if their teachers attain their SLOs. 

Therefore, if a teacher does not reach his or her SLOs because some students refuse to heed instruction, take notes, read, study, attend extra-help sessions, make up work, quizzes, tests, and other assessments, the teacher, not the students, gets penalized with a less impressive evaluation than he or she would if students had done their part.

As a result, more and more teachers are going to great lengths to meet their SLOs and stretching the ethical parameters in the process. That includes doing the students’ work for them, discounting failed quizzes and tests, reducing the rigor of assignments, and misrepresenting data on the final evaluation forms, among other unprofessional but, given that jobs are potentially at stake in Gist’s draconian system, understandable actions. 

Student apathy, fueled in large part by the phenomenon known as social promotion, was a significant problem before Gist instituted the SLOs, and it has only become worse since.  If all the above were not enough to undermine teacher effectiveness and provide disincentives for students, district administrators, to help inculcate the recent, nation-wide “Response to Intervention” (RtI) education initiative, are now encouraging teachers to refrain from giving zeroes for student work that is not submitted.  The justification for this is to raise the graduation rates, of course.

Higher graduation rates might be good news for students and society as a whole, but if policy makers are really interested in school reform, they must identify the behaviors and practices that truly will prepare students for colleges and careers.  Promoting apathy and failing to hold students accountable for both their actions and inactions has a countervailing effect, and Deborah Gist, of all people, should know this.