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The can’t-fail school

January 22, 2011 By

New York City’s top-ranked school is under investigation for cooking the books, reports the New York Times. Theater Arts Production Company School, a middle and high school located in a low-income Bronx neighborhood,  graduated 94 percent of seniors, more than 30 points above the citywide average. The school earned a near-perfect score in “student progress,” based partly on course credits earned by students.  The school’s no-failure policy requires teachers to pass all students who attend class, regardless of their performance; no more than 5 percent of students can get D’s.

In practice, some teachers said, even students who missed most of the school days earned credits. They also said students were promoted with over 100 absences a year; the principal, rather than a teacher, granted class credits needed for graduation; and credit was awarded for classes the school does not even offer.

The school’s former Advanced Placement calculus teacher said he was pressured to pass students who didn’t deserve it.

Last year, every student passed the class even though each received a 1 — the lowest score — on the Advanced Placement test, in part because they had not taken precalculus, he said. Only one had passed the Math B Regents, a minimal standard.

Even some students complained to the Times about the no-failure policy.

Some said that it sometimes hurt their motivation to know that a classmate would pass even if he did not come to class. One said that his current average was a 30 — but that he could bring it up to a 95 with a few days of work — and that teachers sometimes handed out examples of student work that he copied from.

“You would have to be an epic failure to fail at this school,” said Deja Sawyers, a 10th grader. When students do not do their work, “there’s no consequences,” she said, adding that she did not get homework.

Another student, Luisa Cruz, said, “Everybody always passes; it’s really rare to fail.”

“It makes no sense,” she said. “You’ve got to learn from your mistakes.”

The college acceptance rate for graduates is 100 percent, but students’ SAT scores are low and many end up in remedial classes in college.

College acceptance is meaningless: It includes students who go to open-admissions or not-very-selective colleges, take a few remedial classes and drop out.  Sending graduates to college to retake eighth-grade English and math is nothing to brag about.

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Boise State can learn from Boise State

December 26, 2010 By

Higher Ed Watch’s Academic BCS, which ranks the top college football teams using academic indicators, shows Stanford as number one and Boise State as number two.

Boise State’s football players are more likely to graduate than non-athletes, notes Ben Miller on The Quick and the Ed.  Boise State’s graduation rate is only 26 percent, compared to 52 percent for football players.

. . .  though the black football players do have lower graduation rates than the white members of the team, their 43 percent completion rate is still 20 percentage points higher than the figure for white males at the school overall.

. . . The academic accomplishments of the Boise State football team should provide instructive lessons for the school overall. The university should take a look at the various tutoring and other academic supports given to football players to see which ones could be adopted for the general student body.

The top-ranked football team, Auburn, ranks 20th in the Academic BCS with second-ranked Oregon at 21st.

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Graduation rates may be rising

December 1, 2010 By

Graduation rates are inching up and fewer high schools are “dropout factories,” concludes Building A Grad Nation, a report by the America’s Promise Alliance, Civic Enterprise and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins. From 2002-08, graduation rates rose form 72 percent to 75 percent, researchers found. The number of dropout factories — high schools with graduation rates under 60 percent — fell by 13 percent.

Tennessee raised its graduation rate by 15 percent; New York went up by 10 percent.

New York City closed low-performing schools, writes Sarah Garland on HechingerEd.

Besides causing an outcry among parents and teachers, this approach hasn’t always yielded all positive benefits, as we’ve written about previously. (For an in-depth look at the arduous process of closing a school, I recommend the GothamSchools series that has followed the effort to shut down Columbus High School in the Bronx along with two others.)

The city also created “alternate pathways for at-risk students so they could catch up on missed credits or return to school after dropping out.”

While black, Hispanic and Native American students made the greatest gains, only 40 percent graduated on time in 2008, notes Education Week.

The report recommended a number of strategies:

These include targeting schools with high dropout rates and the lower grades that feed into them; providing more-rigorous course requirements along with more flexible class schedules for students; and developing early-warning systems to identify students in earlier grades at risk of dropping out, among other strategies.

To qualify for federal education grants, states and districts must track students from eighth grade through graduation, starting in 2010-11, and start showing improvement in 2011-12. Requiring a consistent reporting method will stop districts from inflating graduation rates, says Joanna Fox of Johns Hopkins.

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New Haven promises college aid

November 11, 2010 By

New Haven’s public school students will get free college tuition at any public college or university in Connecticut, if they maintain a 3.0 grade point average and 90 percent attendance. Graduates will get $2,500 a year to attend an in-state private college. Students will have to maintain a 2.5 grade point average in college to continue receiving the money.

Yale University is providing most of the $4.5 million a year needed to fund the New Haven Promise. It’s open to city students who’ve attended public school — district-run or charter — since ninth grade or earlier.

Only 200 of the 1,000 graduates last year would have qualified, city officials said. About 83 percent of New Haven graduates go on to college, but more than 70 percent dropout after two years.

(Mayor John) DeStefano said the program was intended to curb a citywide high school dropout rate of 38 percent and cultivate a college-going culture, as well as to provide an economic incentive for families to move to New Haven. Students will qualify for the financial aid on a sliding scale, with those who started in city schools at kindergarten receiving the most, 100 percent of their tuition. Students who arrived in the ninth grade will receive 65 percent.

In Syracuse, New York, enrollment in city schools has grown since 2008, when Syracuse University and the Say Yes to Education foundation began offering free college tuition to public high school students. However, the graduation rate hasn’t improved.

George A. Weiss, a Wall Street financier who founded Say Yes to Education in 1987, said the foundation had paid college tuition for more than 350 students in predominantly poor schools in Hartford; Philadelphia; Cambridge, Mass.; and Harlem in New York City. He said academic enrichment programs, counseling and other services had supplemented the tuition assistance.

“You can’t just give them an offer of money,” Mr. Weiss said. “They still have their day-to-day issues, and you have to help them.”

All college scholarship programs have learned this lesson:  Disadvantaged students need mentors, tutors and counselors to get them on the college track and keep them on track. A scholarship offer isn’t enough.

I also predict students with only 90 percent attendance aren’t going to need more than one semester of college tuition.

Update:  Why isn’t Yale offering scholarships to Yale? Chad Aldeman wants to know.

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College drop-outs cost billions

October 15, 2010 By

Billions of tax dollars are wasted on college drop-outs who never make it to their second year, concludes an American Institutes for Research study which looked at four-year college students who don’t make it to their second year. The bill for first-year drop-outs came to $9.1 billion in federal, state and local funds from 2003-08.

AIR used Education Department data, which counts only full-time students remaining at the same institution. Transfers count as drop-outs.  However, by excluding part-time students, who are less likely to complete a degree, the report could underestimate the cost of  college drop-outs.

Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economics professor, thinks the cost is higher, including lost income for the drop-outs’ year in college.

Robert Lerman, an American University economics professor who, like Vedder, questions promoting college for all, said the report fleshes out the reality of high dropout rates. But he said it could just as easily be used to argue that less-prepared, less-motivated students are better off not going to college.

“Getting them to go a second year might waste even more money,” Lerman said. “Who knows?”

The study is flawed, but useful, writes Michael Kirst on College Puzzle. He also thinks counting only full-time students underestimates the cost of drop-outs.

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‘Credit recovery’ is a cheat

September 17, 2010 By

‘Credit recovery’ — after-school classes for failing students — is raising graduation rates by lowering standards, writes Erich Martel, a social studies teacher in Washington, D.C., on Education Gadfly.

In D.C. schools, a student who flunks a class with 120 to 135 seat-time hours can make it up with an 82- to 92-hour hour credit-recovery “class.”  Students who need more teacher attention get less.

Rules ban homework.  All assignments are completed during class time.

During the past two school years, students enrolled in different subjects were assigned to one teacher and grouped in a single classroom. In some cases, non-instructional staff members, such as counselors, were assigned to “teach” CR classes. The clear expectation of school officials responsible for these assignments was that students would spend most of their time completing work sheets with little active teacher instruction.

Many students were simultaneously enrolled in two courses, even though one is the pre-requisite for the other, as in math, Spanish, and French. Some students, mainly ELL/ESOL, were enrolled in as many as three English courses at the same time. CR teachers reported a range of direct and indirect pressure by administrators to pass students enrolled in these courses despite failing grades, extensive absences, and late enrollment.

Credit recovery undercuts the work ethic, while giving students an inflated sense of achievement, Martel writes.

The program is expanding rapidly across the nation. Students get diplomas; administrators get higher graduation rates.  Community colleges get more remedial students.

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Block schedules: Take 8, pass 6

September 5, 2010 By

Block scheduling is being used as a quick fix for the graduation rate at some “dropout factories,” writes Rob Manwaring on The Quick and the Ed. These schools are shuffling instructional minutes to let students take eight classes a year, instead of six. That means a student can fail more classes and still earn enough credits to graduate.

By offering more courses per year, there is a higher chance that a student will be able to pass 6 of the 8 courses and be on track to graduation. There is a catch of course. Each class has less hours of instruction to cover the same amount of material.

Students can use the extra classes to take fluffy electives.

Manwaring visited a school that had improved its graduation rate through block scheduling, but students’ proficiency scores were very poor:  Only 13 percent of tenth graders were proficient in English; none were proficient in geometry, the math class most took, and 1 percent in basic algebra, 3 percent in advanced algebra.

Is this really a trend?

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First, don’t suck

August 28, 2010 By

When only 13 percent of students earn a degree and the university president is cruising the Caribbean on the public dime, forget about “best practices,” writes Ed Sector’s Kevin Carey. First, don’t suck.

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47% of black males graduate on time

August 18, 2010 By

Only 47 percent of black male students earned a high school diploma on schedule in 2008, reports the Schott Foundation.  In New York, 25 percent of black males earned a Regents diploma on time.

New Jersey, with a 69 percent black male graduation rate, is the only state with a significant black population to top 65 percent. Maryland came second at 55 percent with California third at 54 percent and Pennsylvania close behind at 53 percent.

Not known for educational excellence, Newark had the highest black male graduation rate of any major city, notes Jay Mathews.

In Newark, the graduation rate for black males was 76 percent. The other school districts nearest that level were Fort Bend, Tex. (68 percent), Baltimore County, Md. (67 percent) and Montgomery County, Md. (65 percent). The list only included states with more than 100,000 black male students and districts with more than 10,000 black male students.

New Jersey’s data is self-reported by schools and may be inflated, Mathews warns. In addition, the state lets schools graduate some students who haven’t passed the state graduation exam. One way to raise graduation rates is to lower standards.

Black female students, who face different social pressures, do much better than their brothers.

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Students do better in NY small schools

June 24, 2010 By

Small schools, which went from hot to not when results were disappointing, could be getting warmer.  New York City’s small high schools raised graduation rates, according to a MDRC study reported in Education Week. Small-school students were more likely to get on the graduation track by the end of ninth grade, stay on track and earn a diploma in four years, the study found.

The Gates Foundation, which funded the study, spent $1 billion on small schools nationwide before changing course in 2008. Students didn’t seem to be learning more in small schools.

The study looks at 123 “small schools of choice” that primarily enroll disadvantaged students in Brooklyn and the Bronx. All eighth graders choose 12 possible high schools. When too many want the same school, a lottery decides who gets in and who goes elsewhere.  The study compared students who got their top-choice school via lottery with a control group of lottery losers who went to large high schools or to lower-ranked small schools.

While the schools incorporated a variety of themes, such as coastal studies, sports management, and media studies, all were required to offer features common to the small-schools movement. Such features include an “advisory” period to provide for closer attention by a teacher to a small group of students, partnerships with the local community, and common planning times for teachers.

After four years of high school, 68.7 percent of small-school students earned a diploma compared with 61.9 percent of the control group. Small-school graduates also were more likely to earn a Regents diploma.

The difference in graduation rates is large by the standards of most education research, but “relatively small for all the attention that has been lavished on these schools,” said David C. Bloomfield, a professor of educational leadership at City University of New York. The small schools all received $400,000 in startup grants plus technical assistance.

The study of Washington D.C.’s voucher program for low-income students found a much larger rise in graduation rates: Lottery winners who used the voucher to attend private school were 21 percent more likely to earn a diploma compared to lottery losers.

Update:  Chicago students in non-selective small high schools also had higher graduation rates than similar students in regular high schools, concludes a study by the Consortium on Chicago School Research. Attendance and grades were slightly better; test scores were the same.

Chicago researchers weren’t enthusiastic, writes Ed Week’s Debra Viadero.

“Our findings show that this initiative did accomplish much, but not all, of what it was intended to do,” they write. “However, being ‘slightly better’ than similar students does not mean that these students are college ready.”

The small-school students averaged less than a C in academic courses.

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