Spellings’ Cure Is Worse Than The Disease

Bush’s Secretary of Education, Margaret Spelling, has just announced that she will unilaterally make changes to No Child Left Behind through executive regulation. According to the New York Times, the most important change would requiring states to adopt one national formula for calculating high school graduation rates, rather than allowing each state to use its own formula.

Under the [Spellings] formula, graduation rates are calculated by dividing the number of students who receive a traditional high school diploma in any given year by the number of first-time ninth graders who entered four years earlier, adjusted for students who transfer in and out.

Critics have argued, with justification, that many states are deliberately understating their drop out rate, and the desire to have accurate and truthful reporting is entirely understandable. That is a point we have made, from time to time, regarding the creative accounting at Tweed. But Spellings’ cure may be worse than the disease. Under this formula, a school that sticks with a student and graduates him in the fifth or sixth year is treated the same as a school where the student drops out in grade 9 or 10. That unfairly penalizes schools with large numbers of high needs students that need more time to meet graduation requirements, and makes no distinction between the schools in which those students drop out and the schools in which they graduate in more than four years. Under this formula, for example, schools with large numbers of English Language Learner immigrants will be penalized for their inability to have their students reach the standard of proficiency in English Language Arts required of native English speakers, in a fraction of the time those native English speakers had to learn it.

For all of the rhetoric, this is a formula that makes demography into destiny.