Could the Common Core State Standards affect high school graduation rates? by Kelly Griffith and Victor Sensenig

The economic consequences of dropping out of high school are severe. In 2010, the difference in annual earnings between workers with some high school education and those who had completed high school was about $10,000 (U.S. Department of Education 2011). For many families, this represents the difference between life above or below the poverty level. High school graduation has become a precondition for well-paid work, and it is a policy concern of the first order. At the same time, new educational policies like the Common Core State Standards, intend to increase the “college and career readiness” level of high school graduates through a set of “fewer, higher, clearer” standards.  What does this mean for high school graduation rates, particularly for low-income and minority students?  How do we balance the value of a high school credential with the value of what is actually learned in high school?  In this piece, we consider the potential consequences of such policies.

New educational policies like the Common Core State Standards intend to increase the “college and career readiness” level of high school graduates through a set of “fewer, higher, clearer” standards.  What does this mean for high school graduation rates, particularly for low-income and minority students?  How do we balance the value of a high school credential with the value of what is actually learned in high school?

One of the biggest stories of American education in the 20th century was the massive expansion of secondary schooling. At the beginning of the 20th century, the high school graduation rate was about 6 percent and by the end of the century it had risen to about 80 percent (EPE Research Center 2012). The spectacular growth in the first half of the century was unique in the world, well ahead of Britain, France and Germany (Ringer 1979). Economic historian Claudia Goldin (1998) calls the rapid spread of secondary schooling the second great transformation of American schooling, after the growth of the common school in the 19th century.

The rise in the high school graduation rate has not been steady, however. Recent studies indicate that while it increased in the last decade, there was also a period between 1970 and 2000 when the graduation rate remained flat or even declined. Table 1 shows two estimates of the high school graduation rate. Education Week‘s Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center (2012), which tracks graduation over the whole century, relies on the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data (CCD). Murnane’s (2012) slightly higher estimates are produced by supplementing CCD data with household surveys from the Census Bureau and state longitudinal databases, which can better consider student mobility, grade retention, and recent immigration. (Neither calculation includes equivalency credentials.) Though they calculate high school graduation in different ways, these studies tell the same story about the last few decades: stagnation and recovery. One consequence of this stagnation was the United States falling to 22nd out of 27 developed countries in terms of high school graduation (OECD 2012).

This 30-year interruption in increasing graduation rates is puzzling for several reasons. First, it occurred in a period when the financial rate of return on a high school diploma was increasing. Students who finished high school could expect to make more money than high school dropouts, and this economic incentive increased in the 1980s and 1990s (Murnane 2013). Second, it occurred after the decade of the greatest absolute growth in high school graduation rates—the 1960s. In this decade, the category of the “dropout” was created, and “dropping out” was turned into a major social concern (Dorn, 1996). Graduation rates stagnated in the 1970s, despite a major cultural shift to thinking about completing high school as part of the normal life course and dropping out as deviance from that normative path.

Several explanations have been offered for this interruption. Economic historian Claudia Goldin (1998) links rising high school completion to economic recession. In the 1930s, the Great Depression created a scarcity of jobs for teenage males and boosted high school enrollment.  Goldin suggests that a similar scarcity of jobs for high-school age students in the 2000s may explain the higher graduation rates in the last decade. Another theory looks to an environmental cause. Lead exposure increased in the 1940s because of the wide use of leaded gasoline, and its effect on cognitive development and school performance is well established (Drum 2013). However, the decline in graduation that would be expected from this lead infusion is about a decade late, beginning in the 1970s rather than the 1960s, when children born in the 1940s were graduating from high school. It’s also possible that the upheaval of school integration in the late 1960s and into the 1970s could have impacted the graduation rates in the 1970s. However, as Johnson (2011) argues, desegregation actually increased school quality and per-pupil spending for black students, increasing black students’ educational attainment with no effect on the attainment of white students. In fact, the high school completion rates of black students did not stall until the mid-1980s, diverging slightly from the overall trend, though the substantial graduation gap between whites and minorities has changed very little in the last 35 years (Heckman and LaFontaine 2010).

Richard Murnane (2013) offers an explanation for the interrupted rise of high school graduation that is both convincing in its timing and directly linked to education policy. He suggests that dropout rates rose in the 1970s when states increased graduation requirements due to concern about the quality of the labor force. As he writes, “An assumption implicit in state education policies is that the quality of schooling will improve sufficiently enough to enable high school graduation rates to rise even as graduation requirements are stiffened” (68). However, improving school quality is a more difficult task than increasing academic graduation requirements, which do not address the cognitive and socioemotional resources that many economically disadvantaged students require before high school.

However, improving school quality is a more difficult task than increasing academic graduation requirements, which do not address the cognitive and socioemotional resources that many economically disadvantaged students require before high school.

This question of what interrupted the rising high school graduation rate is important because of what future changes may bode for the graduation rate. The Common Core Standards, which most states are adopting, will represent a marked increase in demands compared to current standards. If, in fact, similar reforms in the 1970s depressed graduation rates, the Common Core may affect the recent rise in graduation rates. However, if this recent increase is due to improved long-term, environmental conditions, such as restrictions on the pollutants produced by leaded gasoline, new reforms like the Common Core have fewer implications for graduation rates.

Raising standards, and thus expectations, for students does not inherently lead to higher drop-out rates, but attaching high stakes to standards could. The unintended consequences of high-stakes accountability policies are well documented. These consequences pose a threat to graduation rates in a few marked ways. When districts and schools are held accountable for their students’ test scores, as was the case under past standards-based reforms, the number of students who are “held back,” or retained from moving on to the next grade, have increased (Lee 2006).  Students who are retained are more likely to drop-out (Eide and Showalter 2011).  Test-based accountability policies have also led educators to focus on students who have a reasonable chance, with additional support, of passing high-stakes tests, to the detriment of those students at the greatest risk of dropping out (Booher-Jennings 2005). Finally, these consequences can be intensified when new assessments are introduced because these assessments are often implemented before instruction has been fully aligned to the standards. This is often evident in longitudinal trends as a dip in achievement directly following implementation of the new assessment (Koretz, Linn, Dunbar, and Shepard 1991). In each of these examples, the students affected most negatively by high-stakes accountability policies are those most at-risk of dropping out.

The impact of Common Core Standards on graduation rates will likely depend on the accountability systems put into place and thus will vary across states. States that have secured Race to the Top funding have, as part of their application, agreed to tie a portion of their teacher evaluation process to test scores. In New York State, for example, 40 percent of teachers’ yearly evaluations will be based upon student test scores (New York Governor’s Press Office 2012). Teachers who are evaluated as “unsatisfactory” for two years can immediately be recommended for termination by the district (New York State Department of Education 2011). While the intended effect of these and similar policies is to ensure students have “high-quality” teachers, lessons of past accountability policy suggest that in finding ways to ensure most students are successful on these tests, less attention may be given to students most at-risk of failing and thus also most at-risk of dropping out.

Finally, two consortia have been funded through Race to the Top to develop assessments aligned to the Common Core (Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers [PARCC] and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium [SMART]). These assessments are currently being piloted in a few states and are scheduled to be fully implemented in the 2014-2015 academic year. If policymakers do not allow for a predictable drop in student achievement when these assessments are implemented, the negative influence of high stakes accountability may be even more pronounced.

While the rising percentage of high school graduates described by Murnane occurred at the peak of the testing and accountability movement, it is clear that high stakes accountability disproportionately affects those students in need of the most support. For this reason, as the Common Core, and its fewer, higher, clearer standards, moves forward into implementation, states must give adequate attention to their accountability policies and the potential consequences of these policies on those students most at-risk of dropping out.

References

Booher-Jennings, Jennifer. 2005. “Below the Bubble: ‘Educational Triage’ and the Texas Accountability System.” American Education Research Journal 42(2): 231-268

Dorn, Sherman. 1996. Creating the Dropout: An Institutional and Social History of School Failure. Westport: Praeger.

Drum, Kevin. 2013. “America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead.” Mother Jones (January). Retrieved from http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline.

Eide, Eric and Mark Showalter. 2001. “The Effect of Grade Retention on Educational and Labor Market Outcomes.” Economics of Education Review 20(6): 563-576.

Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center. 2012. Diplomas Count—Trailing Behind, Moving Forward: Latino Students in U.S. Schools. Education Week, June 7. Retrieved from www.edweek.org/go/dc12.

Goldin, Claudia. 1998. “America’s Graduation from High School: The Evolution and Spread of Secondary Schooling in the Twentieth Century.” The Journal of Economic History, 58(2): 345-374.

Heckman, James and Paul LaFontaine. 2010. “The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels.” The Review of Economics and Statistics 92(2): 244-262.

Johnson, Rucker. 2011. “Long-Run Impacts of School Desegregation & School Quality on Adult Attainments.” Working paper no. 16664, National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved from http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/johnson_schooldesegregation_NBERw16664.pdf.

Koretz, David., Robert Linn, Stephen Dunbar, and Lorrie Shepard. (1991). “The Effects of High-Stakes Testing: Preliminary Evidence About Generalization Across Tests.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April, Chicago.

Lee, Jaekyung. 2006. “Tracking Achievement Gaps and Assessing the Impact of NCLB on the Gaps: An In-depth Look into National and State Reading and Math Outcome Trends.” The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, Cambridge. Retrieved from http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu.

Murnane, Richard. 2013. “U.S High School Graduation Rates: Patterns and Explanations.” National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved from http://papers.nber.org/tmp/32162-w18701.pdf.

New York Governor’s Press Office. 2012. “Governor Cuomo Announces Agreement on Evaluation Guidelines That Will Make New York State a National Leader on Teacher Accountability.“ Retrieved from http://www.governor.ny.gov/press/02162012teacherevaluations.

New York State Department of Education. 2011. “Regents Adopts Rules For Evaluating Teacher and Principal Effectiveness.” Retrieved from http://www.oms.nysed.gov/press/EvaluatingTeacherPrincipalEffectiveness.BORAdoptRules.html.

OECD. 2012. Education at a Glance 2012: OECD Indicators. Paris: OECD Publishing.

Ringer, Fritz. 1979. Education and Society in Modern Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

U.S. Department of Education. 2011. “Table 395: Median Annual Earnings of Year-Round, Full-Time Workers 25 Years Old and Over, By Highest Level of Educational Attainment and Sex, 1990 Through 2010. National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_395.asp.