Juking the stats on graduation rates

Bernard Gassaway is a former New York City public schools teacher, principal, and superintendent of alternative schools and programs of more than two decades. So he knows from where he speaks. In the Aug. 29 issue of EdWeek Gassaway shines a light ("Public School Officials Are Artificially Inflating Graduation Rates. I've Seen It Myself")  on the way school officials have used various tricks to juke the stats on graduation rates.

As a direct result of a public thirst for schools to show progress, boards of education pressure superintendents, superintendents squeeze principals, principals ride teachers, and teachers stress students. The ultimate measure of progress for schools nationwide is high school graduation rates.Public school officials use a variety of schemes to give the appearance of progress.

This is nothing new of course. Some of you will harken back to the so-called Texas Miracle, one of the great school reform frauds of all time, engineered by then Texas Gov. George W. Bush and his school chief Rod Paige. Together, they rode the myth of zero dropouts all the way to the White House.

Here in Chicago, where the mayor runs the schools and his political success depends in large part on showing miraculous gains in standardized test schools and grad rate bumps, there a long history of juking the stats. In 2015, CPS was forced to lower four years of inflated high school graduation rates to account for a "higher-than-advertised" dropout rate, another blow to a district beset by financial and professional turmoil. The accuracy of the district's numbers had been called into question in a report by CPS' inspector general. But CPS officials did not announce the revised graduation rates until months after Mayor Rahm Emanuel won re-election.

Gassaway brings us up to date on the stats-juking process in New York City where incremental bumps in grad rates have been induced through the misuse of credit recovery, virtual learning, or reclassifying students with disabilities to lower the graduation standards bar.

But the real kicker comes next. It's all about getting rid of low-scoring or other problem students as a way to produce statistical gains in measurable student achievement.

Gassaway writes:

...when education officials cannot use any of the aforementioned tactics to get struggling students through high school, they transfer or push out students who are off-track for graduation—dropping the dead weight that is dragging down graduation statistics. Pushing students out is the most efficient way to increase a school's graduation rate. Principals transfer overage and under-credited students to alternative schools.

He could well have included the statistical impact produced by the mass out-migration of poor, African-American and their families from cities like Chicago in recent years. As urban public school populations shrink, and the poorest kids leave, schools in the black community are shuttered and resources are redirected towards selective-enrollment schools and charters, average test scores and graduation rates tend to rise.

Gassaway's expose may ring truest for those educators in urban districts who have toiled so long and hard, without adequate resources or support, to bring about academic success for students most at risk for dropping out, only to hear politicians like Rahm taking credit for supposed test score and grad rate gains. 

This is not to say that some of those gains aren't real. But the mayor's boasting about rising grad rates at CPS makes no sense unless he can point to some dramatic changes, either in the classroom (beyond the tracking of freshman students) or in the community that would keep kids from dropping out. So far neither he nor CEO Claypool have. Which leads me to believe that it's more about the whitenizing of the city. 

My last point on this, which I've made several times this week is: If the mayor really believed his own claims about dramatic improvements at CPS under his leadership, why would he be supporting school vouchers as an "escape route" from "failing schools"?

Question for the Mayor

CPAA Pres. Troy LaRaviere on Hitting Left says Rahm forced CPS principals to lobby for school funding/vouchers bill. 

If public schools aren't "failing", why are you pushing vouchers?

Let's accept for a moment, the mayor's latest claim that CPS' graduation rate jumped 4 percentage points from 2015-16 to 2016-17. I know it's not an easy thing to do, given CPS' propensity for juking the stats.

And let's accept as fact for a moment, that this bump wasn't mainly the result of the district switching metrics to measure dropouts or the result of the CPS steadily losing thousands of its poorest, underserved, and most dropout-prone students over the past two decades.

And let's for a moment at least, give all the credit for this bump to the administration and to current CPS leaders.

If we can accept all this, then one obvious question remains. Why in the hell did Rahm and fellow Democratic Party leaders push so hard to drive the inclusion of Betsy DeVos' vouchers (tax-credit "scholarships), meant to allow students to escape the city's  "failing schools", into the school funding bill?

And when I say, "push so hard", I refer to the illegal forcing of CPS principals, on school time, to lobby pols for the bill's passage.

For more on this last point, listen to our interview with Chicago Principals and Administrators Assoc. President Troy LaRaviere on this week's Hitting Left. 

More on Betsy DeVos' love affair with Florida's charter school system

Here's a follow-up on yesterday's post about Betsy DeVos' love affair with Florida's "choice" system, a system of charters and vouchers that she's practically paid for. DeVos recently named Florida's "choice" system as her "model" or "blueprint" for the rest of the country. Republicans are currently drafting legislation that would take the state's tax-credit (voucher) system nation wide.

But a closer look at that system exposes it as part of the problem rather than a solution for failed schools.

Let's start with DeVos' faulty premise that school vouchers (tax credits to pay for private and religious school tuition) and the state's vast network of privately-owned charters are needed as escape routes from the state's "failing" public schools.

Failing schools in Florida's racially-segregated school system, means those schools graded F, based on student FCAT scores. Since those standardized test scores correlate more with concentrated poverty that anything going on in the classrooms, "failing" has become a code word for poor, black or Latino. The A-F grading system in turn, drives the state's real estate market, pushing up home prices around high-scoring schools and reinforcing segregation in both schools and housing.

Sociologists call it social-reproduction, a system that replicates and widens racial and class inequality and transmits it from one generation to the next.

Sunday's Miami Sun-Sentinel ran a story on South Florida's reported "record number of schools labeled as failing".

It used to be rare to have more than a handful of F-rated schools in any of the three counties. But this year, there were a whopping 66 in South Florida. Broward County had 29, Miami-Dade County, 20, and Palm Beach County, 17. The figures include district-run and charter schools.

As if to reinforce my point, the article continues:

 Most of this year's F-rated schools have been D-or F-rated in the past, and all serve students in high-poverty areas.

Sunshine charter alternative school in Orlando

NOT ALL SCHOOLS ARE 'FAILING'... USA Today reports that Florida's network of charters and alternative schools provide a "release valve" for wealthier, high-scoring schools like Olympia High in Orlando.

Tucked among posh gated communities and meticulously landscaped shopping centers, Olympia High School in Orlando offers more than two dozen Advanced Placement courses, even more afterschool clubs, and an array of sports from bowling to water polo. U.S. News and World Report ranked it among the nation’s top 1,000 high schools last year. 

Olympia’s success in recent years, however, has been linked to another, quite different school 5 miles away. Last school year, 137 students assigned to Olympia instead attended Sunshine High, a charter alternative school run by a for-profit company. Sunshine stands a few doors down from a tobacco shop and a liquor store in a strip mall. It offers no sports teams and few extra-curricular activities.

Sunshine’s 455 students – more than 85 percent of whom are black or Hispanic – sit for four hours a day in front of computers with little or no live teaching. One former student said he was left to himself to goof off or cheat on tests by looking up answers on the internet. A current student said he was robbed near the strip mall’s parking lot, twice.

 Sunshine takes in cast-offs from Olympia and other Orlando high schools in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Olympia keeps its graduation rate above 90 percent — and its rating an “A” under Florida’s all-important grading system for schools — partly by shipping its worst achievers to Sunshine. Sunshine collects enough school district money to cover costs and pay its management firm, Accelerated Learning Solutions (ALS), a more than $1.5 million-a-year “management fee,” 2015 financial records show – more than what the school spends on instruction.

Get the picture?

Schools can only be labeled as losers when there are winners to compare them with. As charters and private alternatives re-segregate the system, they are often used to siphon off money and resources from public schools. But they can also be used to siphon off low-scoring kids and potential dropouts from the high-rated, wealthier and often whiter schools.

They can also mask the system's dropout rates. When students are re-assigned to charter alternatives, they are often on a path to dropping out. But they aren't counted as such by the A-rated schools they came from. This masking of dropouts goes on, not just in FL, but in school districts nation-wide.

According to the Sun-Sentinel:

Orlando is one of 83 school districts, from Newark to Los Angeles, where regular schools increased their graduation rates by at least one percentage point from 2010 to 2014 while sending more students into alternative education...Such a pattern could indicate that traditional schools are weeding out students at greater risk of dropping out, although there are many reasons why graduation rates rise.

A good reason to be skeptical about "miracle schools" and reported record-high graduation rates.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES: Not dropouts at CPS. Rather, 'transferring to motherhood'

FOX 32 News Chicago

Sarah Karp, BGA

"[At CPS] There was widespread misclassification of students...They were classified as transfers. In some cases transferring to motherhood." -- FOX 32

Stanford charter researcher Margaret “Macke” Raymond 

“[Ohio] Be very glad that you have Nevada, so you are not the worst.” -- Ohio charter schools have become a joke — literally

Curie High School is one of many high schools falsely labeling dropouts.

Bernie Sanders

“This campaign is sending a message to the billionaire class, and that message is you can’t have it all." -- Iowa speech

Scott Walker

“The first step is, we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public-­employee unions because you use divide-­and-­conquer.” -- N.Y. Times Magazine

Chris Christie on Clinton's shift to the left

 “I thought that Elizabeth Warren wasn’t running for president,” -- The Guardian

Here's the problem with 'data-driven" school reform. You need good data.

 

Rahm projected an 82% graduation rate when he ran for office.

“No one questions the facts: more CPS students are graduating than ever before, those students are more prepared for their futures and we’re making huge strides in helping struggling kids graduate." -- Rahm Emanuel

With all due respect, Mr. Mayor, some folks are questioning the your facts.

Becky Vevea/WBEZ and Sarah Karp/BGA certainly are:

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been talking proudly about something that is really a bit of a miracle: Even during a time of tight budgets and leadership chaos, Chicago Public Schools graduation rates have climbed to a record 69.4 percent. But new data obtained by WBEZ and the Better Government Association shows that number is wrong.

CPS records recently obtained under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act show at least 2,200 students from 25 Chicago high schools were counted as having transferred out of the district between 2011 and 2014. In reality, they were dropouts. The transfers aren’t factored into CPS graduation rates, while dropouts are. (Emanuel touts bogus graduation rate)

Cooked books. No problem. 

The worst part of this is that Rahm and CPS officials admit that the books are cooked but basically say, "Don't confuse us with facts. We know what we want you to know." They are also muzzling principals while the Ministry of Lies and Deception (MLD) goes into to full ass-cover mode.

CPS spokesman Bill McCaffrey also refused to make any principals available to talk about this story. McCaffrey acknowledged that the district has a problem, but said officials don't plan to go back and adjust the rates because of the “billion dollar deficit.” 

Curie Principal Phillip Perry did not respond to phone calls or emails. When reporters stopped by his school, they were not allowed past the front foyer and escorted out by a security guard and a woman who identified herself as a police officer, though she did not have her badge evident and was not in uniform.

Well, maybe that's not the worst part. The worst part may be that researchers at the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research appear to shrug off the deceptive reporting on graduation rates as simply "coding errors" at the school level. They appear to use a method that assumes misreporting that goes both ways, cancelling each other out. The Consortium's Emily Krone says:

In fact, UChicago CCSR research finds double-digit improvements in graduation rates over the last several years, even using a very conservative method of calculation that counts every student who transfers or goes to an alternative school as a dropout.

That's not a "conservative method.. It's a bad guess as well as an unsolicited confession on her part.

CCSR Director Elaine Allensworth claims that coding errors go both ways — some students counted as dropouts did legitimately transfer. Maybe so, but it's not a valid or reliable way to report dropout rates, especially when you have a mayor running for office by boasting of an 82% graduation rate.
The credibility of the researchers is also at stake here.

Okay, so maybe even that's not be the worst part. The worst part may be the complete loss of confidence and trust in administration transparency at the very time when the district needs to go begging for financial support for its schools and when the city's credit rating has been reduced to junk. Remember, it's not just about the false reporting of graduation rates.

They are also misreporting the city's crime rate; did the same on the missing children resulting from the school closures; they overestimated savings from controversial janitorial services with Aramark, partly by forgetting to count 22 entire schools; Rahm's promise to save $60 million by switching garbage collection from a ward-by-ward to a grid system fell $42 million short; and the D.O.T.'s
Inspector failure to report 53% of all requests for pothole and other street repairs.

Figures don't lie but liars can figure.

Rahm's school administrators cooked the books on dropouts

“The annual OIG report is a testament of our cooperation and demonstrates we do not tolerate any wrongdoing, and CPS has either addressed or is addressing all the issues in the report.” -- CPS spokesman Bill McCaffrey

CPS I.G. Nicholas Schuler

Ooooh that smell...While Rahm and BBB scrambled for media coverage about supposed record grad rates, CPS School administrators were busy "misclassifying" dropouts to make their schools look better. This according to the annual report from Rahm's own appointed schools I.G. Nicholas Schuler.

At one school alone, nearly 300 dropouts were wiped off the books since 2009. At another high school officials did the same thing for 18 students.

I don't necessarily blame U of C's Consortium on Chicago School Research for running with the numbers they get from CPS. I just think they should be cautious in how they spin those numbers. I guess I'm still pissed at the Consortium's lead author of it's report on grad rates, calling for a "celebration" of the reported 4% bump.

I also don't know if Rahm/BBB are actively pushing administrators to cook reported dropout rates (remember Bush's Texas "Miracle") or if they acted on their own. But bureaucrats know full well what numbers they're expected to produce if they are going to survive in a high-stakes "data-driven" system where the mayor runs the schools autocratically.

I doubt that Schuler's report, which may be giving up a little to hide a lot, will go anywhere except Rahm's circular file. The CPS I.G. can only make recommendations and has no power to force system-wide changes. Also, I'm pretty sure Schuler got the nod from Rahm's people before releasing the report, which mentions among other things,

• Nearly $900,000 stolen from two Chicago high schools.

• Lying CPS employees who skirted the system to get their own kids into the best schools.

• And a CPS administrator who “engaged in questionable conduct” when a nearly $100 million contract was in the process of being awarded.

With the election only weeks away, it's always better to get the dirt out yourself before your opponents do it. Then you can prime your troops with prepared media hokum, like the statement above from CPS spokesman Bill McCaffrey.

Not on Duncan's VIP list?...One thing you can probably count on is punishment of those teacher/parents who allegedly "skirted the system" to get their own kids into elite selective enrollment schools. I mean, who do they think they are, Gov. Rauner?

Does Rahm deserve the credit for bump in grad rates? Uh uh.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett claim credit for a reported 4% bump in CPS grad rates. 

Rahm Emanuel has rankled the Pilsen and Little Village communities with a new campaign ad — one in which, anti-coal activists say. he attempts to grab full credit for closing two area coal plants, when in fact it had taken years of work. Community response has been quick and angry.

But I'm wondering why there isn't the same angry response from parents and educators as Rahm and CEO Byrd-Bennett try and take credit for the reported steady rise in CPS graduation rates which began more than 5 years ago when Daley was the mayor and the likes of Ron Huberman and J.C. Brizard were running the schools for him and all claiming credit for improved graduation rates? This is also part of a national trend that began about the same time as in Chicago.

Perhaps Rahm and BBB will claim credit for the upward national trend as well.

It's my hunch that few even know how graduation rates are determined or how much credibility goes with the latest calculations, let alone what's driving them.

University of Chicago researchers report that grad rates have increased by 15% since 2008. But given a 2011 change (see below) in the way graduation rates are measured, it's hard to know how they got that figure. They attribute the increases in large part to the power of their own research, which shows a strong correlation between freshmen being on-track and graduating on time.

A TIME Magazine report points to studies released in 2005 and 2007 by researchers at UC's Urban Education Institute’s Consortium on Chicago School Research which "made a simple but powerful finding: Graduation is mostly determined in the ninth grade year."

Institute leader Tim Knowles touted this research back in April:

Freshmen who are on track to graduate in the ninth grade (earning no more than one semester F in a core course and accumulating sufficient credits) are four times more likely to graduate than students who are off track. Researchers found that being on track in the ninth grade is a better predictor of high school graduation than a student's race, family income, the neighborhood they come from and prior test scores, combined.

 Suddenly, addressing the dropout problem was not about the host of factors over which educators have no control — neighborhoods, poverty, violence or prior academic achievement. There was a single, manageable intervention point: ninth grade course performance.

There! claims Knowles. Finally, a magic bullet. Just examine the Institute's data. Forget about all those silly distractions like race, poverty, gun violence, family circumstances and the decimation of neighborhoods (including the mass closing of neighborhood schools), over which we supposedly "have no control". Then implement a few early interventions in the freshman year -- not a bad idea but certainly not a new one -- and voila!

When I say it's not a new one, I'm thinking back to the small-schools movement of the early '90s in Chicago, where early interventions like freshman academies were short-lived. As for 9th-grade on-track rates, you can go back earlier than that. There are tons of early intervention studies showing, for example, that 3rd-grade reading proficiency drives future academic success and that retaining (failing) elementary grade students increases the probability of them dropping out by 5X.

This is not to say that there's no value in the U of C study. Consortium researchers like Melissa Roderick have been pointing to the need for early intervention to reduce high school dropouts for years, and without overstating the power of good data, she and they deserve lots of credit for their focus on urban schools and students.

But research aside, whenever there is reported progress in public education, you can bet your last buck that teachers will be the last ones to receive the credit. First in line are glory-grubbing politicians like Rahm Emanuel who are quick to claim all the credit for last year's bump in grad rates. This, even though his current approach drains these very schools of badly-needed resources and shifts them instead to crony-run charter networks like UNO as well as to pet selective-enrollment schools.

An all-too-compliant media is quick to play along, either rendering unto Caesar... or trying to be "balanced" (OMG, even my pal, the usually critical-thinking Ben Joravsky).

But whether you buy all of the U of C research or not, there is little evidence that the current mayor's top-down, imposed education policies; i.e., more seat time, mass school closures, replacing neighborhood public schools with privately-run charters, whitenizing the teaching corps, cutting community-based health clinics, etc... have anything to do with improved graduation rates.

Other factors to consider

• Has anyone considered the possibility that CPS' shrinking student population along with the mass exodus of nearly a quarter of a million African-Americans, including thousands of school-aged children, has impacted graduation rates?

• In 2011 new federal guidelines set up a single, uniform standard that all states must follow when calculating these rates. Now, the rate will be based on a strict measurement of what is called a “four-year adjusted cohort.” The formula divides the number of students who earn a diploma in four years or less by the number of students who formed the original cohort—that is, the number of students who entered 9th grade together—of the graduating class. So the question is -- how much of the small 4% increase should be attributed to the way dropouts and grads are counted? I'm thinking back a few years to 2006, when this same Consortium found that  only 6.5% of CPS freshmen went on to earn four-year college degrees by their mid-20s, and among African-American and Latino males, only 3%. I'd be curious to see how that number has changed.

• I still haven't seen how newly-reported graduation rates break out by school, neighborhood, race and poverty. As I reported before, I am concerned that the rate increase may be more reflective of the changing demographics in the city than any single school intervention. 

Chicago Tonight's panel of "experts". No teachers allowed.

Just watched Chicago Tonight show on dropout prevention. Shouldn't have eaten first.

The panel, which included CPS' new accountability chief John Barker, must have set the world record for empty, meaningless cliches abut Common Core and data-driven this and new metrics that. Barker was aided in elevating data about freshman-on-track above any and all other issues, by Elaine Allensworth from the Consortium on Chicago School Research.

Accountability Chief Barker

The panel was sailing right along on Phil Ponce's soft-ball questions until a few people in the audience began raising issues of poverty, violence and other outside of school crises. The panel then turned into a gaggle of hand-wringing, head-nodding sympathizers of the poor with nothing responsive to add to the discussion.

The coup de grace came when a staffer from Amundsen High School (how did he get in the building?) asked about budget cuts and when neighborhood schools would finally get the resources they need, ie. for more counselors and smaller classes, to really make a dent in dropout prevention.

No teacher allowed

Barker responded that the system was in a "structural crisis" because of teachers' pensions. Maybe after the pension fund is raided on December 3rd, the problem will be solved and schools will finally be able to afford more data to scrutinize.

Wondering if armed guards were actually stationed around WTTW to make sure no classroom teachers or CTU folks would could sneak in? After all, what would they know about graduating students. and dropout prevention?

Study: Why do so many kids drop out?

The 2012 High School Dropouts in America survey finds that the great majority of kids who leave school early, do so because of out-of-school conditions such as family problems or economic necessity. The survey findings cut against the current mythology that bad teachers, failing schools and unions are the source of the dropout problem.

Nearly one-quarter — 23 percent — of Americans attribute their failure to complete high school to a lack of parental support or encouragement, followed by entering parenthood at 21 percent. Missing too many days of school ranked third at 17 percent. Other reasons for dropping out include failing classes (15 percent), uninteresting classes (15 percent) and suffering from mental illness (15 percent).

 One-third of high school dropouts say they are employed either full time, part time, or are self‐employed. Another 38 percent of the men and 26 percent of the women were unemployed.

According to the research, if a sixth grader in a high poverty school attends school less than 80 percent of the time, fails math or English, or receives an unsatisfactory behavior grade in a core course, there is a 75 percent chance he or she will drop out of high school.

I'm surprised that the study fails to mention the high incarceration rate among black and Latino youth and the lack of resources available to help transition them back into school once they are released.