Report: 'No Child Left Behind' Obscures Crisis in Graduation Rates
Feature Story by civilrights.org staff - 3/9/2004
As the controversial education initiative, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), enters its second year of implementation, a new study reports a "hidden crisis" in minority education."Losing Our Future: How Minority Youth are Being Left Behind," from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard (CRP), in conjunction with The Urban Institute, Advocates for Children of New York, and Results for America, reports that minority students face a dropout rate of 50 percent nationally. The report maintains that regulations from the Department of Education obscure the dangerous realities and hinder efforts at remedies.
"[T]he Department of Education issued regulations that allow schools, districts, and states to all but eliminate graduation rate accountability for minority subgroups," said Christopher Edley Jr., CRP co-director. "By doing so, Department officials have rendered these accountability measures virtually meaningless."
"Losing Our Future" reports that changes in the accountability standards established by Congress in NCLB have hidden the true graduation-rates for minority groups and weakened the requirements for improvement. As a result, 39 states have established "soft" improvement standards, meaning that they can avoid sanctions if any improvement -- even less than one percent -- is shown in graduation rates. Although these "Adequate Yearly Progress" standards were written into NCLB to hold states accountable for minority graduation rates, currently only nine states retain fixed yearly goals for improvement.
"The dropout data in use today misleads the public into thinking that most students are earning diplomas," Urban Institute Research Associate Dr. Christopher Swanson said. "The reality is that there is little, or no, state or federal oversight of dropout and graduation rate reports for accuracy."
Current methods used for counting graduates also have allowed schools to over-report their numbers of minority graduates, the report says. Particularly misleading is the use of a formula that counts students entering their senior year in high school and graduating, but ignores students who dropped out before 12th grade.
According to the report, while 75 percent of white students graduated from high school in 2001, only 50 percent of all black students, 51 percent of Native American students, and 53 percent of Hispanic students earned a high school diploma in the same year. The study found that the rates were worse for young minority men, with black, Native American, and Hispanic men graduating at rates of 43 percent, 47 percent, and 48 percent, respectively.
"The implications of the hidden minority dropout crisis in America [are] far-reaching and devastating for individuals, communities, and the economic vitality of this country," said Advocates for Children of New York Executive Director Jill Chaifetz. "High school dropouts are far more likely to be unemployed, in prison, and living in poverty."
As the nation celebrates the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the study has linked low graduation rates to the return of segregated schools. In fact every state or district with high minority concentrations had lower graduation rates than districts with majorities of white students. Previous reports from the CRP suggest that segregation in education is on the rise, which researchers say will mean an increase in dropout rates as well.
In response to NCLB's gaps, legislators have introduced a Student Bill of Rights, which aims to correct some of the problems. The focus of this legislation, sponsored by Rep. Chaka Fatah, D-Penn., and Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., is the equalization of funding in rural and urban districts. Since segregated districts and high-poverty districts often demonstrate poor performance under the accountability aspects of NCLB, Fatah and Dodd expect that equalization of funding might help these schools perform at the same levels as suburban schools.
"We must provide all students with the resources necessary to become capable citizens able to compete for employment in the global economy," Rep. Fattah said. "This can't be accomplished if our schools don't have the resources to teach their students, including adequate and equitable funding."
