High school graduation standards have collapsed. Does it matter?
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Today we tee up a fresh debate about high school diplomas, plus round up posts and comments from Eva Moskowitz, Ben Austin, Jill Barshay, John Bailey, Chad Aldeman, Karen Vaites, Jed Wallace, Matt Gandal, Tarek Grantham, and Homero Chavez.
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Last week, for Fordham’s Education Gadfly newsletter, I wrote about the remarkable educational attainment gains of the reform era.
The percentage of young Americans with no high school diploma dropped by more than half from the class of 1997 to the class of 2016—from 14 percent to 5 percent.
For Hispanic students, it dropped by a factor of three, from 37 percent to 12 percent. For young men, it dropped from 15 percent to 6 percent.
The percentage of young Americans with a two-year degree or higher shot up from 37 percent (class of 1997) to 51 percent (class of 2016). A majority of young Americans now have a college degree of some sort.
The percentage of young Black Americans with at least a two-year degree shot up from 27 to 42 percent. For young Hispanic Americans it more than doubled, from 17 percent to 36 percent.
But I added an important caveat to this great news:
There’s a debate in academe about how much these attainment gains amount to real progress versus “degree inflation.” I’ve certainly been skeptical of some increases in the high school graduation rate, given all the games we’ve seen at the state and local levels, such as the adoption of dubious credit recovery programs, widespread grade inflation, and the elimination of end-of-course and exit exams like MCAS...
I didn’t even mention the ways that school districts, including several Ohio cities, are now gaming the newfound enthusiasm for career and technical education to find easier pathways to graduation for their lowest performing students. Still:
…that doesn’t mean all of these improvements in the graduation rate are fake. Doug Harris at Tulane University dug into this a few years ago and concluded that most of the progress was real. It helps that student achievement and attainment were moving in the same direction.
As my post was going to print, The 74 published a devastating analysis by Jessika Harkay that was right on point: “Many
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