aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Friday, December 21, 2007
On falling high-school-graduation rates
American high-school-graduation rates peaked around 1970 before entering a long period of stagnation and decline, according to a working paper released this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The decline in high-school graduation has been especially severe among male students, and it accounts for roughly half of the emerging gender gap in college attendance, according to the paper, which was written by James J. Heckman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and Paul A. LaFontaine, a researcher at the American Bar Foundation’s Center for Social Program Evaluation.
Apparently there’s been a debate about how to count high-school graduates. One side says graduation rates, especially for minorities, are far worse than the Ed Dept.’s figures. The other says that minorities’ graduation rates have slowly been converging with those of whites.
This new paper splits the difference but the results aren’t good:
In their paper, Mr. Heckman and Mr. LaFontaine gather information from a wide variety of data sources, including surveys conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, official enrollment figures from state departments of education, and longitudinal research such as the NCES’s High School and Beyond study.
Those data sources vary in their treatment of recent immigrants, prisoners, members of the military, and other groups. Mr. Heckman and Mr. LaFontaine massaged the studies’ findings to bring those variables into alignment. Once that is done, they write, the studies all tell essentially the same story: Graduation rates peaked around 40 years ago, and there has been no significant convergence between the rates for whites and the rates for minorities.
The authors note that there is tentative evidence that graduation rates have increased since the 2002 enactment of the No Child Left Behind law, which uses high-school graduation rates as a benchmark for states’ performance. But it is too soon, they write, to say whether such increases reflect true improvements, or whether states have simply learned to manipulate the figures. And in any case, they say, there is no reason to believe that graduation rates have returned to the peak levels of the late 1960s.
The paper is available here.
