Statistics 101

The ideals and efficiency of the Bush administration’s educational reform act, No Child Left Behind, have been called into question from the day it was proposed. As the bill was signed and initially enacted, hesitancies regarding the emphasis it placed on testing, that testing’s efficiency, and its ability to create solutions to the problems it was guaranteed to find, surfaced. Throughout this questioning, however, we were all assured that despite our clamoring that this was working. Working is good, right? Why change it if it’s working?

The question is, is it? On Monday the Bush administration, and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, announced that all states are now required to use the same formula to calculate the number of students who are graduating or dropping out. Perhaps this was an unimportant second or third page headline for many newspaper readers, but it begs an important question: What was happening before? If graduation statistics weren’t standardized from state to state in the past, what was the improvement we were seeing? Sam Dillon of the NYT reported on March 20 that Tennessee reports an 87% graduation rate, when the reality is that they lose approximately 13,000 students a year, which leaves only 63% to graduate. California reports 83% rate to the federal government, but estimated 67% for their own state records.

It’s fairly easy to speculate about the motivation behind this sort of number fudging. When states fail to meet expectations of NCLB, they are marked as “Target Schools.” These schools are then followed closely to make sure that their performance (in testing, graduation, etc.) improves. If this continues the school can be “restructured,” a process that is no doubt about as pleasant as it sounds.

It will be interesting to see how the graduation/drop out rates change with the new formula in place. I would guess that some of the progress that has been flaunted by the Dept. of Education will be quickly pulled from their website. Perhaps the incentive their expectations created was not what they expected.