Cleveland's miserable high school graduation appears to have improved considerably, and Jay Greene thinks he knows why:
When a Plain Dealer reporter asked me about the increase earlier this month, I said the numbers should be treated "with some healthy skepticism." I hadn't heard of a district making such rapid improvement in graduation rates...But I've updated my estimate for Cleveland's graduation rate, and found, I'm embarrassed to admit, that my skepticism was unwarranted. There does appear to be a large gain in graduation rates in recent years. According to my method of independently estimating graduation rates, Cleveland went from a 28 percent graduation rate for the class of 1998 to a 29 percent rate in 2000 and then jumped to 45 percent in 2002, the most recent year for which I can compute results. The improvement appears to be real....Cleveland began at such a low point that rapid improvement might have been somewhat easier. In 1998, Cleveland had the lowest graduation rate by far among large school districts nationwide...Second, Cleveland is home to a significant voucher program that may have placed pressure on the district to improve its quality...Third, the state takeover of Cleveland's schools may have been exactly the shock the district needed to turn itself around.
Cleveland, in essence, had nowhere to go but up, and two serious shakeups seem to have helped immensely. The national high school graduation rate is 71%; Ohio is actually above average, at 78%. So how did Cleveland get so bad to begin with?
One site, Catalyst For Cleveland Schools, claims the city lacks the " 'community pillars' like churches, large businesses and economically diverse schools" that other cities have. News station WCPN notes the following:
Cleveland ranked near the bottom in a number of categories - children who are disabled, who suffer from lead poisoning, and who live in poverty.
FairTest, not surprisingly, puts some of the blame on the Ohio graduation exit exam. What FairTest doesn't address is why students in Cleveland can't be expected to pass the items on this exam by the time they've completed 12 years of public schooling (caveat: this is the current version, not what might have been in place in 1995).
Sample reading item (following an approximately 540-word-count length essay entitle, "How The Turtle Got Her Shell"):
How do the emotions of the turtle change from before she discovers
her jewels are lost to after she realizes this fact?
A. joyful to spiteful
B. distressed to jovial
C. depressed to mirthful
D. cheerful to sorrowful
Sample math item (I've had to spell out mathematical notation):
The table below shows values for x and y.
x y
0 –1
1 0
2 3
3 8
4 15
5 24
Which of these equations represents the relationship between x and y?
A. y = x - 1
B. y = x + 19
C. y = x-squared - 1
D. y = 2(x-squared) - 5
Given that this exam is currently in place, yet Cleveland's graduation rates have nearly doubled, I'd say that, despite testing critics claims, the exam doesn't seem to be where the problem lay.
Posted by kswygert at March 29, 2005 12:36 PM