Just the facts: U.S. grad rate at its highest ever
Education opponents have been winning large amounts of newsprint and airtime with a supposed “graduation crisis” that is simply bogus. It’s time to set the record straight.
Economists Lawrence Mishel and Joydeep Roy analyze historical graduation rates in their Economic Policy Institute book “Rethinking Graduation Rates and Trends.”
Their findings show that U.S. high school graduation rates have never been higher. To restate, a higher percentage of students graduate from high school than at any other time in our history. The false notion that there is a dropout crisis is a weapon being used by the privatization/voucher/charter forces who intend to eliminate public education.
Yes, it would be ideal if still more students graduated from high school, and if there were no racial/ethnic gap in graduation rates. But again: Our public-school system is doing better than ever before at graduating students from high school and reducing the racial/ethnic gap in graduation rates.
According to Nicholas Lemann’s book “The Big Test,” it was only about World War II that graduation rates hit 50%. In the recent past, and to some degree in the present, depending on culture and demographic, it was not considered the norm or even desirable in many families for their kids to graduate from high school.
To illustrate, my own grandmother — born in 1899 and raised in Appalachian Maryland and West Virginia — dropped out of school after eighth grade to go to Columbus and get a job in a factory that made gloves. That was the norm and the expectation in her family, and it would have been an unthinkable act of defiance and disloyalty for her to try to insist on staying in school.
When I’ve mentioned this in conversation, I’ve sometimes gotten the response that education was so much more stellar then that graduating from eighth grade in 1914 was like graduating from high school today. Well, not really. My beloved grandmother was quite literate and wrote many letters. However, in one of them she wrote to tell me that men have one fewer rib than women on one side, proving that Genesis was literally true. Grandma, by the way, was an autoworker in Detroit for much of her working life, including through the Depression, and then became a hairdresser. Her resume reflects the economic opportunity available to a non-high school graduate in the past.
Back to Mishel and Roy. Here are quotes and summaries from their book.
“Some of the discussions of recent high school completion and dropout rates claim a newly discovered crisis of low completion. Remarkably, these recent discussions have paid very little attention to the trends in high school completion over the last 40 years. In fact, historically there has been remarkable progress in raising both high school completion rates and in closing racial/ethnic gaps in high school completion.”
Mishel and Roy explain that data are available only back to the 1960s. They adjust those data to control for two significant (and controversial) societal changes that impact the hard data:
“…one must adjust, as we do, for the increased incarceration among black men in the 1990s and for the increased immigration population among Hispanics (which we can only do for data starting in 1994).”
Compensating for those changes requires breaking the trend into three time segments: 1962-80, 1979-94 and 1994-2004. Here are their summaries for those time periods:
“Over the 1962-80 period, the high school completion rate improved remarkably among both blacks (up from 41.6% to 76.6%) and whites (up from 69.2% to 86.9%) and the black-white gap in completion decreased from 27.6 percentage points in 1962 to 10.3 percentage points in 1980.”
Mishel and Roy then report the trend for non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks from 1979-2004. “We do not report the trends for Hispanics in this time period because we can not exclude the recent immigrants in the data before 1994,” they explain. Here are the statistics:
“High school completion among non-Hispanic blacks, ages 25-29, rose from around 76-78% in the 1979-81 period to around 88% in 2004, a rise of about 11.0 percentage points. Non-Hispanic white rates of high school completion rose by 3.8 percentage points to about 93.0% by 2004. Thus, the black-white gap in completion (by diploma or GED) narrowed about 5.0 percentage points in 2004.“
In the trends from 1994-2004, Mishel and Roy exclude recent immigrants because their “educational attainment does not reflect the performance of U.S. schools. This is especially important for tracking trends among Hispanics – half of Hispanics ages 25-29 were not in (this) country 15 years earlier.”
Here are their findings for that period: “Rates of high school completion rose for every race/ethnic/gender category. There was especially large progress in raising the Hispanic completion rates, up 4.2 and 5.6 percentage points among men and women, respectively. There were increases in high school completion among both non-Hispanic whites and blacks.”
(The mathematically impaired, such as myself, need to be reminded that “percentage points” and “percent” are not the same thing.)
Mishel and Roy go on to note that the graduation rate for African-American men in that last period rose only a tiny bit, but that there are complexities because of the surge in incarceration for that demographic. That’s a tragic sociological issue for a different set of experts and a different discussion.
In any case, their findings conclusively put to rest the notion that there’s a new crisis in dropouts, discussion of which (as it’s a political weapon) is never presented in historical context. Mishel and Roy find it remarkable that the historical context is invariably left out of these discussions, but they’re economists, not politicians. It’s not remarkable; it’s a political strategy.
— Caroline
Economists Lawrence Mishel and Joydeep Roy analyze historical graduation rates in their Economic Policy Institute book “Rethinking Graduation Rates and Trends.”
Their findings show that U.S. high school graduation rates have never been higher. To restate, a higher percentage of students graduate from high school than at any other time in our history. The false notion that there is a dropout crisis is a weapon being used by the privatization/voucher/charter forces who intend to eliminate public education.
Yes, it would be ideal if still more students graduated from high school, and if there were no racial/ethnic gap in graduation rates. But again: Our public-school system is doing better than ever before at graduating students from high school and reducing the racial/ethnic gap in graduation rates.
According to Nicholas Lemann’s book “The Big Test,” it was only about World War II that graduation rates hit 50%. In the recent past, and to some degree in the present, depending on culture and demographic, it was not considered the norm or even desirable in many families for their kids to graduate from high school.
To illustrate, my own grandmother — born in 1899 and raised in Appalachian Maryland and West Virginia — dropped out of school after eighth grade to go to Columbus and get a job in a factory that made gloves. That was the norm and the expectation in her family, and it would have been an unthinkable act of defiance and disloyalty for her to try to insist on staying in school.
When I’ve mentioned this in conversation, I’ve sometimes gotten the response that education was so much more stellar then that graduating from eighth grade in 1914 was like graduating from high school today. Well, not really. My beloved grandmother was quite literate and wrote many letters. However, in one of them she wrote to tell me that men have one fewer rib than women on one side, proving that Genesis was literally true. Grandma, by the way, was an autoworker in Detroit for much of her working life, including through the Depression, and then became a hairdresser. Her resume reflects the economic opportunity available to a non-high school graduate in the past.
Back to Mishel and Roy. Here are quotes and summaries from their book.
“Some of the discussions of recent high school completion and dropout rates claim a newly discovered crisis of low completion. Remarkably, these recent discussions have paid very little attention to the trends in high school completion over the last 40 years. In fact, historically there has been remarkable progress in raising both high school completion rates and in closing racial/ethnic gaps in high school completion.”
Mishel and Roy explain that data are available only back to the 1960s. They adjust those data to control for two significant (and controversial) societal changes that impact the hard data:
“…one must adjust, as we do, for the increased incarceration among black men in the 1990s and for the increased immigration population among Hispanics (which we can only do for data starting in 1994).”
Compensating for those changes requires breaking the trend into three time segments: 1962-80, 1979-94 and 1994-2004. Here are their summaries for those time periods:
“Over the 1962-80 period, the high school completion rate improved remarkably among both blacks (up from 41.6% to 76.6%) and whites (up from 69.2% to 86.9%) and the black-white gap in completion decreased from 27.6 percentage points in 1962 to 10.3 percentage points in 1980.”
Mishel and Roy then report the trend for non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks from 1979-2004. “We do not report the trends for Hispanics in this time period because we can not exclude the recent immigrants in the data before 1994,” they explain. Here are the statistics:
“High school completion among non-Hispanic blacks, ages 25-29, rose from around 76-78% in the 1979-81 period to around 88% in 2004, a rise of about 11.0 percentage points. Non-Hispanic white rates of high school completion rose by 3.8 percentage points to about 93.0% by 2004. Thus, the black-white gap in completion (by diploma or GED) narrowed about 5.0 percentage points in 2004.“
In the trends from 1994-2004, Mishel and Roy exclude recent immigrants because their “educational attainment does not reflect the performance of U.S. schools. This is especially important for tracking trends among Hispanics – half of Hispanics ages 25-29 were not in (this) country 15 years earlier.”
Here are their findings for that period: “Rates of high school completion rose for every race/ethnic/gender category. There was especially large progress in raising the Hispanic completion rates, up 4.2 and 5.6 percentage points among men and women, respectively. There were increases in high school completion among both non-Hispanic whites and blacks.”
(The mathematically impaired, such as myself, need to be reminded that “percentage points” and “percent” are not the same thing.)
Mishel and Roy go on to note that the graduation rate for African-American men in that last period rose only a tiny bit, but that there are complexities because of the surge in incarceration for that demographic. That’s a tragic sociological issue for a different set of experts and a different discussion.
In any case, their findings conclusively put to rest the notion that there’s a new crisis in dropouts, discussion of which (as it’s a political weapon) is never presented in historical context. Mishel and Roy find it remarkable that the historical context is invariably left out of these discussions, but they’re economists, not politicians. It’s not remarkable; it’s a political strategy.
— Caroline
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