The Education Pipeline in the United States 1970–2000

Walt Haney George Madaus Lisa Abrams Anne Wheelock Jing Miao Ileana Gruia

January 2004

The Education Pipeline in the United States 1970?2000

Lynch School of Education

BOSTON COLLEGE

The Education Pipeline in the United States, 1970-2000*

Walt Haney, George Madaus, Lisa Abrams, Anne Wheelock, Jing Miao, and Ilena Gruia,

January 2004

Education Pipeline Project, National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Educational Policy

Lynch School of Education Boston College

Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 *The research reported here was supported with a generous grant from the Ford Foundation. For such support we are extremely grateful, but note that the views expressed here are not necessarily those of anyone other than the authors.

Contents

I Introduction

1

II Data and methods

3

III Kindergarten Attendance More Universal

6

IV Attrition Between Grades 9 and 10 Increasing

10

V Bulge in Grade 9 Enrollments

14

VI Falling Graduation Rates

19

Mortality

25

Migration

26

Private School Enrollments

31

Home schooling

32

Grade 9 to Graduation Rates

34

The Education Pipeline 1970 vs. 2000

41

VII Causes and Consequences

44

Kindergarten attendance

45

Grade 1 flunk rate

45

Transition from elementary to high school

48

Constriction of high school pipeline

49

VIII Conclusion

56

References

63

Appendix

67

1

The Education Pipeline in the United States, 1970-2000

I Introduction Close to 100 years ago, in a book titled Laggards in our schools: A study of

retardation and elimination in city school systems, Leonard Ayres wrote: No standard which may be applied to a school system as a measure of

accomplishment is more significant than that which tells us what proportion of the pupils who enter the first grade succeed in reaching the final grade. (Ayres, 1909, p. 8) Nearly a century later, rates of student progress through elementary and secondary school have continued to be recognized as indicators of the quality of educational systems. In the Goals 2000 Act of 1994, the U.S. Congress and President Bill Clinton established as a national education goal that the United States should aspire to a high school graduation rate of 90%. In 2002, in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, the Congress and President George Bush set out as a criterion for evaluating secondary education, "graduation rates for public secondary school students (defined as the percentage of students who graduate from secondary school with a regular diploma in the standard number of years)" [Sec 1111(b)(2)(D)(i)]. In this report we present results of analyses of data on grade enrollment and graduation over the last several decades both nationally and for all 50 states. The main reasons for these analyses are that state-reported dropout statistics are often unreliable

Education Pipeline, p. 2.

and most states do not regularly report grade retention data, that is data on the rates at which students are held back to repeat grades. Hence, the only way to study long-term rates of student progress through elementary-secondary educational systems is to examine data on grade enrollment and graduates over time. This project grew out of a study of education reform in Texas in which it was found that analyzing enrollment and graduation statistics could show what was really happening when reliable statistics on dropouts were unavailable (Haney, 2000).

These analyses allow us to show how graduation rates, both nationally and for the states, have been changing in recent decades. More generally, these analyses allow us to examine the education pipeline in the United States to identify key transition points through which students progress, or fail to progress, from kindergarten through the grades to high school graduation. Before presenting results of analyses, we explain sources of data used and the manner in which enrollment and graduation data have been analyzed.

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