Editorial: Higher graduation rates sound good, but what do they really tell us?

State schools Supt. Tom Torlakson had some good news this month about California schools: The high school graduation rate rose to 83%, up 8.5 percentage points since 2010. That means brighter prospects for at least some of the newly minted graduates, and reflects some excellent work by teachers and school leaders.

His announcement, however, raised a crucial question that the state needs to answer: How much of the increase indicates real educational improvement, and how much of it was attained through short cuts that allowed districts to boost their numbers without teaching young people the skills expected of a high school graduate? There have been disconcerting signs that too much of the latter has been going on in California, and to be fair, across the nation.

Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley, notes that 11th grade scores on the state’s standardized tests haven’t shown the improvement that the higher graduation rates would seem to indicate.

A key issue is the role played by online credit-recovery programs, which enable students to take classes online that they’d missed or failed in the classroom. Last year, this page revealed problems in the online credit-recovery courses that the Los Angeles Unified School District relied on to graduate more students — in particular, those who hadn’t passed the full series of courses required to enter the state’s public colleges and universities, a new prerequisite for an L.A. Unified diploma. The course materials were rigorous enough, but students were able to skip entire units by taking simple 10-question, multiple-choice pre-tests. If they got at least six of the answers right, they were counted as completing the whole unit, even if it was a section of the course that would otherwise have required them to write essays.

Soon after that editorial ran, the school board voted to raise the requirements slightly for the pre-tests — while still allowing many students to skip large amounts of course material.

The San Diego schools appear to have used these same courses, but also employed other tactics to boost their reported graduation rates. According to the nonprofit investigative news organization Voice of San Diego, the district revamped some courses to make them easier to pass and encouraged students who were the furthest behind to enroll in charter schools designed for credit recovery, thus removing them from the district’s rolls.

These are the two biggest districts in the state, accounting for more than 12% of its enrollment.

Of course, these two districts and many others also plunged into efforts that were of real benefit to students. Those included better tracking of individual students to catch them before they fell too far behind, and increased summer school and Saturday school classes to help them catch up. Too many able students had gotten tripped up by a single course in the past, or hadn’t even realized they were missing a required course for graduation.

The relatively new emphasis on graduation rates is a welcome change from what used to be a single-minded focus on test scores as the sole measure of school improvement. But as with test scores, when policymakers care too much about numbers and not enough about the quality of education behind them, schools will often respond by doing whatever it takes to move the numbers up quickly.

California doesn’t want to return to the days when graduation rates at schools in impoverished areas were closer to 50% than 100%. But it also cannot afford a return to the days when many high school graduates couldn’t hold on to decent jobs because they lacked reading, math and thinking skills. A recent report by the Public Policy Institute of California found that 80% of community college students end up in remedial classes.

Torlakson is entitled to cheer the new graduation numbers, but at the same time, he should be leading efforts to find out how much those numbers mean. How many of these new graduates are able to transition to college work without remedial help? How many have the skills to apprentice in rewarding fields that don’t require higher education, such as mechanical and construction careers? Or for that matter, driving a delivery truck? A decade ago, UPS was complaining that it couldn’t find enough applicants who could pass its literacy requirements for delivery drivers. Now that the state has eliminated its high school exit exam, it will be hard to know exactly what a diploma means.

The head of California’s schools owes it to students to ensure that the piece of paper they receive when they cross the stage will be worth something after the glow of commencement day fades.

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