Education Next – Chad Aldeman
“I have a new report out this week called “Mind the Gap: The Case for Re-Imagining the Way States Judge High School Quality.” I hope you’ll give it a read. I’ll be blogging about it all week, starting today with a look at why we even need high school accountability systems at all. As I point out in the paper, we’re in the midst of a strange paradox. Reading and math achievement levels are increasing for 4th- and 8th-graders, but they’ve barely budged for high school students. High school graduation rates are at all-time highs, and more students are going to and persisting in college, but college dropouts are now a bigger problem than high school dropouts. The graph below shows what the trend in achievement scores looks like. Since 1973, math scores for the average 9-year-old have risen 25 points (on a 500-point scale). Scores for the average 13-year-old are up 19 points. Both of these are statistically and practically significant. But the average 17-year-old today is scoring only 2 points higher than the average 17-year-old in 1973, and even that small gain is not statistically distinguishable from 1973.”(more)