The Merced Sun-Star

May 1, 2006

Money not the cure for grad rates

By Dan Walters, Sacramento Bee columnist

The bottom line for any public education system is – or at least should be – how many of its young charges actually make it through 12 years of school and obtain high school diplomas that represent basic levels of knowledge and skills.

That may explain why, in the vast welter of test scores and other benchmarks, high school graduation rates are among the most difficult data to obtain. California officials say they want to know how many kids fall between the crack, but lack the capability to accurately track progress, or lack thereof, through the system.

A new tracking system is being developed that supposedly will provide the missing data. In the meantime, the Department of Education publishes high school graduation data that are, at best, guesswork, leaving it to non-government researchers to calculate more accurate rates.

The general conclusion of outside studies is that somewhere between 30 and 35 percent of California’s youngsters don’t make it through high school, with the graduation rates for African American and Latino youngsters – and school districts with heavy non-white enrollments – being significantly below the average.

The latest and most ambitious effort to calculate graduation data comes from the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research in New York City. Financed with a grant from Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ foundation, the Manhattan Institute used sophisticated modeling to produce high school graduation rates for almost every state and the nation’s 100 largest school districts, including many in California.

Overall, the study found, the graduation rate for American high schools in 2003 was 70 percent, ranging from 88 percent in New Jersey to 54 percent in South Carolina (the District of Columbia and Hawaii were not included because of insufficient data) with California 38^th at 65 percent. Graduation rates for African American (55 percent) and Latino youngsters (53 percent) were substantially below average, and girls of all races did significantly better than boys.

California’s large school districts were all over the map. San Francisco (76 percent), San Juan (82 percent) and Elk Grove (75 percent) stood out, for example, while Los Angeles (51 percent), Fresno (58 percent) and San Bernardino (42 percent, lowest in the nation) were decidedly subpar.

Perhaps the most interesting facet of the Manhattan Institute data, however, is that they allow us to make a bottom line comparison of California with other states on whether spending more money on schools translates into better outcomes.

New Jersey tops all states, according to a recent Census Bureau report of 2003-04 data, in per-pupil school spending at $12,981 and also, as mentioned earlier, is tops in high school graduation rates. But beyond that, the correlation completely collapses. New York, for example, is second in per-pupil spending at $12,930 but is 47^th in graduation rate at 58 percent. Conversely, Utah, dead last in spending at $5,008, is 14^th in graduation rate at 77 percent.

Some high-spending states rank high in graduation and some do not. Some low-spending states rank low in graduation and some do not. There’s simply no correlation. In fact, 17 of the 25 states that fall below California’s $7,748 in spending outperform California in high school graduation rates, including No. 2 Iowa and No. 4 North Dakota.

Clearly, money alone is not the panacea that advocates in the educational community would have us believe. Other factors – ethnicity, peer pressure, families, culture, English proficiency, curriculum, instructional quality, etc. – evidently play powerful roles in determining whether students make it through high school and thus acquire the fundamental basis for successful adult lives. Tellingly, the large California school districts with above-average graduation rates tend to have enrollments that are mostly white and Asian American, while those below the line tend to have largely Latino and African American student populations.

Unfortunately, the political debate over education has almost entirely focused on money rather than focusing on those other factors and devising strategies to overcome them – if, indeed, it would be possible to do so.