While hardball politics is not the place one should ever go looking for intellectual rigor, North Carolina’s political culture seems especially prone to hyperbole, illogic, and silliness.
These characteristics were in full display when the news broke that the graduation rate in North Carolina schools had exceeded 80 percent for the first time. As recently as 2006, only two-thirds of freshmen completed high school in four years. For the 2011-12, the rate was 80.2 percent.
You don’t usually see statistical swings that pronounced. It’s a trend that begs for careful study and thoughtful explanation. Instead, it set off a food fight in our political cafeteria.
Democrats argued that the trend reflected past successes in school reforms such as the ABCs of Public Education – successes that won’t be replicated now that the penny-pinching GOP is in charge. For their part, some Republicans claimed that the rise to 80.2 percent in 2011-12 showed that “our approach to education is working.”
Both sides get failing grades for these arguments. Whatever else you might say about policies enacted in 2011, it is simply not possible for them to have affected the 2011-12 graduation rate one way or the other. As for the provisions of the ABCs of Public Education, the legislation was enacted in the mid-1990s but then adjusted repeatedly in response to testing errors and budget constraints. That makes it hard to establish correlations, much less causality, between the program’s implementation and the rapid rise of graduation rates since 2006.
As is often true, North Carolina political partisans need to get out more. Our state isn’t the only one that has experienced rapid improvement in graduation rates. In a recent report for the nonprofit America’s Promise, researchers examined graduation-rate trends from 2002 to 2009, the last year for which comparable data are available. North Carolina definitely showed a large gain, nearly seven percentage points, but so did most other Southeastern states. Indeed, the gains in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama were larger than ours. Georgia’s and Florida’s weren’t far behind.
More generally, if you look at the map of graduation-rate gains, a regional dynamic presents itself. Most of the states with significant improvements were in the Southeast or Northeast. Nearly all of the states with weak gains or declines were in the Oil Patch or the Southwest. Coincidence? Probably not. Although analysts adjust the rate to compensate for overall changes in student population, they can’t control for all the demographic or economic trends at play.
For example, in states such as North Carolina with high teen unemployment, struggling kids who might once have dropped out to enter the workforce may stay in school if they can’t find jobs. That may well be a good decision for them in the long run – but it is a sign of economic weakness in the short run, and not necessarily reflective of successful school reforms.
My colleague Terry Stoops has identified another troubling aspect of the issue. At the same time that North Carolina’s graduation rate has been rising, the share of high-school graduates needing remedial education in college was also rising. That suggests it may be getting easier to graduate.
There’s still another reason why the political blame game is unhelpful. If Democrats are right to predict that fewer teachers means lower graduation rates in the future, what are we to make of the fact that educational employment in North Carolina public schools actually peaked in 2008-09, at 129,100 teachers and teacher assistants, and then declined by an average nearly 4,000 a year in 2009-10 and 2010-11, when Democrats were still in charge? The decline in 2011-12, under GOP rule, was somewhat lower at 3,000 positions.
Democrats weren’t sabotaging public education in 2009 any more than Republicans were in 2011. In reality, the total decline in classroom teachers from the 2009 peak is about five percent. And the difference between what the Democrats and Republicans proposed to spend on education was about one percent.
These are not dramatic differences. Nevertheless, the political drama in Raleigh continues.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and author of Our Best Foot Forward: An Investment Plan for North Carolina’s Economic Recovery.