RALEIGH – North Carolina’s high-school graduation rate is famously low – and notoriously misrepresented by state officials – but policymakers still shouldn’t obsess too much about it.
I don’t mean to say that the graduation rate isn’t troubling. With a third or more of our ninth-graders failing to finish their high-school educations, there is obviously a need for efforts at dropout prevention, for better performance in elementary and middle school to keep students from falling too far behind their peers, and for more alternatives and choices for students who don’t see their current, government-assigned high-school settings as relevant or welcoming.
But the reason not to focus all our attention on high-school completion is that there is no guarantee that graduates from our public high schools are truly prepared for higher education or the world of work.
Neal McClusky, a policy analyst for the Cato Institute, provided an interesting national take on the problem in a recent School Reform News piece. He reported the findings of new surveys of employers, college professors, and high-school graduates themselves. The results aren’t exactly flattering for American high schools:
[Professors] estimated half of all students who arrive at their schools are inadequately prepared for college-level math and college-level writing. In addition, large percentages of instructors felt the public high schools are failing to adequately develop students’ abilities to do such things as “read and comprehend complex materials” (70 percent), “think analytically” (66 percent), and “do research” (59 percent).
Many graduates admitted that they did not leave high school with what they needed to succeed. Among both college-bound and employment-bound students, nearly 40 percent said there were gaps in their educational preparation. Interestingly, large majorities of all three groups – employers, graduates, and professors – said they favored higher academic standards and serious high-school exit exams, precisely the policies that other states are in the process of adopting and that some politicians here in North Carolina think might be too hard on our students.
We do them no favors, however, when we hand out diplomas that signify little of educational significance. McClusky reported that only 24 percent of graduates said that “they faced high academic expectations” in high school and “were significantly challenged.” And these are just the students who realize that their academic preparation was spotty. Others naturally believe that their high-school performance was up-to-snuff – after all, if it wasn’t, would they have received a diploma?
Yes, unfortunately.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.