Exit exams can catch kids in dropout crunch

By Donna Harrington-Lueker

Education officials in Massachusetts trumpeted rising scores on the Bay State's high-stakes tests this fall, but researcher Anne Wheelock wasn't ready to jump on board the bandwagon.

According to her analysis of the state's data, 10th-graders may be scoring better on the state's exams, but the number of ninth-graders who've been held back continues to increase, especially in some of the state's urban and small working-class communities. And failure rates among African-American and Latino students continue to put the most disadvantaged students at greater risk of dropping out.

''Just at the kick-in point (when students have to pass the test to get their diploma), the proportion of kids who drop out has become even more disproportionately African-American and Latino than it already was,'' Wheelock says.

Nearly one in three of the students who failed the state's exam this year were African-American or Latino, according to Wheelock's analysis.

Call it the great unknown of high-stakes accountability. Faced with the pressure to boost student achievement, an increasing number of states have pushed to adopt large-scale testing programs, and they've used scores from those tests to prod schools and school districts to improve. Currently, 24 states have adopted so-called exit exams, which students must pass to get their diploma.

Upping the ante, President Bush's education plan calls for testing every child in grades three through eight every year -- at a cost of billions of dollars, according to some estimates.

But while everyone's talking about high-stakes tests, remarkably few are talking about high school dropouts. In fact, according to a National Research Council report released last summer, schools, states and the federal government fail to collect the data needed to track the effect of high-stakes tests on students already at risk for academic failure. Neither do they agree on how to count the dropout rate.

And those are striking omissions, given the very real social and economic consequences of not getting a diploma. They're also striking, given recent statistics:

* U.S. Census figures show a record number of Americans -- about 81% -- have completed high school. But among young adults between the ages of 18 and 24, the numbers are considerably lower. Only 75% of these young people have completed school. That's well below the 90% graduation rate the nation's governors and former President Bush made a goal more than a decade ago.

* For minority students, the numbers are more dismal. According to a new report from the Manhattan Institute, an education think tank, and the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the national graduation rate in 1998 was only 56% for African-Americans and 54% for Latinos. Among white students, the rate was 78%.

* Researchers who track dropout rates in states with high-stakes assessments have also warned that the nation's most vulnerable kids -- kids from low-income families, kids who don't speak English as their native language -- run the highest risk for not completing school. And increasingly, Wheelock says, more Massachusetts students are leaving school in the ninth and 10th grades and are less likely to return to school later on.

But graduation doesn't have to elude students at risk. And states don't have to throw out tests that have the potential to tell communities whether schools are educating all children.

To make that happen, though, states have to hold schools accountable not just for the scores on the third-grade reading test, but also for the number of ninth- or 10th-graders who make it to grade 12. That means steeling themselves to face the public furor that's likely to accompany accurate numbers on graduation rates, and it means helping schools better serve kids who are most at risk.

One promising option: Decades of research on small schools show that a school's size and its academic rigor make a significant difference in achievement, especially for youth at risk.

Just ask Juan Huertas, an 18-year-old graduate of the Met School in Providence. As an eighth-grader in a city middle school, Huertas cut classes more than 80 days a year and admits that life on the street had more allure than anything that went on in the classroom.

The Met, an innovative small school of about 100 students in downtown Providence, changed that behavior. Huertas designed his own course of study, worked closely with the same teacher for 4 years and learned to meet rigorous demands for excellence. Rather than drop out, he became the first in his family to attend college.

Eighteen-year-old Derek Amado, another Met student, tells the same story. Following Huertas' lead, he, too, has college on his mind, something he says was unthinkable to him as an eighth-grader.

A similar combination of personal attention and rigorous coursework is the driving force behind keeping at-risk freshmen in five Philadelphia high schools. Working with researchers from Johns Hopkins, the high schools offer freshman academies that provide students with double doses of mathematics and reading, special catch-up courses and teachers prepared to provide one-on-one attention.

The result: The number of students making it from ninth to 10th grade has increased as much as 30%, says Johns Hopkins researcher Robert Balfanz.

And those numbers, Balfanz and others say, may count more than any statewide score on a standardized exam.

''When you aggregate numbers, you lose things,'' Balfanz says. ''You lose how desperate things can be in cities.''

You also lose something society can't afford: an entire generation of students at risk.