Leaving Hometown High

ROBERT REISCHAUER, Urban Institute: I'd like to welcome you all to this First Tuesday forum. These are gatherings at which we try to showcase some interesting, relevant, and newsworthy research that's going on at the Urban Institute and hear the perspectives of experts, both in the academic domain and also in the real world—people who have had experience on the ground.

We have a topic today which is newsworthy, not simply because—this morning, as I was driving to work, I heard a discussion on a related topic which had to do with GEDs and what impact they have on future job prospects of individuals. And here we're gathered together to talk about high school graduation rates, the accountability measures that states have adopted under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the economic and social benefits both to individuals and to society from high school graduation, and some of the programs that might strengthen high school graduation, particularly among racial and ethnic minorities.

We have a very strong and diverse panel here to discuss some of these issues and I will just say a little word of background about each of the participants in the order that they will speak.

First we have Chris Swanson, who is a senior research associate here at the Urban Institute in the Education Policy Center, and he is leading a Department of Education-sponsored evaluation of the expanded flexibility of using the No Child Left Behind Act. Chris is also the co-principal investigator of a large five-year evaluation of the high school reform effort that is going on in the city of Baltimore.

He will be followed by Harry Holzer, who is a professor at Georgetown University and affiliated with the Urban Institute as a visiting fellow. I'm always reluctant to say he seems to be affiliated with almost every university and research group around—Michigan, Harvard, and Wisconsin, to name a few. Before he came to the Institute and Georgetown, he was a professor at Michigan State University; he left the cold climate of Michigan to be the chief economist at the Department of Labor during the Clinton administration.

Harry will be followed by Margaret Simms, who is vice president for governance and economic analysis at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, where she has been for some 19 years. Before that, she was a program director here at the Urban Institute, and she has taught at Atlanta University and the University of California at Santa Cruz, edited a number of volumes, and was the author of some as well.

Last but not least among the presenters is Bob Wise, the former governor of West Virginia, a nine-term Democratic congressman who I believe was an at-large whip at one point, somebody with whom I worked and whose skills I admired when I was on the Hill. He is now the president of the Alliance for Excellent Education. It's worth noting that during his term as governor of West Virginia, there were significant increases in the number of students graduating from high school and entering college, and significant improvement on test scores.

The forum will be moderated by Lynn Olson, who is the senior editor at Education Week, and is the executive project editor for Quality Counts, which is the annual report card that Education Week puts out on the performance of education in the 50 states. She has won numerous awards as a journalist in this area, is a board member of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and is the author of The School-to-Work Revolution.

With that, let me turn it over to you, Lynn.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Great. Well, thanks for joining us today on a really timely topic. As you know, the issue of high school graduation rates is back on the radar screen, in part because of provisions under No Child Left Behind that all states now publish graduation rates, disaggregated for major racial and ethnic groups, for low-income students, for students who speak limited English, and for students with disabilities. The law also requires that graduation rates, not disaggregated—I'm sure we'll talk about that—be used for accountability purposes in meeting adequate yearly progress.

In addition, and in part because of those requirements, we're seeing a lot of attention now on how you calculate graduation rates and what that really means, and with that comes some recognition that the rates we've traditionally relied on may in fact be vastly overreporting the percentage of students who are graduating with a standard high school diploma, particularly in large urban areas and for certain segments of the student population. And that's particularly troubling at a time when the lack of a high school diploma—as we'll hear from this panel today, I think—means your chances of doing well in the economy are really quite constrained.

So with that I'm going to turn it over to the panelists. They're each going to present for about six to eight minutes, and then we're going to open it up for questions, so as things occur to you, keep them in mind, and we'll try to throw it open to the audience as soon as we can.

So Chris is going to start us off.

CHRISTOPHER SWANSON, Urban Institute: Thank you, Lynn.

It occurred to me this morning that we're actually celebrating an anniversary of sorts here today. It was almost two years ago to the day that we had our first First Tuesday forum on graduation rates, so I think this is actually a nice opportunity to kind of look back and take stock on what we've learned in the past two years, and (at least from the Urban Institute's perspective) about a dozen reports later, and also look forward, especially since the high school is really on the radar screen for education reform, and figure out how graduation fits into this.

I'm going to touch briefly on four issues here. First is the nature of the graduation crisis we're facing. I know we have to be careful about how we use the term "crisis" nowadays, but I'll be bold and say we have a crisis on our hands. I'll talk a little bit about the NCLB context, which Lynn has alluded to, which is a very important piece in understanding how this issue has evolved in the public policy circle and in looking at ways it needs to be taken into account moving forward with high school reform. I'll talk a little bit about state implementation. This is one of the really tricky pieces with NCLB. NCLB lays out some guidelines, but the states have a lot of autonomy in certain respects in how they implement No Child Left Behind, especially for graduation rates. And then I'll close with just some observations and recommendations about how to move forward with graduation rates.

So, the crisis: about two years ago, a number of researchers and I started to look into graduation rates in this country. The conventional wisdom prior to that had been that graduation rates were pretty high, very high in fact. If you looked at the Current Population Survey, for example, which is probably the most prominent source of information on high school completion for years, if not decades, you would have seen a completion rate in the neighborhood of 85 to 87 percent, which seems pretty high, and I think some folks had started to think that, well, maybe that's as high as it's going to get.

So the motivation for dealing with the high school completion issue was pretty low at that point. New research has been coming out and has really built more of a consensus than it had two years ago: that in fact the graduation rates for public schools in particular are probably considerably lower than that. My own research puts the national graduation rate from our most recent report at about 68 percent for all students nationally, and that's a lot lower than we've been seeing in general, but underneath that overall number, we see tremendous disparities between different groups. For whites and Asians, graduation rates are about or a little above 75 percent. For historically disadvantaged groups, we're looking at graduation rates just a little below 50 percent. So it's a 50-50 chance of graduating from high school if you're African American, Latino, or Native American.

So this has really generated a lot of interest and concern about high school completion issues. And it's taken some people by surprise. You know, one of the questions is, why didn't we know we had such a problem at the time? You know, I'll be bold in saying we have a crisis, but I'll be not bold in not getting into the long history behind that, although it's a good Q&A topic if anyone has questions.

But one question is, why is high school important? And we'll hear more about this from Harry, but getting a diploma is an incredibly important indicator of individual and collective success—economically, socially, in terms of incarceration and things like that. Why we're so interested in graduation rates now is because of No Child Left Behind. As Lynn mentioned, No Child Left Behind has done a very important thing. For the first time in major federal legislation, it's introduced accountability for graduation rates along with test scores. And that's important, and although you may hear some criticism of No Child Left Behind up here today in certain respects, I think that's an important benefit, and we have to give credit where credit's due, and so that's a great advance.

But No Child Left Behind may have laid out some general parameters, and it's important to think why we have this accountability for graduation rates in the first place. This may not be obvious to everybody. When the law was being drafted, there was a concern that if accountability was based strictly on test scores, this might introduce an opportunity to game the system—introduce perverse incentives. And so, for example, if a high school was interested in raising its test scores, one way it could do this is by pushing out low-performing students. And so you've created a push-out problem and you've raised your test scores, but you've done so by violating the spirit of the law essentially. And so that's why we have this accountability in the first place, and that's why it's important to have strong accountability for graduation rates.

Now, as it turns out, through the regulatory process, a tremendous amount of flexibility has been left in the hands of the states in terms of how strong the accountability is for graduation rates. If we look at the test-score side of NCLB accountability, it's strong down the line. We have good methods for calculating test scores. People may have issues about bias, but, you know, there's a science behind it. We have a high goal: 100 percent proficiency by 2013-14. We have a requirement for states to chart incremental progress from year to year toward making that goal, and we have a very important requirement that test-score accountability must be met for all students as a whole and also disaggregated for racial and ethnic subgroups, special education students, low-income students, and so forth.

If you match that up with the graduation rate accountability, you really see a very shocking double standard. The things that are required for test-score accountability are not required for graduation rates. There's little, although growing, sense of what a valid rate is. The goal is left in the hands of the states and the states have picked goals, final goals, anywhere from a 50 percent to a 100 percent graduation rate. States do not have to make incremental progress, annual measurable objectives, in the language of NCLB, and in fact, any improvement can count, and sometimes just not backsliding can count as making adequate yearly progress (AYP) as far as graduation rates are concerned.

And finally, and importantly, states are not required to disaggregate graduation rates when they make their primary determination of adequate yearly progress. And given the huge gaps we've seen nationally, and in many states, between high- and low-performing groups, that's a particular concern with the accountability for No Child Left Behind.

I'm probably running short on time, so I'll move toward closing up here. I think what we really need to think about is graduation rates in the context of No Child Left Behind. It's the age of accountability, and whether people like No Child Left Behind or don't like No Child Left Behind, accountability is here to stay in public education. So, you know, it's time to think about getting with the program and to make that program a strong one. If we're thinking about smart accountability and strong accountability for graduation rates, we need valid ways to calculate graduation rates, and we need better federal guidance to let states know what a good method is, what a poor method is, which methods work better in certain contexts as opposed to others. That would be a very useful role for, I think, the federal government in this respect, and a productive one—one that doesn't get into discussions about the federal role as punishing local schools.

I think we need meaningful but attainable goals for graduation rates. We can hold up the 100 percent proficiency goal on the test-side score of No Child Left Behind, but that's been open to a lot of criticism as being unrealistic, and I think we don't need to necessarily get into that territory with graduation rates, but we do need a meaningful goal. If we're concerned about equity and social justice, we absolutely have to have accountability for subgroups with graduation rates, and that doesn't exist in a majority of states at this point.

And finally, in particular as we look toward this growing movement for high school reform, it's important that high school graduation stay part of the discussion. I think we have a tendency in policy circles, in education at least, to gravitate toward test scores. It's something we're familiar with, it's something that seems real, and it's something we're used to doing. Graduation rates take a little bit of a different thought process. We have to approach it from a different perspective, but if you think about the importance of getting a diploma for an individual student versus getting, you know, a 75 or a 76 percent on his or her state assessment, the difference in the importance of the diploma is clear.

And so we have to, I think, bring the real-life consequences of finishing high school, opportunities to get a good job or to go on to college, as part of this discussion as we move forward. Thank you.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Great.

Harry, I think you're now going to talk about what the economic consequences are of having a diploma or not having a diploma.

HARRY HOLZER, Urban Institute: That's right. Thank you, Lynn.

Well, my charge was to take the numbers that Chris presented and talk a little bit about what they mean in terms of these labor market outcomes. So for at least a couple of minutes, I'm going to refer to a handout in everybody's packet called "Employment Outcomes by High School Graduation Status." This is a couple of tables that I put together from calculations using the Current Population Survey, the CPS, which is the monthly household survey that the government uses to calculate employment rates every month, and other economic indicators. We used the March CPS because that has information on previous years' earnings as well as employment.

I apologize. There are probably more numbers on these two tables than most of what you'd like to see. You know, economists like me think that pages and pages of numbers are a wonderful thing. Normal people don't necessarily see it that way, but I'm just going to highlight a few things in these tables selectively and then move on.

So table 1 is basically a calculation of employment rates, the fraction of the population employed, comparing high school graduates with high school dropouts, broken down by gender and also by race and by age group. If you glance at these numbers very quickly—this won't be a big surprise—high school dropouts are working less than high school graduates in every single category—every single age group, every single race or gender group. But there are differences in how large those differences are across these groups. For instance, if you look at Hispanic men, both in the youngest group and in the prime age group, the difference isn't that large. It turns out that Hispanic men, many of whom are immigrants—not all, but immigrants or children of immigrants—even when they don't have a high school diploma, they work at very high rates. Compare them, for instance, to young African-American men and you see a much, much steeper drop-off in all age groups in the amount of work. High school dropouts work about a third less than high school graduates, and high school graduates are already lagging behind their counterparts. So it's really a pretty steep decline, and it's very worrisome.

Note, for instance, that in the youngest group, high school dropout males are working even less than high school dropout females in the African-American community. That's something you don't see very often, the young men working less. And remember that the CPS doesn't include anybody who is incarcerated right now, and if they were included, the employment numbers would look that much worse for young black men. So you have a dramatic drop-off in employment activity for them. You also have fairly large drop-offs in employment for women who are high school dropouts, and that's often related to their childbearing behavior. Young women who are high school dropouts have children early and relatively often, and that impedes their labor market activity for a long period of time.

Now, if you turn quickly to the second page, I have sort of the same breakdowns, but I have numbers on annual earnings—and this is annual earnings in thousands of dollars rather than employment—you see a similar pattern: high school dropouts in every single category are earning a good deal less per year than are high school graduates. In percentage terms, the drop-off is bigger here than it was in the previous table, and that makes sense because when you think about annual earnings, annual earnings are a combination of how much people work as well as how much they earn per hour when they're working, and high school dropouts lag behind high school graduates on both dimensions. So there's an employment effect and also a wage effect going on here.

The other thing you notice, if you compare the two different age groups, if you compare the gaps for the really youngest crowd versus the gaps for the 25- to 54-year-olds, in percentage terms the gaps are considerably larger for the older group. The gaps are about—high school dropouts are earning a quarter to a half less on average than high school graduates when they're very young (and that's already a pretty big gap), but then as they age, those gaps widen. So in the prime age group, high school dropouts are earning considerably less than half of what high school graduates are earning for most of these groups. And that says that high school dropouts not only do poorly when they enter the labor market, but then they don't advance very much and they fall further and further behind as they age, and that's problematic as well.

So, to talk about, then, what these numbers—I mean, the punch line is very clear, I think, for these numbers. High school dropouts, by and large, do quite poorly in the labor market, and those difficulties last over their entire lifetimes. I want to sort of say what this means for a couple of issues. Number one, what does this say about the value of a high school diploma in the current economy? Now, notice I didn't include anything on people with college diplomas, or even people with some college. That would have made the tables that much more complicated, and I didn't want to do that. But it's pretty well known that high school graduates have fallen considerably behind relative to folks with college degrees or even associates degrees, or almost any kind of postsecondary certification.

So in one sense, a high school diploma is less important in the labor market than it used to be. It's not as strong an indicator to employers of the kinds of skills that they're looking for. At the same time, not having that high school diploma is a lot worse than it used to be. Those people go almost nowhere in the labor market. So it's sort of a mixed story. Having a high school diploma doesn't guarantee that you have skills and that you're going to do well in the labor market; not having a high school diploma does guarantee, in most cases, that you're going to do quite poorly. And so it is an important degree to have, and it sends an important signal, and it affects future opportunities both for learning and for work.

The other thing I wanted to talk about briefly is a little more about these differences across groups. As I've said, the employment rates look quite different, for instance, for Hispanic men or white men without high school diplomas relative to young African-American men. The numbers for men and women look somewhat different. What's that all about? I think the numbers for Hispanic men indicate we have a labor market where there are actually a pretty good-sized chunk of jobs that don't require skills and don't require high school diplomas—all kinds of cleaning jobs and low-level blue-collar work, low-level service work, and the only problem with those jobs is they don't pay very much and they are sort of tickets to nowhere really.

Now, for newly arrived immigrants, these jobs are often quite attractive relative to what they had before, and these are, in many cases, families where the demands for income, and immediate income, are fairly strong. So there's a strong incentive for young men to take those jobs and often to drop out of school. The problem is that they're then locked into a low-wage situation, largely for the rest of their lives. For young black men the situation is quite different. Because they don't have a labor-market alternative that draws them out of school, they frequently disconnect from both the world of school and the world of work, so they're doubly disadvantaged. And with very high odds, young black men without high school diplomas will get in trouble with the law and end up being incarcerated in very, very large numbers. The majority of young high school dropouts do end up in prison. This is a disaster not only for themselves, but also for their families, their communities, and in some ways the nation. And even if we're benefiting from those high incarceration rates in terms of lower crime rates, it carries a big cost in many other ways.

So there are serious consequences for dropping out of high school for many different groups. What does all this say about high school reform? And I'll try to wrap up, and I know Margaret and Governor Wise are going to talk a lot more about the policy meaning of these numbers. I would just sort of say quickly that on the one hand, we want the high school diploma to matter. We just don't want to push people through and give them pieces of paper because we want the degree to matter in the labor market. We don't want to water it down even more than it already has been in terms of employers' reactions to it. On the other hand, I think the simpleminded focus on cognitive skills and on preparing people for college, which has really been very strongly highlighted in many very recent proposals—Bill Gates and the National Governors Association issued a big report focusing almost exclusively on college-ready skills—I think that's too narrow for the populations that we're often talking about here. The draw to the labor market is going to be very strong for the young immigrants, the young Hispanic men. The absence of a draw to the labor market for the young black men early in life is a disaster.

I think high school reform has to be defined broadly. It has to include cognitive skills and academics but also preparation for the world of work, links to the labor market, occupational skills, and occupational credentials—and how we integrate those in a sensible way is a topic for more discussion, but I think that has to be on the table.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Great.

Margaret, you'll pick up on that, I'm sure, and talk about how this fits in with the policy picture.

MARGARET SIMMS, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: Yes, I want to focus on two things. One, I'd like to pick up just briefly on Harry's point about the importance of a high school diploma in economic terms. And he hinted at it: it's a prerequisite for what the market is increasingly requiring, which is postsecondary skills, training, or education. You'll find in your packet—and you don't have to turn to it now—a brief summary of some work that Cecilia Conrad did for us at the Joint Center that focused on high-tech jobs—who gets them and what explains differences or gaps between whites and blacks in terms of obtaining those jobs. And she focused on two kinds of jobs. One is jobs that don't require a college degree. So it doesn't mean you have to go four years to college, but they often require skills that are either acquired in community college, voc tech, or in the military, like computer control programmers and operators, ATM repairs, and so forth.

Well, if you don't have a high school diploma, it's going to be very difficult to get into any of those training programs. Traditionally for African-American men, the military was often a way in which to acquire skills that, for various reasons, were not obtained or obtainable in their communities. Well, the Army now requires a high percentage of their enlistees to have high school diplomas, so it's closed off what had been a traditional route for people who didn't do well in the education system to get the kind of skills to be productive in the labor market.

In the work that Cecilia did, she did discover that education appears to play an important role in the difference in job-gaining success for African Americans in many jobs, particularly those that require only two years of college. So there's an area where we could see that focusing more on education would be important, but not just on finishing high school—but also in your packet you'll find a couple of graphs on course-taking, and there, looking at advanced math and advanced science, are differences by race in terms of the courses that have been taken by people who have completed high school. So just finishing high school is not enough. As we look at the high school reform we need to focus on what it is that people have when they leave high school.

Now, I think one of the issues that are very important in terms of looking at high school reform and No Child Left Behind, for African Americans and for others disadvantaged in and by the educational system—the challenge is how to balance accountability and attainment. On the one hand, it does a student little good to graduate without the skills and the exposure, the course-taking that would be necessary to perform in the workplace or in higher education, but on the other hand, some forms of accountability can actually serve to widen gaps as opposed to narrow them if the impact of not performing well is to reduce the resources available to the schools where these students are highly concentrated.

I think that in some ways when Harry talked about the kinds of skills that people need to bring to the workplace when they get a high school degree, not just the kinds of cognitive skills that take you through college but other workplace-oriented skills, it reminded me of some of the work that we were doing at the Joint Center in looking at the application of school to work in this country in comparison with the success of apprenticeship programs in Europe—and that is that you can't build a strong program on top of a shaky elementary education. So if you start to implement high school reform, now you have students who, even in the best of circumstances, have not been exposed to whatever benefits No Child Left Behind had in terms of strengthening elementary education because this is the group that's kind of betwixt and between. They passed through those early years of education before accountability and kind of reached high school at a point at which they're going to be now hit with "now you've got to perform" and now your schools have to perform in a way that really wasn't expected when you started on this process.

And so we need to find ways in which not only do we hold schools accountable but we ensure that the students come out with the kinds of education they need to perform well in the labor market, and we also need—and I don't have time to talk about it—that where employers perceived that they have had an equal education, which is not always the case now.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Great.

So, Bob, Chris talked about this as a crisis, but my sense is the public doesn't quite perceive the crisis yet, and I'm hoping you could talk a little bit about where the public—

BOB WISE, Alliance for Excellent Education: You're a very good moderator because you cut three minutes off my introduction as I got to the crisis. (Laughter.) And you're absolutely correct. I believe it is a crisis, and indeed, I believe this discussion comes at a very important time, because the stars have aligned for just briefly, to get something done, but it is a brief time. So we've got everything in confluence; what do we do with it? And along come people to really try to do something about meaningful graduation data. I wish this discussion were taking place across the country. It needs to because that's the only way we're going to get the level of crisis in front of people.

Let's look at the positive things that have happened. First of all, in the last few months, the president of the United States has declared high schools to be in crisis—devoted the first three sentences of the State of the Union to that subject. Secretary Spellings has been very articulate and hard driving on the subject.

The governors of the nation came together in Washington two months ago for a national summit. Bill Gates and many in the business community have talked about the crisis, and so we've got the top policymakers, but as one governor said to me at the National Governors Association (NGA) meeting, "The only problem is I've held a number of town meetings and nobody's talking to me at home about it."

And so, that's what the importance of this data is—this data can be used to drive home exactly the nature of the crisis. Commencement is going to be taking place across the country in just a few weeks, but what was brought home to me the other day in North Carolina was when a former teacher said to me, you know, I went back to a high school graduation—I went back and got the yearbook from four years before, and I looked at what was then the entering 9th grade class, and I crossed off the faces of those who would not be walking across the stage. And there are a few you can discount—they moved or their parents were transferred or something—but he said, after a while, you stop running out of explanations. And so the key here is to drive this home to the public.

I though it was well—and actually in your packet you'll find a press clipping from a Texas newspaper, and the Alliance for Excellent Education, which I'm the president of, has just released to every state an estimate of how much money would be in their economy through simply—it's similar to what Harry does—simply projecting the difference between a high school dropout's wages and a high school graduate's. So if you cut the dropout rate in half, using the data essentially that Chris gathers and the Manhattan Institute, what would be your savings? Well, one of the Texas officials, not a state official but a county official, noted that—in effect what he was saying was it didn't really apply because they only had a dropout rate in one of the poorest counties in the state—which I might add is also in the country—of 5.6 percent. That's not what anybody else thinks. But correspondingly, another person quoted in that article, who's on the board of the local community college, noted that only 17 percent of the students show up able to handle the work in the community college. And so, this kind of disconnect means that there's a disconnect in the data.

We've got a brief open window. We need to be doing some things with this data. First of all, it has to be incorporated in every discussion across the country. So to those of you who actually work in groups that have those kinds of abilities, please do so. We've got to be taking it to groups that aren't normally associated in this—a number of the civil rights organizations, for instance—that don't focus on high schools per se. But this is particularly critical because of the data for people of color and what happens where you've got a 50 percent graduation rate at best.

We have to be willing to talk about adolescent literacy and the fact that 70 percent of our 8th graders are reading at basic and below—only 30 percent read at proficient—and what that means because, unfortunately, those numbers hold up as they get into high school. We have to be willing to attach some more sanctions to NCLB for graduation. And Chris mentioned this—for graduation you're looking at disaggregated data, and there are sanctions attached for not being able to graduate enough. I think there's a difference here, as I say—and there are some other statistics I want to get to very quickly.

You haven't handed me my note yet.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: You're okay so far.

BOB WISE, Alliance for Excellent Education: Okay. She's a brave moderator. Usually most moderators get in the middle so they can really control this thing, but I can tell Lynn's got the iron hand.

But let's look at some other statistics quickly. Good news, good statistics: governors are involved, the president's involved, the Department of Education, and NGA and businesses are involved. The challenges? The public's not engaged, and there are varying degrees of effort in varying states. We've done an analysis and divided the states into three tiers from the most active to those that really need some assistance. And finally, there's another main statistic taking place that could weigh against action: 36 governors are up for election or reelection in '06. Trust me, having been there, if you're looking at—ooh, here it comes. (Chuckles.) If you're looking at a reelection campaign, your vision narrows significantly. Or if you're going out of office, you want to consolidate what you put into place but you're not sure you have time to take on something and leave it to a successor.

And so, if this data is to be meaningful, then all of us here have to be magnifying exponentially our efforts to get the word out about what the data are and what's their significance, and make it meaningful. Once again, this data won't mean—a friend of mine at home has a saying, an old state senator: "If the folks in the little white houses don't understand it or get it, then you're not communicating." This is what we've got to get out of this room and get to a lot of white houses, and condos too. Thanks.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Great. So we have people walking around with portable microphones, and if you want to raise your hand, we'll try to get a mike to you to ask questions.

RICH LEVY, National Multi-Housing Council: My question is for Dr. Swanson. What do you think the reason is that the Current Population Survey—do you have any ideas why the Current Population Survey is overreporting people's graduation rates?

CHRISTOPHER SWANSON, Urban Institute: This is the thing where I wasn't being bold, right? I wasn't explaining the background. Just really quickly, the Current Population Survey, as Harry mentioned, is a monthly survey of households. In October, they asked a lot of questions about educational attainment, and that's where we, for decades, have gotten our information about graduation rates—completion rates, technically.

When you look underneath the surface at what the CPS tells us, it's not actually a graduation rate in the sense that we're interested in public school performance now with No Child Left Behind. What the CPS gives you is basically a young adult educational attainment rate. And so it looks at 18- to 24-year-olds and tries to figure out how much education they've had. Problems with the CPS: it has a really difficult time distinguishing between somebody who's really graduated with a diploma as opposed to somebody who's gotten a GED, some other credential, or just entered the 12th grade but has not actually gotten all the way across the stage. It's indirectly reported. There's one person in the household who reports on behalf of everybody else in the household. It's very socially desirable to have finished high school. It's very undesirable not to have finished high school. And so there may be misreporting or misunderstandings about what the questions mean.

In addition, there are coverage issues in terms of the populations that the CPS looks at. As Harry mentioned, it does not include incarcerated individuals or other people in institutionalized settings. When you add all these things up, first you've got the wrong kind of number for accountability purposes, and then you have a number of different factors that would tend to inflate the number you're getting out of CPS relative to kind of a real performance-based public school graduation rate.

And so those are the numbers that have been in the public eye for a really long time, and it's only now that we've taken a different look, looking at data from public school systems, calculating these rates in different and multiple ways, that we're getting a sense that the graduation rates are actually pretty low. My own work puts the graduation rate around 70 percent, and there's a whole slew of other studies, actually in the past couple of years, that are getting very similar answers but using different methods. And so I think that gives us some confidence that we're grasping something real here, and it's time to pay closer attention.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Chris, let me follow up on that in terms of No Child Left Behind. You mentioned the flexibility under it right now for states to calculate the graduation rate, to set targets. For anyone on the panel, should the federal government step in and set some clear criteria? If so, what would you put in there? And, Bob, you talked about disaggregation for the purposes of making adequate yearly progress. Given the pushback from states about the number of schools failing to make adequate progress even before you do that, how do you think that would sell politically?

BOB WISE, Alliance for Excellent Education: Lynn, if you're going to ask for consistency—because only six months ago I was writing letters about how No Child Left Behind had to be—we have to be given more flexibility at the state level—there probably will be. But the concern about No Child Left Behind, from a state official's standpoint, yes, is somewhat about the requirements, but it's also about resources. And I don't know any governor, at least that I'm aware of, who opposes the intent of No Child Left Behind, and we all have benefited from the increased reporting and standards that it requires.

So I think the pushback comes in the sense of, well, it's not fully implemented yet at the elementary school level and now there's another requirement. I think the benefit, though—and I think the argument can be made—is that this assists you, particularly as governors right now are focusing 30 governors had in their State of the State messages some reference to high school reform, which the year before, it was like four.

And so what this means is that this is on governors' minds. They're thinking about it, and so I think that maybe not this year but next year you might be able to get more grudging acknowledgment that this needs to be done.

LYNN OLSON, Alliance for Excellent Education: And, Chris, should the feds step in and be stricter about how states calculate graduation rates, and if so, what are one or two things you'd point to that would help out?

CHRISTOPHER SWANSON, Urban Institute: I think the feds could be more helpful in terms of calculating graduation rates. And the situation we have now is—this whole issue is something that's deceptively simple. We didn't think we had a problem and we have a problem. Graduation rates seem like a basic thing to calculate. In fact, the states are among—the whole group of 50-plus states and territories are using more than a dozen different ways of calculating the graduation rate. The reason that's important is because they generate different results on the order of up to 14 or 15 percent across the different methods.

A couple of things that I've seen from my research and others' research in the past couple of years, first is that one of the main differences between rates that seem to be problematic is whether or not they incorporate information on dropout. The majority of states are using some sort of mathematical formula that includes information about dropout to indirectly calculate a graduation rate. The reason that's a problem is because there's a growing consensus that we're systematically undercounting our dropouts, and there are a lot of reasons for that, and some of them may be, you know, foul play and some of those are just that we don't have the infrastructure we need to do that. So I think right now that's a real basic recommendation that we can make. Unless the states can absolutely verify the quality of their dropout data, don't use it to calculate a graduation rate.

Looking forward further down the line, there's been a lot of talk about states developing longitudinal data systems where they can give each student an ID when they start the 9th grade, or actually before that, and follow them to high school graduation to see: did they graduate, did they drop out, how long did it take, and things like that. I think that makes absolutely perfect sense as a long-term goal, but I think it's not a mid-term solution. I think for the majority of states to be able to do that, it's going to be at least 5 to 10 years, and some states won't even be doing it at that point. So we need to be thinking about more interim solutions. We need to collect better data in general. We have to have better quality control, and we need to be collecting more information about things that relate to the high school graduation process, in particular whether students are held back in grade and how long it takes them to complete. We have very little information on that, but if we were to collect more information in these types of areas, we could improve the formulas that the states are using now that could dramatically improve the quality of their information without going all the way to track data.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Great.

Question in the middle there. And could you state your name and affiliation too?

LAURENCE PETERS, Temple University: I'd like to just talk a little bit about this collision course that we're on, it seems, between No Child Left Behind, which is raising the notion of rigor in the high school curriculum and how that—we're talking about new tests possibly for the high school level—and this problem which I think is really—I think Harry Holzer mentioned, you know, this whole notion of students being disengaged and the curriculum not really matching the workforce needs. And to what extent do we have time to really handle that kind of collision course between the possibility that No Child Left Behind will in fact force more dropouts and the possibility that we'll get less traction on the issue of preparing students for this new workforce?

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Harry, do you want to take a stab at that?

HARRY HOLZER, Urban Institute: I don't have an answer to that, but you've highlighted, and some of the other speakers highlighted, a real problem, that if a strict application of No Child Left Behind, brought to the high school level, at least early on, ends up meeting higher dropout rates, as Margaret indicated, in the short term—now, again, we talk about incentive effects and schools changing what they do and students maybe being more motivated, but the early effects of leaving more children behind by strict application of that standard—I think you're right—that would be quite problematic and would put more people on that path where their chances of linking to the labor market ultimately are going to be significantly reduced, and especially in some of these minority communities, which is, again, why I would hope that as we approach high school reform, that we do it in a more sensible way and a more balanced and broader way.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Margaret, did you have a follow-up to that?

MARGARET SIMMS, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: To follow on what Harry said, I think as we start to think about how to do reform as opposed to just accountability, that one of the things that need to be built into it is incentives for people to change how they approach high school education. I'd say it's kind of like you could look at what they do in the workforce development system. If you set incentives that lead people to help those who least need the help, you're not going to deal with the problem that you have, so you have to develop some more—probably more complicated and maybe more expensive incentives that drive reform in a way that you'll get, in the long term, more people out with a better set of skills, and that you get people more engaged in the process. But that's going to take time, thought, and unfortunately for some people to hear, money.

CHRISTOPHER SWANSON, Urban Institute: Tag on—this is a really important dilemma facing high school reform. (Audio break, tape change)—on the school systems, who have disincentives to make dramatic changes because of accountability in No Child Left Behind and other reasons. But the business community is very motivated to deal with this issue. The minority business community in particular has been following this issue very closely. These are their people. These are their children, their brothers and sisters, their communities that have a lot at stake in this, looking out to the civil rights community.

So I think we need to expand our scope beyond the groups we usually think of when we set about trying to fix educational problems because this is a broader problem and I think all these groups need to be brought to bear.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: There's a question in the back.

KEVIN SULLIVAN, KnowledgeWorks Foundation: Previously I worked for Dick Riley at the Department of Education for eight years. The issue I would like to raise is the—Chris Swanson's numbers—the problem of boys, that we have an enormous gender gap in high school graduation and just boys going through the educational system, and there seems to be a lack of research or even awareness of that issue. Some response to that.

CHRISTOPHER SWANSON, Urban Institute: Certainly there's a gender gap. It's not as dramatic as the racial-ethnic gap, which gets up to 25, 30 points in many places, but the gender gap is very, very consistent. Nationally, it's 8 percent. It's larger among certain groups. I think we have an increased attention to gender. We have the president of Harvard to thank for that. I mean, for years we've known that there're problems but it hasn't gotten much traction. I think if there're any benefits to shooting off your mouth, maybe this is one of them.

But I agree; we used to think more about dropout and gender kind of in the context of boys being more likely to leave school to get a job that maybe didn't need a high school or certainly a college education, but that's kind of the old way of thinking about it. The economy has changed; those jobs are much harder to come by and may be more isolated to certain populations. So I agree. This is an issue, and maybe as gender continues to get a little more traction within education in general—we're still talking about test scores mostly—we'll start to give a little bit more focus to high school completion as well.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Margaret, what do we know about what actually works? If you were going to target young African-American males as sort of the highest risk group, what do we know about—

MARGARET SIMMS, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: Well, there is certainly some research that suggests, if not "proves," that boys in general learn differently than girls, and that we seem to have set up a system that favors more the way girls learn. And so the trick is to—again, as part of reform—is to think about ways in which you can acknowledge differences in ways in which children learn. And I think also, as has been previously discussed, you have to think about what engages people and—to the extent that boys are really focused on the after you get out of school—that the links between what they learn and what they can do need to be stronger than they have been.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Harry, you know, building on that, because one of the consistent themes from research, right, is that the time, the lack of a high school diploma, and these academic skills really become clear mid- to late 20s and beyond. So how do you then get the message about the importance of those skills and that diploma back to a much younger age group?

HARRY HOLZER, Urban Institute: I think it's a challenge and we haven't figured out exactly what the answer to it is. I think when you compare the situation of the boys and the girls, I think—and this is maybe more based on impression than hard analysis—I think the 1990s changed things, mostly in a positive way, for low-income young women. Welfare reform initially was thought of as a big stick on the behavior of young women, but it also came with a lot of carrots in terms of all kinds of new supports for low-income working parents with children, which often mean low-income working moms. And so I think the incentives became much clearer to the young girls, and they responded to those incentives in many ways—in ways that you'd like to see, both in terms of schooling and especially in terms of the labor market.

For the young boys, very little changed. The labor market, in some sense, continued to deteriorate from their point of view. The kinds of jobs that traditionally they liked—construction, better manufacturing jobs—continue to dwindle in number. At the same time that we're subsidizing the women with children, we're imposing, in many ways, higher taxes and more barriers on the young men. So I think there's this disengagement that occurs because the prospects that they see, especially among their fathers and uncles and older brothers, look so bleak to them that they just disengage from the whole system at an early age.

Now, Lynn's question is, well, what might work? You know, there are some programmatic responses that have been positive in this situation on the preventive end before people disengage—things like the career academies, which, from the labor market side, is one of the most successful programs that have been rigorously evaluated with strong labor-market impacts on disadvantaged young boys in high school without any negative effects on their tendency to get postgraduate, postsecondary education. There's always a concern that we're going to be tracking folks.

So there's some evidence from that. There's evidence from mentoring programs like Big Brother, Big Sister, Quantum Opportunities, and also on the other side, even after—once people have dropped out, evidence from programs like the Job Corps and the Youth Service Corps, that even these second-chance programs can have good, positive impacts on reducing incarceration rates. So there is a range of things that work; figuring out how to implement them on a broad scale is a challenge, but at least some positive evidence is there.

MARGARET SIMMS, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: Can I make one correction to what Harry said? Harry pointed to welfare reform as a major incentive for young women to stay in school. I think that there's a larger trend in labor markets, particularly in urban areas, that provide more incentive for young women to finish school because of types of jobs that were available required skills that they needed to bring from high school. And similarly, the labor market that seemed to be available to young men provided no particular incentive for finishing high school, because the kinds of jobs available then were just the same jobs that your older brother was able to get with only 10 years of school.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Jane, a question in the back.

JANE HANNAWAY, Urban Institute: This is a question for Governor Wise. Bob, when you were listing the problems that we might not see any action to deal with this—you talked about governors up for reelection, you talked about the public not being aware, but you didn't talk about money, and states have more restricted budgets; there's more competition coming from health care, especially Medicaid. How do you think the governors are going to respond?

BOB WISE, Alliance for Excellent Education: Jane, thank you for bringing that up because that is obviously the other aspect of it. Every governor who left the NGA summit—because if you recall, there was a summit and then they went right into their regular meeting. So you sat in the summit for two days and you really got excited about hearing everyone talk about the possibilities of high school reform, then the next day you started the regular NGA meeting, and you walked into reality because the first session was on Medicaid. And this year most governors in most states face something that they never faced before, and that is that for the very first time, Medicaid expenditures in the state now equal or exceed K-12.

So you're a governor of a small state like mine, and for the first time in three or four years you've got "new money" coming in—didn't you always like that term, Bob?—in the sense of revenues coming in over and above, because of an improving economy, what you projected. So you've got $150 million coming in, and, boy, you really want to put $30 million to $50 million into this new high school initiative. The only problem is you've got a $120 million Medicaid shortfall. So now are you cutting services and are you going to undercut the health care economy of your state, which in most states is the single-largest component? Or do you put it into a new program?

So you're absolutely correct. That's why at the Alliance for Excellent Education, what we're working to develop is economic benefit analysis—a cost-benefit analysis to show that the dollar—and I did this on a scholarship program in our state to show that the dollars that we're spending now, we will get back more than that in increased tax revenues from higher-producing, higher-revenue-earning citizens and the other benefits that come from the economy. That's the only way you're going to be able to do it because, you're right, the states are strapped right now, but you're not going to get any help from Washington that I can see, given the fiscal situation, so it essentially is going to be up to the states—which is, incidentally, one of the reasons that my organization, which is traditionally a federally operating organization, is operating in states right now, because that's where it's going to be for the next several years. And because of the increased interest—yes, some because of No Child Left Behind but because of the fact that it's going to be states that I think are leading the charge for high school reform, and each state will be doing it somewhat on their own and each state will, though, have differing situations as far as resources, but I think that's where it's going to come from.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: There's a question over here.

JIM LOEWEN: I'm a sociologist, author of the book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, which has no relevance to this. My question is for Chris. I look at your California statistics and the districts that were racially or socioeconomically segregated seem to have lower graduation rates. And I'm wondering if that's because they have more minority students or poor students, or if there is an additional impact coming from being segregated, and if that impact affects all the different groups in those districts or just the minority groups or the poor groups in those districts?

CHRISTOPHER SWANSON, Urban Institute: That's a great question. The short answer is we haven't done all of those analyses to look at the effects of segregation as a context of the community for individual groups. The relationship between level of segregation and the, say, percent of minority enrollment is very tight one, so it's a little hard to disentangle these things in a certain way. But, I mean, this finding that we have here in California, you see it all over the country, and certainly whether we think of this in terms of segregation or in terms of districts that serve very heavily minority, very poor populations, I mean, there are a lot of challenges here.

One of the things that you don't see in that particular report—and this is a little bit different topic that I'll just throw out there—is the difference between the numbers I get from my research and the number the states report. The state numbers statewide are 15 percent higher than what you see there in that brief, and some of the 10 largest states have differences between our results and the states—the official numbers that are up to 20, 25 percent different.

And so when you have high-minority, high-poverty districts that are seeing these overly rosy results from the state, they're going to think everything's fine maybe. And the other thing with California that is important to keep in mind, and that you don't see here either, is that California does not include disaggregated data on graduation rates in the state report cards, despite the fact that that's required by law, I should add. And so where we see here, at least statewide, that we get these large disparities, California, the residents, and the schools are not seeing that from the data that the state is producing.

KATE BLOSVEREN, Progressive Policy Institute. This is a follow-up question. Do you think that there's value in requiring all the states to disaggregate their graduation rates for the AYP requirement?

CHRISTOPHER SWANSON, Urban Institute: Yes. And the reason that's important is especially if we think of why the graduation requirement is there in the first place under the law. It's the potential to game the system and to raise test scores by pushing out students. This is especially important for what may be, in some cases, numerically small groups because, say, you have a majority white school district that has a handful of minority students. White kids are doing fine in terms of getting through high school; minority students are dropping out in droves. Depending on how large a population that is, that could really get papered over if you're just looking at the overall number. The overall number may look okay because the whites are doing really well and everybody else is doing really poorly, and that in particular is a reason we need to pay attention.

And it's also the philosophy of No Child Left Behind, and I see no reason why one of the core principles of No Child Left Behind should not apply to graduation rates the same way it applies to test scores.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Margaret and Chris, you know, we hear a lot of concerns and anecdotes about the fact that this accountability will encourage schools to push certain students out of the system. Based on sort of the research you're seeing, do we know whether that's happening or not?

CHRISTOPHER SWANSON, Urban Institute: Based on the research, it's fairly early to tell. No Child Left Behind has only been in place for a couple of years. And one of the tricky things with graduation rates is that the data tend to kind of lag. You don't find out who dropped out the previous year until the next year, for example.

And so, while I think there's reason to be concerned that there could be an increase in what we call pushout, there's no really good systematic information on that. There has been a fair amount of pretty convincing anecdotal evidence in some places—Houston, New York City, Chicago—that at least in isolated contexts there have been concerted attempts to push students out of school. Chicago is one of a few schools that had a "wall of shame." Students who were too old to feasibly graduate on time, their names went up on a list, and it was kind of a hit list. These are students who don't need to be around anymore. That's anecdotal, but I think it underscores what could be happening and also underscores the importance that we need to keep a close eye on this. And this is part of my call, to keep graduation rates in the public eye so that high school reform moves forward. If we're just looking at test scores, we may be missing a really important part of the picture here.

QUESTION: Dr. Swanson, do you know whether there's any organized effort to make NCLB look at subgroup graduation data? And also, do you know whether—is there any interest on the part of Congress or the U.S. Department of Education to make that a requirement down the road?

CHRISTOPHER SWANSON, Urban Institute: Certainly there are a lot of groups who are concerned with this issue the way I've described it. It would be nice to have somebody from the Department here who could speak to these issues, or members of Congress. It's hard to tell. I certainly hope that this is something, either looking forward to the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind in a couple years or regulatory changes that could be made. And one of the important things with graduation rates, and some of the problems with the accountability in particular, is we don't need to rewrite No Child Left Behind to deal with some of these issues, some of these double standard and accountability pieces I talked about.

It's a situation that arose because of the federal regulations, and so the remedy for that could be done in a regulatory context as opposed to getting Congress involved.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: There's another question back there.

KEVIN FINNERIN, Issues in Science and Technology at the National Academy of Sciences: We hear a lot of complaints from employers that they can't find people with the skills they need for better-paying jobs. We also hear from people who look at the school-to-work transition that employers never even ask for high school transcripts to find out how well kids did or what courses they took. What do we really know about what employers are looking for? Are they really looking for people that have certain skills or are they really looking for people who are likely to show up tomorrow for work?

HARRY HOLZER, Urban Institute: They're looking for both. Those surveys can be misleading and misleadingly quoted. First of all, with different employers, there's a large amount of variation out there. If you're looking at the bottom-end jobs in the economy, certainly those skills are going to matter a lot less than they do moving up. But I think one way to think about this is every employer wants employees who are going to show up on time, so if you're looking for the skills that are most frequently required by employers, it will be those basic job-readiness skills because it'll be close to 100 percent of employers looking for them.

If you're looking for how many of them actually look for a high school diploma, the number goes way down because employers have learned to discount the value of a high school diploma as a predictive tool for what people know. If you're interested in a set of cognitive skills, not necessarily at a really high level—sort of 9th, 10th grade math, reading, communication abilities, plus some problem solving, some analytics—my sense is that those are growing more and more important all the time, especially for jobs above that kind of $6 or $7 an hour level. And there's a very nice compilation from the Russell Sage Foundation called Low-Wage America, which is a set of industry case studies that came out about a year and a half ago that sort of looks industry by industry by industry—and you get the same story, that there are jobs there, even for high school graduates, that pay well above that entry level to get you close to the economy's median wage, but in fact they do require either the postsecondary credential—the certificate, the Associate's degree—or certainly an ability to read, write, speak, and think in an above-basic level. So I think we do have a wide range of evidence on that.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Margaret, do you want to add to that?

MARGARET SIMMS, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: Well, I think one of the challenges is (and certainly there have been some attempts to do this on the small scale, like the Casey-supported jobs initiative) how do you connect the employers with the people they're looking for in terms of how you vouch for the people you're placing, how do you develop from the employer a set of things that they are really looking for? I think the big challenge is how do you take that to a big scale? And we've not been very successful with that.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: There was a question back in the middle.

KATHY NELSON: I'm retired from HUD. And presumably a small one, but my son just went from junior year in high school to college, and at his college, almost a third of the group fell in that category, and I assume with the increasing emphasis on advanced placement classes that that might be increasing. How would that be measured in terms of graduation rates? It just seems like another potential problem.

CHRISTOPHER SWANSON, Urban Institute: Right, and that's one of these issues. Grade retention and time to completion are important. Most states do not have good data on either of those things, and so the short answer is, in most cases it can't be taken into account. It's important—I think kind of skipping grades is much less frequent than being held back, but it stems from the same issue of timeliness and progress. And I think—we don't have good data on how often this happens nationally. We don't have good information on the groups that—well, we can guess, but the groups that tend to be retained most and what the consequences are. We know being held back is a tremendous predictor of dropping out, so it's important to understand the dropout problem to understand the retention problem: where it happens and why it happens.

So I think we don't have any really good answers right now, but I think it's an important thing, especially as a research community, to get people interested. If we want better graduation rates, if we want to decrease the actual number of students dropping out, if we want to understand this problem better, we need different types of information and somebody has to collect it and pay for it.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: You know, one of the things you always hear about the U.S. is we're great because it's such a second-chance system, right? I mean, you can drop out and then you can get a GED, you can go to a community college. I wondered if you could address, particularly because the percent of young people who are getting GEDs has been growing, those second-chance avenues and where they fit into this.

HARRY HOLZER, Urban Institute: What is very clear is that a GED is not considered the equivalent of a real high school diploma in the labor market. There remains some debate about whether there is any positive value to it at all. And there have been different economists that have put different spins on that. My sense is that it probably does have some small economic value in and of itself, and its greatest value is probably as a potential stepping-stone to other postsecondary avenues for a chunk of folks.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: I saw a question back there in the middle.

STEVE BRUMBAUGH, Chicago Discovery Academy: Real quick—how many of you guys actually teach in an inner-city high school? Okay, there's four of us. All right.

Governor Wise, you mentioned sanctions several times, about improving, possibly, graduation rates, and I want to know in what ways you think that will help. I teach in Chicago, but many suburban districts view the state implementation as ineffective or burdensome, so they simply opt out, and they've got, you know, sometimes significant minority populations.

BOB WISE, Alliance for Excellent Education: Well, opting out—I mean, obviously opting out is not helpful and that's not what we're talking about. Now, from my organization's standpoint, though, we're looking—and Chris has talked about this as well—we're looking at the fact that you don't have to disaggregate the data for graduation, at least as far as facing any sanctions, and yet that's the end road. I mean, that's what we're all working toward. So it doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't make sense to me as far as an objective to say that we can get somebody all the way through the system, assuming they get through the system, and then at the end we don't have the data to tell us how Latinos are doing, how African Americans are doing, socioeconomic groups, and so on. So that's what I mean.

And this also, though, gets to the statistics, and let me just—actually I'm going to take the prerogative and just completely avoid your question right now.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Governors and ex-governors, right?

BOB WISE, Alliance for Excellent Education: Yeah, well, it's something you learn real quickly.

To me this is a very important discussion about the various aspects, and you're talking about an element of it—the disaggregation—but there's something that sometimes we're missing, and that's the message that needs to be going out. Because of this data we've got one stark statistic, and I think you're dealing with it in Chicago as well. We've got one-third of our kids that aren't graduating on a national average, and we've got another third that aren't graduating college-ready or ready for the modern workplace, however you define it, as Harry's talking about.

So we've got a system right now in our country where two-thirds of our people coming through these high school years aren't ready for the modern workplace. And to me that's an incredible—to me that's an incredible crisis that we're facing, and that's what the importance of this discussion is and why it's got to be taken all across the country.

The reason I think disaggregation is important is because it then permits us to identify populations and to use research-backed methods—if we don't have the tools, to develop the tools; if we do have the tools, to apply them to those populations.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: There's a question over here.

BRIAN FRIEL, National Journal: Tell me if this statement is true, that more Americans than ever before are graduating from high schools, more Americans than ever before are graduating from college, and that we have the best-educated generation of Americans in the history of the United States.

MARGARET SIMMS, Joint Center for Political Economic Studies: Well, the first two sentences are true because there are more Americans—(chuckles)—so you can have falling rates and still have larger numbers. So even if numbers don't improve, you can improve the first two. I don't know about the third one. I think that you might get some debate there. In fact, some people have argued that it's our higher education system that is world-standard and not our elementary and secondary.

BOB WISE, Alliance for Excellent Education: What was the third one?

MARGARET SIMMS, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: That we have the best-educated generation.

BOB WISE, Alliance for Excellent Education: Yeah, let me jump in and say I happen to believe that in terms of the higher education, that we do, but I think you start to begin to see a drop-off. We're coming in, we're pretty competitive through 4th grade, particularly in reading. We then start to drop off, and some will make it back up in the higher education system, but the fact that we're 15th in graduation rates among developed nations and the fact that our math and science scores, in an international comparison, are down there at the same level I think does not bode well.

Once again, two-thirds of our people aren't graduating with the skills they need for the modern workplace.

HARRY HOLZER, Urban Institute: Let me just see if I can put another spin on exactly what Bob is saying. It may be true in some absolute sense that our skills and our school completion rates are higher than they've ever been. The relevant comparison is to the trends in the economy, in which those skills are demanded of all people. And I think in some sense, there's evidence that the demand for those skills in the economy has outstripped the supply that the education system is producing, and the consequences for even—whether you think it's one-third or two-third of the folks, by which measure, that aren't ready, the negative consequences for them of not being ready are certainly worse than they were a generation or two ago.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Other questions from the audience? Yes, back there.

EUGENE STEUERLE, Urban Institute: I'm just wondering—you know, I've listened to educational debates for many years, and I'm more of an amateur than an expert in the field, but in most of these debates, they constantly go back to system improvements or system changes, you know, whether it's superintendents replacing principals or researchers deciding we've got one-size-fits-all solutions. And I'm wondering more and more, especially as I think of these problems with the young males, whether we don't really need to have a system that builds individual plans around almost every single individual, and if that individual needs tutoring, then they get tutoring. If that individual needs to have a job—how they're going to learn on the job is that they need to have a job. If that individual needs to make sure that they're busy in the out-of-school hours when they're getting in trouble—I'm just not so sure we're going to get at these problems by constantly thinking of these systematic improvements.

Maybe I'm jumping ahead of where you are in terms of identifying the problem and solutions, but I'm wondering how much we need to individualize the solutions.

BOB WISE, Alliance for Excellent Education: May I jump in, Lynn?

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Yes.

BOB WISE, Alliance for Excellent Education: That's a discussion really for a whole other session, but you're absolutely correct. I mean, one of the things that—the importance of this data is it shows you what the problem is and then permits you to advocate for certain policy shifts or developments, and one of them is to have a much more personalized learning situation, both a personalized learning center but also having an adult that forms a direct relationship with students, particularly with those that are at risk, as well as a personal learning plan, at least from the 9th grade on.

And when you do that—and I was thinking as Harry was talking—I haven't been on this job long enough to decide whether I agree completely on your cognitive versus other skills, although I do believe that you have to graduate from high school with a certain level of skills—the skills that get you into college, many of which will also be necessary for the workplace.

But wherever we come down on that, I think that it is essential that there be a learning plan that is worked out with the parents, the teachers, the guidance counselor, the student that helps that student along. You buy a car, you get a maintenance plan for four or five years of that car; we ought to be willing to do the same for our kids. And for many, and particularly for many at-risk students, you're going to need that because as they face more and more frustrations, it's a downward spiral until they go out the door unless there's somebody intervening.

CHRISTOPHER SWANSON, Urban Institute: I think this is a good point because the first step in finding a solution, is understanding the problem. I think, you know, historically with graduation rates, we've had two challenges there. One, we didn't realize we had a problem, and, two, we didn't realize how broad the problem was. If a third of all high school students are not graduating, then that's not a not-in-my-backyard problem. In some places, though, it's a more systemic problem; in other places it may be isolated to particular groups, and as we just heard, it may need a tailored solution. And I think this is an important thing to consider as well, along with the other.

HARRY HOLZER, Urban Institute: I think the other point I would—systems matter, I think, when you start to look at the disconnects between the world of work and the world of school, and a lot of these high schools in low-income neighborhoods and why the message isn't getting through to the schools and to the students in those schools about what the employers are looking for and why those employers aren't communicating early on. There are high costs to employers. Someone earlier asked about why employers don't look at transcripts, and those are costly things for individual employers to do, and their ability to communicate what they're ultimately looking for, I think, is often limited if the systemic pieces aren't also there. So I think we want to keep those in mind as we think about the more tailored solutions as well.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Other questions from the audience? Yes.

QUESTION: Could you speak to—in terms of graduation—(inaudible)—we have a lot of kids in the senior year starting to drop out, and some kids at very sophisticated suburban schools, they do the first semester and then they drop out. A lot of kids just give up in the senior year. Can you speak to the issue of—the whole question of the senior year of high school and how that's changing, and the disconnect between senior year and college? Is that a place where you can make some change and transition? I mean, you've got Leo Botstein from Bard saying kids ought to graduate from high school at 16 and go.

CHRISTOPHER SWANSON, Urban Institute: I think the first important thing to say is that the senior year dropout is not our big problem; the transition into high school is our big problem. You have—especially in low-income, high-minority school districts, you can lose half of your students between 9th and 10th grade, not even thinking about the students who may not have even made it to 9th grade. So that's our primary problem that we need to tackle.

That being said, in addition to the transition into high school issue, there's a transition out of high school issue, and I think we do see what may be promising solutions on the scene. Early college is one idea. The Gates Foundation is looking into that. And so this is a way for students who are treading water toward the end of high school—maybe they've got all their credits but they need to stick around to get their diploma, to keep them engaged. And also for students, especially from more disadvantaged backgrounds, to start accumulating college credits. It makes a linkage between what students are doing in high school and another longer-term goal, which is going to college, and gives them the tools to get a leg up on college, which can be especially important for students who may have limited resources to pay for college.

LYNN OLSON, Education Week: Great. I'm getting the close-up-the-meeting signal from the back of the room. Thank you very much, everybody, for being here, and if you have other questions, I'd come up and approach panelists individually as they head out the door.

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