(Click here to view the PDF of the chart.)
By Mac LeBuhn, DFER Policy Analyst
The Condition of Education, an annual report on a subject pretty well conveyed by the title, was released last week by the Department of Education. For anyone outside of education policy, the report is essentially Lunesta delivered in chart form. (There’s no sleep aid like a reading scale score chart.) Unsurprisingly, those working in education found it a little more engaging.
For education reformers in particular, the lessons of the Condition of Education are especially interesting. After all, reformers have spent the previous twenty years working in and on America’s school system with most reforms accompanied by the dire prediction it would be the one to finally put public schools under. As the both the House and Senate Education Committees prepare to take up bills to revise the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Condition of Education provides timely insight into how US schools and students are faring after 20 years of reform:
1. Black and Latino reading gains – Since 1971, black and Latino students have rapidly outpaced their white peers in growth on reading assessments: for Latino students, scores increased 25 points; for black students, 34 points—more than double the gains made by white students over the same time period. The 44-point gap between black and white students that existed in 1971 shrank to a 24-point gap today, with most of the reduction occurring over the previous 15 years.
2. The more rigorous American high school – This generation of prom attendees may not be thrilled by the development, but high school course-taking is much more rigorous than it was twenty years ago. In today’s high schools, a greater percentage of students are enrolled in STEM courses than their peers in the 1990s and often by significant margins. The percentage of students enrolled in statistics classes has increased tenfold, the share of those enrolled in pre-calculus and calculus more than doubled and the percentage of students who completed geometry, trig, chemistry, physics, biology and chemistry courses all saw double-digit increases over the past twenty years.
Of course, all this rigor has forced some students out of high school and led to fewer students earning a high school diploma, right? Nope. On the contrary, graduation rates have steadily increased to their highest level since the National Center for Education Statistics started tracking the statistic. Moreover, gains in the general graduation rate have been joined by reductions in dropout disparities between student subgroups. As the report states, “the dropout rate between high-income and low-income families narrowed between 1970 and 2011, particularly during the past two decades, when the gap narrowed from 21 percentage points in 1990 to 11 percentage points in 2011.”