Walt Haney, George Madaus, Lisa Abrams, Anne Wheelock, Jing Miao, and Ileana Gruia
Boston College
January 2004
Walt Haney, George Madaus, and four colleagues at Boston College's testing center authored this 72-page report on behalf of the National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy. It analyzes 30 years of grade retention, cohort progression and dropout data for the U.S. as a whole and for the states. After 10,000+ calculations, they reach four conclusions. First, and not surprising, kindergarten participation rates rose from 60 percent to 90 percent over these three decades. Second, a lot of kids (almost 12 percent, they say) are "disappearing" from the education pipeline between grades 9 and 10. Third, there's a 9th grade "bulge": lots more students (12 percent more) enrolled in 9th grade than were enrolled the previous year in 8th, which is explained, say the authors, by high rates of grade retention during the freshman year. Fourth, what we already knew to be a dismayingly low rate of high-school graduation - 75 percent if you compare the number of graduates with the number of 8th graders 4 years earlier - grows even worse, to 67 percent, when the number of graduates is set alongside the number of 9th graders 3.5 years earlier. As you might expect if you are acquainted with Messrs. Haney and Madaus and their lapdog of a "national board," the authors ascribe all these woes to standards-based reform and high-stakes testing. Unfortunately, their remedy is to do away with the tests rather than do a better job of equipping young people to pass them. But see for yourself by surfing to http://www.bc.edu/research/nbetpp/reports.html.
