As Good as Advertised? Tracking Urban Student Progress through High School in an Environment of Accountability

ABSTRACT No Child Left Behind's mandated high-stakes testing and accountability policies have pervaded districts and schools nationwide. To examine student progress and graduation in the midst of first generation Texas-style accountability, this study tracked individuals in a longitudinal dataset of over 45,000 high school students in the Houston Independent School District (HISD). Using descriptive cohort and inferential competing risk analyses, the study found evidence that student leavers were severely under-reported and graduation rates exaggerated. The majority of high school students in Houston actually failed to advance to graduation, and minority, LEP and economically disadvantaged students were disproportionately affected. An important question for the field, and the impending reauthorization of NCLB, is whether accountability policies are as good as advertised for urban schools. Keywords: Urban Education, Dropouts, Accountability, Latino youth, African American youth As a progenitor of high-stakes testing and accountability, Texas has been a target of research examining claims of an educational "miracle" tied to the state's education policy. Much of the empirical work focused on the efficacy of test scores (Klein, Hamilton, McCaffrey, & Stecher, 2000; Linton & Kester, 2003; Toenjes & Dworkin, 2002), but other research focused on measures of educational progress such as grade retention, dropout rates, and graduation (Carnoy, Loeb, & Smith, 2001; Haney, 2000; McNeil, Coppola, Radigan, & Vasquez Heilig, 2008; Vasquez Heilig & Darling-Hammond, 2008). Darling-Hammond (2000) pointed out that research on the "Texas Mirac Ie" and student progress had found that fewer than 50% of African American and Latino 9th graders progressed to 12th grade and graduation four years later. Carnoy et al. (2001), however, found a positive inferential relationship between lower dropout rates and higher TAAS scores on the tenth grade TAAS in the 1 990s. That is, those high schools that had larger increases in their students' pass rates on the tenth grade TAAS also had larger declines in dropout rates. The largest positive relationship between test scores and dropout was found in urban high schools serving low-income students. There is, however, data that called into question Houston's publicly reported success. The US Department of Education listed Houston as having one of the highest dropout rates in the United States (NCES, 2003). This is in contrast to dropout rates reported by HISD to the Texas Education Agency (TEA) that hovered below 2% (Texas Education Agency, 2001). Peabody (2003) reported that audits by TEA uncovered evidence that school personnel had falsified Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS) "leaver" codes in order to reduce reported dropouts at more than 1 5 HISD schools. TEA auditors examined the dropout coding of half of HISD's traditional high schools. They reviewed the records of nearly 5,500 students who left those schools and checked how the schools had reported their reason for leaving. The auditors found that almost 3,000 students should have been coded as dropouts but were not. (60 Minutes, 2004). The spurious dropout data confounds the Carnoy et al. (2001) findings of an inferential relationship between lower dropout rates and higher test scores. Additionally, Vasquez Heilig and Darling-Hammond (2008) found that those Texas high schools that "pushed out" students showed the largest increase in test scores and accountability ratings. Despite the limited and conflicting research on the impact of highstakes testing and accountability policies on student outcomes, a decade of Texas and Houston education policy was held up as a model for NCLB's national systemic reform (McNeil, 2005). The mass media repeatedly questioned the validity of the Texas/Houston Miracle (Benton, 2005; Dobbs, 2003; Scherno, 2003; Spencer, 2005; Winerip, 2003), but very little peerreviewed research has used student-level data to examine long-term student progress measures such as student leavers, grade progression and graduation during the basal years of Texas accountability. …