Raising High School Graduation Rates

Ben Levin, former Deputy Minister for Education in Ontario and author of the new book, More High School Graduates, joins us to talk about what it will take to raise our extremely low high school graduation rates and save more kids from dropping out. Only 72% of American students who enter high school currently graduate — a huge problem for the kids and for our economy. But the problem is not limited to the so-called dropout factories. Even in the best schools in the U.S. there are kids who should graduate, but don’t. During Ben Levin’s tenure as Deputy Minister for Education over the last decade, high schools in Ontario raised their graduation rate from 68% to 81%. It can be done in the U.S. as well and Ben Levin talks about what it will take in this fascinating interview.

Q: Thank you for taking time to speak with us today, Ben. Let’s start out by talking about the big picture and look at the high school graduation situation today in the U.S. and why it’s imperative that schools, districts and states work to change this situation.

Ben Levin: Well I think this is pretty well known to most educators that a generation ago, you could do okay with a high school education or even without a high school education. You could go into what were pretty well paying and secure jobs in manufacturing, for example, and you could live out your life in them, and that’s just simply no longer the case.  So the returns to advanced education in fact have actually have been increasing in the US and it’s more and more important that high school, which used to be quite a good qualification in the labor market, is now really the very basic qualification anyone has to have to be able to either proceed to more study, let alone to have a decent job and to be able to earn a decent living and have a decent life.

Q: Our current high school graduation rate of 72% in the US is highly problematic on so many levels, especially considering that the rate is even lower among African-American, Latino and Native American students. The costs to society, our economy, and to each individual who fails to graduate are enormous.

Ben Levin: Well, what’s worrying to me is that the rate has been stagnating for quite a long time and perhaps even moved backwards in some cases. That it is so strongly linked to socio-economic status and ethnicity, that’s very worrying because, of course, it exacerbates the other kinds of class and ethnic distinctions that are so problematic in the United States, at least as one looks at it from across the border.  The big divisions between rich and poor, between inner cities and suburbs, and all of those are related to many other things, such as crime rates, and people’s sense of insecurity and social comfort. So it just seems to me that helping more kids at least finish high school is a sine qua non [the bare minimum] for having the kind of society I think most Americans want.

Q: A lot of school leaders may be wondering just how doable it really is to raise high school graduation rates given the headwinds that schools face in dealing with the issue. But the Ontario school system – which certainly shares many common features with American schools – has done just that, raising graduation rates from 68% to 81% in the past few years. You were closely involved with that success. Can you tell us how about how Ontario did it and if that can serve as a model for American schools?

Ben Levin:  Ah, yes, definitely. Well, in Ontario our high school graduation rate was, and this is a four year high school program, so this was counting five years, that is giving people an extra year, we were at 68% in 2004 and now last year we were at 81% and I expect with the new numbers come out in March, we’ll be at 82 or 83%.  So that is a big improvement. That means 20,000 more kids a year graduating from our high schools, which was not the case before, and of course, the kids who are now graduating, who didn’t used to graduate, are not, by in large, your affluent, well-prepared kids; they are other kids. So that’s been a big change and it’s happening across all the 900 or so high schools in the province. Ontario is a big place, two million students, an area the size of the whole southeast of the United States. So it’s a big region and we’ve been able to do it across the whole section. I can talk a little bit more about how we did that, which of course is encapsulated in the book, because the messages in the book are drawn very heavily from the experience in Ontario. We had a pretty comprehensive strategy that was implemented all across the province. We worked very collaboratively with districts; we didn’t impose things on districts. The only thing that we said to the districts was you must be working on this; we did not say you must work on this in this particular way; we worked closely with districts and schools about what would this kind of effort would look like in your setting with the kids that you have. What we wouldn’t accept was people saying we’re doing as well as we can given the kids we have.

Q: In your book you briefly discuss the term dropout and why school leaders should not use the term. I think it’s a very important distinction that many educators may not have thought about before but which really colors how one looks at the entire issue of raising high school graduation rates.

Ben Levin:  Well dropout puts a focus on the negative; that’s one thing. The second thing is, it’s very hard to know which kids are dropouts given the very unpredictable   pathways these kids take: they leave, they come back, so to us we wanted to talk about the positive side, which is graduates. If you have graduates, then you don’t have dropouts clearly. That is why we decided that we would focus on the graduation rate, increasing the graduation rate as opposed to reducing the dropout rate.  It avoided all those questions about who counts as a dropout, and it just got us focused on how do we help more kids be more successful. It also takes the focus away from kids’ deficiencies and puts them back on what are we doing as a system to help kids be successful.

Q: So why don’t more students graduate anyway? You write that failing to graduate is a process, not an event.

Ben Levin: Well that’s a complicated question. There is quite a bit of research on it and there are a variety of reasons relating to students’ own life circumstances, their relationship with the school, whether they think anyone in the school really cares about them, what’s going on in their life outside of the school, where they see their career destinations, if they have a career destination at all.  All those things have a role. Mostly it’s a kind of a gradual process of disengagement that starts when kids are maybe in junior high school and then exasperates, as they get older.  No single factor, in fact not even any set of factors really accurately predicts which kids graduate and which kids don’t. That is why we really want to be really careful about saying we know that when kids are 13 or 14 years-old, which ones are going to graduate – because it turns out we don’t.

Q: Many school leaders are well aware that there can be many early warning signs that suggest problems ahead for students – attendance, academic performance, discipline issues, etc. But you argue that these early warning signs are not what they appear to be and that no single factor can or should be used to predict failure to graduate.

Ben Levin: That’s right. I think there is lots of evidence showing that no factor is a really good predictor of whether kids graduate or not. You know the OECD did a study with Canada, looking at kids who wrote the PSA test when they were 15 and following them up six years later when they were 21. Of the kids who were at the very lowest level of PSA’s performance in reading and writing and language at age 15 – which is very low – six years later, 40% of those kids were in post-secondary education of some kind. So what that says to me is, yes many kids have struggles and challenges and even deficiencies, but our job as educators is to try to turn that around and help those kids be successful and we have a lot of evidence, I think, that shows that almost anyone can be successful in school with enough motivation and the right supports.

Q: You discuss in your book the fact that many educators think that the only way we can achieve higher graduation rates is if we lower the standards because they see human ability as fixed – they don’t believe kids can turn things around. You point to studies that show just the opposite: that, in fact, we simply don’t know the limits of student potential.

Ben Levin: I like to think that only some educators believe that, but quite a few people in the general public believe that. There is a bit of a catch-22 and we’ve experienced some of that in Ontario as well. If schools aren’t doing well, then people criticize us for not graduating more kids, and if we start to graduate more kids, then they say, “Oh well, you must have made it easier.” So there is a kind of a can’t-win to that argument. But, of course, we don’t do kids any favors by giving them diplomas. What we want to do is help them earn the diplomas; that’s the whole goal. There’s no point giving the credential away; what we want to do is develop the skills and knowledge that lead to an earned credential. And if you think of that historically, we are now graduating in many parts of the world proportions of students that would have been impossible 50 years ago. The US historically had a pretty high high school graduation rate, but 50 years ago, in a place like say Korea, 10% maybe of people would have been finishing secondary school; now they are over 90%, and that isn’t because they are giving away their high school diplomas. So it can be done. We have vastly more students in post-secondary education than we used to and, of course, there are complaints about the quality, but I don’t think anyone, even the most vigorous critics would argue that we should go back to 8% of our students in post-secondary education as a way of preserving quality.

Q: One of your fundamental beliefs is that all high schools need to work on improvement – not just the dropout factories. As you say, even the best high schools can do better.

Ben Levin: Right, yes, so the first thing is that I think this is particularly apropos in the US situation: improvement has to happen in all schools. Yes, there are schools that have high levels of failure, and those schools need special attention. If you do the mathematics, you will see that most kids who are not graduating are not in the so-called failure factories. They can’t be. The math just doesn’t work. So they are in all kinds of other schools and so our approach here was to say that every school has to be involved for school improvement. If you’re graduating 90%, aim for 95%. Every school can be improving until we’re helping every kid to be successful and there is no school that is there yet. That creates a feeling that “we’re all in it together” too, so it isn’t just oh, if only those other schools somewhere else would do better. It’s all our problems and all our challenges for all of us and we all have to be involved in it together. So one of the things we tried hard to inculcate here was the idea that every school’s success is my school’s success and vice versa. It’s not just I have a great school and all those others are terrible and who cares?  If other schools are terrible, that’s bad for me too.

Q: What are some of the specific challenges that school leaders face at the high school level and what do school leaders need to focus on to surmount them? As you discuss in the book, turning around a high school is a lot more complicated than an elementary school.

Ben Levin: Norton Grubb at Berkeley has just written quite a nice book about this as well, about the challenges of leadership in high schools. One is that high schools are much bigger, so you’ve got the challenge of trying to galvanize a much bigger organization, with many more students and many more staff and so communicating as a leader to 100 teachers, or 120 or 180 teachers is a very different challenge from communicating with 25 or 30. You can’t get them all into a room at the same time, so that’s one part of it, just the size. The second thing is that high schools are very much organized along the lines of subjects and disciplines, and teachers often have a stronger allegiance to their discipline – math or science or whatever it is – than they do to the school. So that balkanization makes it more difficult because math teachers, say, may have a very different view of what is required for school improvement than, say, social studies teachers. You have to start to build the bridges across the disciplines whereas you don’t have the same challenge in the elementary schools. The kids aren’t the same in high schools because they run across a lot of teachers – because teachers are typically working with a lot of kids. If I have 25 kids that I work with everyday in an elementary classroom, after awhile I’m going to get to know those kids pretty well. But if I’m seeing 150 kids a day for a semester, I’m not going to get to know them well. So it’s much easier in a high school for kids to slip between the cracks and be in a situation where no adult knows them really at all. So those are some of the things that make it harder to create improvement in high schools.

Q: A key theme of your book is that the changes needed to improve graduation rates must occur at the district and state level – while individual low performing schools need attention, there are large numbers of unsuccessful students in every school and so all schools deserve the same attention.

Ben Levin: Let me just say a bit about the US context as I see it in that regard because in the US there is such an emphasis on individual schools and innovation, but the problem is scale and sustainability. We’ve got a long history of being able to point to schools that beat the odds, and that is great, but what we need is not one school that beats the odds or ten or even a thousand – we need every school to be doing that and doing it consistently, so I want to argue from our systemic approach because if we just focus on individual schools just doing neat things, we never get to the level of scale we need or the level of sustainability we need to move the whole system forward.

Q: Your thesis is that improving high school graduation rates requires four core strategies, which you say can be a “recipe” that is clear and easy to remember. Can you tell us what these core strategies are and give us an overview of each?

Ben Levin:  Well the first one, and I would say the most important because in a way it’s the easiest to do so you get the most bang for the buck, is to know the status of all your students and to be intervening as soon as somebody is going off the rails in some kind of way, as soon as there’s a problem, not waiting for kids to fail. That means that schools need systems for keeping track of every kid’s progress. In Ontario now, every school, every semester, will be looking at the progress of their students and identifying part-way through the semester, which kids seem to be struggling and what can we do to help those kids now so they don’t fail those courses. Instead of waiting for them to fail, and then trying to do something after the fact, which is often too late. Many, many problems that young people have that cause them to fail courses can be solved in 15 or 20 minutes of adult time if someone took the time. But if we don’t take the time, now you’ve got a kid that has failed a course, or is just behind and that leads to a lot of later problems. So that’s the first thing, is do we know the progress of all the kids and do we have a system to make sure that as soon as there is a problem, we’re trying to resolve it, not waiting, that’s the first one. Much more to be said about that, but I’m just kind of being very high level here.

The second one is to think about the program. Now on one hand, high schools are often saying success is a matter of having the right courses for the kids, so if kids aren’t successful, we need what often turn out to be easier courses for them. I’m not arguing that, but I am arguing that schools need to think about what their program mix is and even more, about how they structure and the timetable that.  One of the things that high schools often don’t pay much attention to is the timetable and yet the timetable is really important. For example, if kids who start as freshmen end up doing a lot of difficult compulsories in their first semester, that can set them up for failure, whereas if we spread their compulsories and the more difficult courses across two semesters, and intermix them with some other things, they’re more likely to be successful. It’s that kind of thing. It’s when in the day different courses are offered – because we know some stuff about high school kids’ level of attention early in the morning vs. later in the morning vs. later in the afternoon. It’s which teachers are assigned to teach which kids. Are the kids who need the best teaching, getting the best teaching, or is it, as in many high schools, the case where the most senior teachers teach the most successful kids and often it’s the newest and least experienced teachers who are teaching the most challenging kids? So those kinds of questions about how we organize teaching and learning, I think, that’s the second area, thinking of that in a much more systematic way.

The third one is building relationships with the broader community, reaching out to parents, to neighborhood groups, ethnic groups, sports organizations and building connections with them, because for many kids, those are important parts of their success. But also building bridges to post-secondary institutions through things like dual credits and post-secondary options, which are widespread in the US, but far from universal. And also building connections with employers, because for many kids, that connection to work is critically motivating, and so we need to think how we connect with employers and ways to provide kids real opportunities to move into meaningful work if that is what they want to do without closing the door to post-secondary education if they decide they want to do that later.

The fourth and last area is daily teaching and learning practice. I say that’s fourth not because it is the least important – because in many ways it’s the hardest to do –but to really think about what it means to change how kids interact and what they are asked to do everyday – how we assess students, the kind of tasks we give them, the degree to which students have some choice and voice in the work they do and how they do it; how we create classrooms which are intellectually challenging and stimulating for all young people, not just for the ones we’ve decided are gifted Those are really critical issues that need sustained attention and I think schools have to work on all four of those things. Obviously, no one is going to do all four at the same level of intensity at the same time, but it’s a matter of thinking about those four broad areas and then putting together a strategy that says okay, more of this, this year, more of that next year, but in a kind of a balanced way over a period of time you move the school forward.

Q: You talk in the book about aiming high – to bring more students than ever to the higher levels of attainment that they will need to thrive in our 21st century global world. Let’s close by talking about that and why school leaders must really think long and hard about redoubling their efforts to provide a quality education to all students.

Ben Levin: Yeah. There’s a lovely new book by Kathleen Cushman called Fires in the Mind in which she’s interviewed quite a few teenagers about what it takes to be good at something and is there something they’re good at and how they get to be good at it. I mention this book because what’s really clear in these interviews with a really wide cross section of kids is that they understand what it takes to be really good at something, which is effort, practice, and coaching. They know that, and many of them are good at things, but the things that they are good at, aren’t necessarily things that ever get recognized in school. So there’s a kid who knows a ton about fly-fishing because of his grandfather who taught him and he said in my whole school career, I never got to talk about fly-fishing, which is my passion. So in the school, we think of these kids as being unmotivated and undisciplined, but it’s more accurate to say they are unmotivated by the particular tasks we’ve asked them to do. Now I’m not arguing from that that we should say to the kid if all you want to study is fly-fishing it’s fine. Of course we can’t do that, but the point I’m making is that every young person has things that motivate her or him. Every young person has things that turn their crank and get them excited and part of the challenge is to find those things to unlock that level of effort and commitment so that young people really start to see what they are capable of doing and they stop seeing school as some set of bizarre tasks that adults have asked them to do for no reason that they can discern and start to see schooling as something that is inextricably connected to who they are, what they want to be, and how they want their lives to unfold. When we can build those connections and really engage kids, then a lot of the problems resolve themselves because you get motivated kids who want to be there and they think they’re doing something that is worthwhile.