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NATIONAL
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Another Black, Minority School Dropout Myth?
by Anthony D. Advincula
Special to the NNPA from the New York Amsterdam News
NEW YORK (NNPA) – While a recent study by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MIPR) claimed that only 50 percent of Black and Latino students in the United States complete high school with a diploma, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) said that it was “inaccurate” because MIPR used “seriously flawed data and methodology.”
In a 99-page report, “Rethinking High School Graduation Rates and Trend,” released late last month, the Washington-based EPI revealed that about 75 percent of Blacks and Latino high school students actually receive diplomas nationwide.
“Our research finds no suggestion of a horrifyingly low graduation rate among Blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups in the country,” Lawrence Mishel, EPI president and co-author of the study, said in a national telephone conference with reporters.
“In fact, we have found out that Black-White graduation gap has shrunk significantly over the last 40 years.”
He said that the MIPR data, generated by its senior fellow Jay P. Greene and former Urban Institute research associate Christopher B. Swanson, “reflect an increasingly used but incorrect characterization of the rate of high school graduation,” because they mainly relied on enrollment data reported by school districts and collected by the states and the federal government.
“There are two fundamental problems with Greene’s graduation rate research,” Mishel added. “First, he ignored the other data available on high school completion that are far more reliable, far more consistent with each other, and show significantly higher graduation rates than the school enrollment data. And second, Greene’s computations show an artificially low graduation rate because he does not fully correct for grade retention, especially among minorities, in 9th and 10th Grade.”
Joydeep Roy, economist and co-author of the EPI study, also criticized the Greene-Swanson findings for failing to rigorously examine all possible data sources, including the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), considered to be the best available data on the issue, and the Census and the Current Population Survey, which tracks individual students or survey households.
Both of these surveys also confirm higher graduation rates (about 74 percent) among Blacks and other minority groups.
“Greene and Swanson used misleading indicators,” Roy added during the conference.
Between 1979 and 2004, the EPI report also revealed that high school completion rates (regular diploma and GED - general education development) rose for both White and Black students, but it grew faster for Blacks. Over these 25 years, the Black-White graduation gap narrowed by 8.4 percentage points.
The overall high school graduation rate with a regular diploma, with the data from NELS, is about 82 percent, the EPI report added.
“We hope this report will clear the fog, create a better understanding of the true challenges we face and the progress we’ve made, and help lead the way to better targeted solutions for continuing to close the remaining gaps. Understanding where we are and how far we’ve come can help identify what has been working in American public education,” Mishel said.
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