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Last week, Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland joined a long list of school districts making the papers for dubious practices that prop up graduation rates. The Washington Post revealed that alarming percentages of the county’s 2018 graduates had missed quite a bit of class. In Einstein High School, which was profiled in the story, 40% of graduates missed the same class between 10 and 50 times in a single semester. Across MCPS, 1,800 of the 11,500 graduates had 20 or more unexcused absences in 90 days. Put simply, more than one in seven graduates passed despite missing the same class at least once a week.
Why would MCPS excuse such high absenteeism? The answer is simple: graduation rates. Quotes from students, educators, and district staff all acknowledge that absences are allowed in order to help more students finish high school. Keeping students from dropping out and raising graduation rates are laudable goals worth tracking, but the question of how these goals are pursued is as important as the decision to pursue them in the first place.
Without disputing the Post’s reporting, MCPS officials were quick to note that no policies were broken: Attendance does not affect course grades, and no grade manipulation was found. The county isn’t breaking its rules on absences because in recent years it has changed them, making it, in the words of a union official, “easier to pass courses, recover from failing grades and be out of class.”
No doubt those policy changes were made with the best of intentions. No one wants marginal students to drop out, and graduation rates measure success in that effort. However, the ubiquitous effort to raise graduation rates can push districts into a “by-any-means-necessary” footing that affects students and teachers long before symptoms like egregious absenteeism make the papers.
Absenteeism like that in MCPS is just one symptom of the slip into a by-any-means-necessary approach. Others include outright violations of sensible attendance policies, pressure on teachers to allow substandard make-up work, or high-volume (and too often low-quality) credit recovery programs. The pattern across these instances begins with grad-rate pressures, continues with failed policy — due to extreme permissiveness or lax enforcement — and ends with outcomes that most fair-minded observers immediately recognize as scandalous.
Still, Montgomery County — widely respected for its schools — stands apart from stereotypically struggling school systems, like District of Columbia Public Schools or Los Angeles Unified School District, where these symptoms may prove to be a disappointment, but not a shock. This story shows that problems stemming from unbridled policy reactions to graduation pressures aren’t just affecting struggling districts, but districts across the board.
But just because these symptoms can crop up in any district doesn’t mean that it’s an equal opportunity problem. The symptoms of these policy lapses are concentrated in struggling schools. This is clear nationally in credit recovery participation, and similar patterns are evident in absenteeism within Montgomery County. It’s no coincidence that the schools the Post mentioned had the highest absenteeism were five of the six with the lowest graduation rates in the county. In those five schools, more than one in three graduates were chronically absent; in the rest of the county, it was roughly one in nine.
Obviously, allowing two tracks to the same diploma — one through schools where students have to show up, and a second in schools where they don’t — is untenable. It’s bad for schools, teachers, and students, both those who play by the rules and those that learn to stretch them. Less obvious is which policies are appropriately flexible to keep students in school to meet the expectations for a diploma, and sufficiently rigid to keep those expectations high across schools.
Graduation pressures aren’t the problem in these scenarios; they are a laudable goal that districts should work to improve. The problem is district policy, described by one MCPS teacher as “vague and not consistently applied from one school to the next.” Without reasonable constraints, we should not be surprised by different results. Similar comments are common in my research on credit recovery programs, which also boost graduation rates. In many districts, there are no policies surrounding these programs, allowing them to vary substantially even between schools in the same district.
Districts should wrestle with how policies can provide supports for students that allow them to meet, not dodge, their responsibilities for graduation. Too frequently, districts are falling short, and sometimes we see the evidence in papers like the Post. If that is going to change, district policy has to drive improving graduation rates, not just chase them.
To learn more about high school credit recovery, and how to ensure these second chances are not second-rate for students, RSVP for AEI’s credit recovery event on Thursday, June 6 at 5:00pm.
The Washington Post recently revealed that alarming percentages of the 2018 Montgomery County Public School graduates had missed quite a bit of class. Why would MCPS excuse such high absenteeism? The answer is simple: graduation rates.
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