For the year 2013, the U.S. government estimates 5.1% of whites dropped out of high school, 7.3% of blacks, and 11.7% of Hispanics. Any kid who is not living in a closed bomb shelter understands how tough America’s job market has become. Why are these students leaving school?

I would like to suggest that many students are leaving because of fictions created by educational leaders, starting with the idea that students can leap huge chasms in their background learning levels if only we push hard enough. When schools shifted to a virtually completely test-based model of success, as part of meeting No Child Left Behind (NCLB) expectations, daily instruction adapted to match questions expected to be encountered on that test. And a great many students began to regularly fail English and math tests now pitched years above their test-documented levels of academic understanding.

Last year, I was required to give my bilingual students exactly the same tests and quizzes as the regular classes in their grade. I had some input into the quizzes, but none into the unit tests, which were prepared by a now-bankrupt outside consulting firm on the East coast. Special education teachers were also required to give identical tests and quizzes. Materials presented were essentially undifferentiated. It didn’t matter if you were a life-time special education student, a new arrival from Honduras, or the kid with the highest state test scores in the grade. You received the same tests and quizzes as everybody else. Then teachers shared data. Failing students were entered in red. My bilingual classes were often a sea of red, especially if a quiz or test had too many story problems. The special education teacher found herself in the same situation.

Eduhonesty: If a performance spreadsheet shows a sea of failure, student after student who did not meet the target, school leaders need to at least consider the possibility that the problem may not be with either the teacher or the students. When handed a quiver of arrows, the fact that I can’t shoot down a passing Boeing 747 does not prove that I am a poor shot.

Regularly failing math and English classes is an excellent predictor for dropping out of high school. When we create instruction likely to precipitate that failure, we should not be surprised that our more “rigorous” approach does not seem to be helping the dropout rate. That Hispanic dropout rate does not surprise me at all now; I have been required to administer so many unreadable tests to my students that I would expect nothing else.

*(https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_219.70.asp)