Education Spin

Summary
Last year, the president touted U.S. gains in education, saying that our "fourth- and eighth-graders achieved the highest math scores on record." He bragged that "African-American and Hispanic students posted all-time highs." Last week, the president said those eighth-graders weren't so great at math after all. He claimed they had "fallen to ninth place" in the world, and he bemoaned a high school dropout rate that had "tripled" over three decades.

What a difference a year makes.

Last year President Bush was talking up improvements that had occurred since his No Child Left Behind Act was implemented. This year President Obama is making a case for spending more on teachers' salaries, early education and more as part of his new agenda. We certainly wouldn't argue that education can't be improved, but some of the figures Obama used painted a bleaker picture than actually exists:

The high school dropout rate hasn't "tripled in the past 30 years," as Obama claimed. According to the Department of Education, it has actually declined by a third.

Eighth-grade math scores haven't "fallen" to ninth place compared with other countries. U.S. scores have climbed to that ranking from as low as 28th place in 1995.

Obama also set a goal "of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world" by 2020. But in terms of bachelor's degrees, we're nearly there. The U.S. is already second only to Norway in the percentage of adults age 25 to 64 with a four-year degree, and trails by just 1 percentage point.

Analysis
Whether the education system in the U.S. has improved greatly or needs great improvement may depend on whether a president is nearing the end or just beginning his time in office.

In his final State of the Union address, President George W. Bush claimed student test scores had gone up after enactment of his education legislation. As we said at the time, he was mostly correct. Bush said for example that in 2007, fourth- and eighth-graders "achieved the highest math scores on record." We noted that the "record" of scores dates back only to 1990, and also that Bush failed to note a decline in reading scores for eighth-graders, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But, in general, test scores have risen since enactment of the No Child Left Behind law.

Touting those cheery stats, however, wasn't exactly on President Barack Obama's agenda last week when he spoke about education to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C. Just as Bush left out any mention of less-than-rosy assessments of the nation's education system, Obama didn't say too much about how smart our kids are. And some of his gloomy claims were just plain wrong, or misleading.

High School Dropout
One line left us wondering whether Obama needed to brush up his high school math:

Obama: Not when our high school dropout rate has tripled in the past thirty years. Not when high school dropouts earn about half as much as college graduates. And not when Latino students are dropping out faster than just about anyone else.

Let's start with what he got right: He's correct that the dropout rate for Hispanic students is much higher than for any other group. And according to a report by the Census Bureau, full-time, year-round workers over age 25 who have earned a bachelor's degree make more than twice as much, on average, as those who did not complete high school.

But the claim that "our high school dropout rate has tripled in the past thirty years"? That's not even in the ballpark. According to the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, the "status dropout rate"—defined as the percentage of people between ages 16 and 24 who are not in school and do not have high school diplomas or GEDs—was 9.3 percent in 2006. In 1976, 30 years before that, it was 14.1. That's actually a 34 percent decrease in the high school dropout rate.

Of course, dropout rates are notoriously hard to measure and compare. For instance, while NCES shows a status dropout rate of 9.3 in 2006, the high school completion rate for that year was only 74.8 percent. Why the discrepancy? Instead of counting people of a certain age with a diploma or equivalency certificate, this figure compares the number of high school freshman in a certain year to the number receiving a high school diploma four years later. Those who take more than four years to finish aren't counted, nor are students who get GEDs instead of diplomas. But using this calculation still doesn't back up Obama's claim. The dropout rate—that is, the discrepancy between incoming freshmen and graduates—would have been 25.2 percent in the 2006-2007 school year. The rate in 1976-1977 was 25.6 percent.

Even pessimistic accounts don't show a tripled dropout rate. According to a report by the Educational Testing Service, titled "One Third of a Nation" after the number of students they say are high school dropouts, high school completion rates peaked at 77.1 percent in 1969 and dropped to 69.9 percent in 2000. (NCES shows higher numbers in both years.) That would put dropout rates at 22.9 and 30.1 percent respectively—a 30 percent increase over 31 years. As many sixth-graders could tell you, tripling would mean a 200 percent increase.

So where did Obama's figure come from? A White House spokesman pointed us to a report by the College Board, which said: "The rate at which American students disappear from school between grades nine and 12 has tripled in the last 30 years." But the College Board's report included a mistake, which it later corrected: The rate really refers to what happened between grades nine and 10. More important, however, it is not really a "dropout rate." The College Board report in turn cites a 2004 study by the National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy, which actually shows a tripling of the attrition rate between grades nine and 10, not the dropout rate. In other words, the difference between the number of students enrolled in grade nine in one year and the number enrolled in grade 10 the next year has increased threefold. At the same time, there has been a corresponding threefold increase in grade nine enrollments relative to grade eight. The report shows more ninth-graders failing that grade, not dropping out.

NBETPP reports: This combination, of increasing attrition of students between grades 9 and 10, and increasingly more students enrolled in grade 9 relative to grade 8, is surely a reflection of the fact that more students nationally were being flunked to repeat grade 9.

A threefold increase in students being held back could certainly be considered a matter of concern. But it is not by any stretch of the imagination a tripling of the dropout rate.

Better, Not Worse at Math
While Bush boasted last year that "eighth-graders achieved the highest math scores on record," Obama said their math scores had "fallen to ninth place" in the world. Which is it?

Well, Bush was basing his claim on tests of only U.S. students by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also called the Nation's Report Card, which started testing math skills in 1990. And he's correct. Obama's stat is an international measurement by the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) from the U.S. Department of Education, which does show U.S. eighth-graders in ninth place, behind places including Chinese Taipei, Korea, Singapore and Hungary. But the president was misleading when he said our eighth-graders had "fallen" to that ranking. As our colleagues at PolitiFact pointed out, in 1995, U.S. eighth-graders were in 28th place and in 2003, they had jumped to 15th place. Now, they're even smarter, comparatively speaking.