Language and math have always been part of the core public school experience in the US; science, by contrast, has often been considered an optional topic. But the combination of a push for greater standards and a recognition of science's increasing role in our high-tech economy has resulted in the adoption of science requirements by many states. Now, an analysis of US census data suggests that the increased push for science may have a negative effect: an increase in the dropout rate in states that have adopted science requirements.
This isn't to say that science is bad for students. "That there is positive impact of rigorous coursework when chosen by students is not controversial," researchers based at the Washington University School of Medicine wrote in a recent study, "but there has been ongoing debate over the effects of requiring a more difficult high school curriculum for everyone."
The authors relied on data obtained by the US Census Bureau, through the actual census and annual surveys the Bureau performs. (For data junkies, it's worth noting that all of the data is publicly available from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series website.)
The data contains a set of measures of educational achievement, indicating whether the person graduated high school, ever attended college, and completed college. The authors used the full data set (with 2,892,444 individuals), which had a serious drawback: there was no way of knowing whether people attended high school in the same state in which they currently lived. To control this, the authors also created a subset of the full population, one where the person was listed as having been born and currently residing in the same state, which improves the probability that they had attended school in the state.
They then broke down the number of science and math classes required for high school graduation, which ranged from a low of none to a high of six; eight states adopted standards during the study period, which ran from 1980 to 1999. They also obtained data about factors that influence academic achievement, like average family income in different states and the amount of financial aid available to students at state schools. As an added analysis, they also ran the data in the states that instituted requirements as a "before-and-after" experiment.
Those states with the highest math and science requirements ended up seeing higher dropout rates once all the other influences were accounted for, with the probability of students quitting increasing by nearly one full percent. Black (1.9 percent additional) and Hispanic (2.6 percent additional) men saw an even larger boost in dropout rates.
The situation for college was quite a bit more complex. Overall, students were less likely to attend college if they'd had high math and science requirements, again with some variation among ethnic groups. But once at college, those students who had completed several math and science courses were more likely to graduate. The effect was small—a boost of just 0.4 percent overall, but some groups saw larger gains. Black women, for example, saw graduation rates go up by nearly three percentage points.
The general trends were similar among the population that had been born and settled in the same state, although there were some differences among the individual groups. Here, the boost provided by math/science requirements for Hispanic men in college graduation was so large (a gain of 15 percent compared to the group's achievement as a whole) that the authors suspect they might be seeing the effect of something else related to a stable residency: "Our results could suggest that migration status is serving as a proxy for unmeasured factors that are relevant to education for Hispanic men and women."
The results aren't especially surprising. Math and science aren't for everyone and can pose a real challenge for those without interest and aptitude. And challenges will certainly make it harder to see things through to completion.
But there are other factors not considered here that might also contribute to these results. The training of math and science teachers may vary from state to state and could have a profound effect on students' interest and achievement. One indication of this cited by the authors was that public colleges saw an increase in remedial math class attendance over the period between 1975 and 1980. The authors' introduction also made it clear that the US as a whole takes a rather chaotic approach to math and science education. During the study period, five states added Algebra II as a requirement, even as Florida eliminated it and Texas considered doing the same.
The final issue is that education itself is not a controlled experiment; state and local school boards rarely change a single aspect of education while keeping everything else the same. (An example cited by the authors: Chicago schools made "Algebra for All" a policy in part by eliminating any remedial algebra classes.) As a result, teasing out the influence of a single factor is difficult.
It's probably not unreasonable to conclude that simply adding math and science requirements could boost the dropout rates in public schools. Now educators have a new problem to tackle: how to improve science and math education in a way that keeps graduation rates unchanged even as requirements are expanded.
Educational Researcher, 2014. DOI: 10.3102/0013189X14540207 (About DOIs).
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