The ninth-grade bottleneck: an enrollment bulge in a transition year that demands careful attention and action

School Administrator, March, 2005 by Anne Wheelock, Jing Miao

Consider the following: In Texas, a state audit finds that Houston's dropout rates are much higher than reported, in part because district officials have failed to count discharged students as dropouts.

In Miami, a high school principal is investigated for charges that low-scoring students were pushed out of school to boost test scores.

In Massachusetts, the state's dropout report for 2002-03 fails to count hundreds of students from several urban districts in its calculation of official dropout rates.

In New York City, increasing numbers of early school leavers are included in neither graduation nor dropout rates because they are discharged to "other educational programs," with the number of students discharged now exceeding the number who graduate.

Holding Power

Across the country, official reports of high school students out of school do not always reflect the scope and extent of an urgent but neglected national education problem: The nation's graduation rate is in steady decline. An increasing percentage of adolescents are not graduating from school in four or even five years. A related cause for concern is the increase of students who are stuck in the 9th-grade bottleneck and fail to progress into 10th grade on time.

On paper, policymakers view graduation rates as important indicators of school quality. In 1994, the United States established a national education goal of achieving a 90 percent high school completion rate by the year 2000. No Child Left Behind legislation requires states to report graduation rates, defined as "the percentage of students who graduate secondary school with a regular diploma in the standard number of years."

Still, stated goals have not succeeded in improving school holding power. To the contrary, our analysis of grade enrollment data from the last 30 years shows that graduation rates have fallen steadily since 1984, with the decline accelerating in the 1990s. When the graduation rate is defined as the percentage of students who complete their schooling in the "standard number of years" (calculated by dividing the number of students enrolled in grade 9 into the number graduating from high school three and a half years later), the national rate has fallen from 72 percent in 1991 to 67 percent in 2001. Even when the graduation rate is defined by the number of graduates divided by grade 8 enrollment four and a half years earlier, a definition that offsets the effect of enrollment fluctuations in grade 9, the rate has slipped from 78 percent in 1991 to 75 percent in 2001.

Growing Bulge

School enrollment numbers also highlight where what Johns Hopkins University researchers Robert Balfanz and Nettie Legters call school "promoting power" is weakest. Grade enrollment numbers for the past 30 years show the transition between grades 8 and 10 is increasingly difficult for many students.

Compared with enrollment numbers in 8th grade, 9th-grade enrollments are larger than ever. If students are progressing on time through the education pipeline, student enrollment in any particular grade should be about the same as enrollment in the previous grade. Such is the case in most of the grades. However, 9th-grade enrollment relative to 8th-grade enrollment belies this expectation. Enrollments are increasingly bunching up in grade 9. As of 2001, 13 percent more students were enrolled in grade 9 than in grade 8 the previous year nationwide, while the bulge can be much larger for some states. For example, in Florida, as many as 32 percent more students were enrolled in grade 9 than in grade 8 the previous year.

The largest dip in enrollment from one year to the next is now between grades 9 and 10. As grade 9 enrollment has increased relative to grade 8, student progress from grade 9 to grade 10 has become more constricted. Nationally, as of 2001, while 10th-grade enrollment was between 11 and 12 percent smaller than 9th-grade enrollment the previous year, the difference was much higher in some states. For example, Florida, South Carolina, Georgia and Texas have grade 10 enrollments that are 20 percent smaller than the grade 9 enrollment the previous year. In contrast, prior to the mid-1980s, between 2 and 5 percent of 9th graders failed to progress to 10th grade, and the loss of students from the pipeline was most pronounced after grade 11.

The 9th-grade bulge and 10th-grade dip are most dramatic for African American and Latino students.

National enrollment trends from 1992-93 to 2000-01 show persistent race disparities. While grade 9 enrollment for white students is consistently between six to eight percent higher than enrollment in grade 8, the increase is about four times as much for black students (23-27 percent) and Latino students (24-28 percent). At the same time, while grade 9 to grade 10 attrition rates have been steady at about 6 to 7 percent for white students, attrition is over twice as much for the Latino population (14-19 percent) and nearly triple for the black population (18-21 percent), varying by state.