When It Comes to the GED, These Dropouts Are Being Left Behind

Pass rates for black and Latino test takers are lower than those of their white peers.

(Photo: David Schaffer/Getty Images)

Jul 18, 2016· 3 MIN READ

A veteran journalist and former White House correspondent for Politico, Joseph Williams is a freelance writer, blogger, and essayist in Washington, D.C.

For high school dropouts, the GED is step one on the road to continuing their education, either in community college or at a four-year college or university. At a time when at least some postsecondary education is a prerequisite for a good job, the second-chance certificate has sharply increased in value since its creation in 1942.

Yet the most recent annual report by GED Testing Services, the leading company that administers the GED, shows that while roughly 72 percent of all students who take the test pass it, less than a quarter of Latinos and about one in five African Americans earn passing grades.

Besides a de facto identifier of who’s at risk in the new economy, experts say the disparity adds to the growing pile of evidence that U.S. education is separate and unequal—and that education reform must include changes to what one analyst calls an “apartheid” school system.

“None of it really surprises me in the context of overall educational disparities by race that we see,” Felicia Wong, president and CEO of The Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C., told TakePart. “Since the 1980s, when we moved away from race-conscious, desegregation-focused school policies, we’ve seen racial disparities rise” in education as well as economically.

Kimberly Quick, an education policy analyst at The Century Foundation, said the wide performance gap reflects “the long-standing stratification of our education system and the systems that bolster it,” as well as circumstances that lead to the GED as an option.

“Black youth are more likely to attend persistently poor schools that lack qualified or experienced teachers, have an insufficient number of therapists or counselors on staff, and don’t offer advanced coursework like AP classes, physics, or calculus,” Quick said. At the same time, black students “are significantly more likely to be subjected to putative disciplinary measures that too often push children out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system,” making a high school equivalency degree the only option for getting ahead.

“Educationally it’s unreasonable to believe that most black adults who had these childhood experiences arrive at GED test day on equal footing as their white peers,” she said.

Conceived to help young World War II veterans, many of whom left school to join the war effort, the GED was designed to help them complete their education and qualify for good jobs. Educators and the general public quickly embraced the test as a backup plan for civilian dropouts wishing to qualify for trade school, college, or a better job.

Other companies administer the test—HiSET and TASC—but GED Testing Service dominates the market. While TASC offers the test in fewer states, its data also reflects the racial disparity in testing.

According to the report, the number of Latino and African American test takers has increased, arguably owing to the emphasis officials, including President Barack Obama, have placed on education as the ticket out of poverty.

The total pass rate of GED test takers in 2013 was 75.3 percent, and the success rate for whites was 50 percent, according to the report. But the numbers for minorities are dismal by comparison: 23.2 percent for Hispanics and 21.5 percent for African Americans.

Though it largely reflects racial gaps in education funding—most GED test takers rely on what they’ve learned prior to dropping out to pass—the white-minority gap “only tells part of the story, since GEDs are standard across the board,” Quick said. The communities from which a large chunk of minority test takers come, she said, are usually as much a part of their educational experience as crumbling classrooms and subpar teachers.

“Without healthy neighborhoods with job prospects, safe streets, access to health care and healthy food, strong schools, and political empowerment, it’s difficult to maximize the potential of community members—and it’s certainly more difficult to correct past educational inequities for adults now striving to improve their lives,” Quick said.

Wong also believes racial and class isolation is a central issue, saying “it’s very clear from the evidence” that court decisions striking down government-mandated school integration policies—and setting legal precedents against enacting new ones—widened the educational gap over the last two decades.

School districts and towns “pushed back against Brown, and legally and jurisprudentially, you saw them win,” Wong said. Ending “racial isolation,” she said, is important because in racially balanced schools “you see better, more experienced teachers, you see more per-pupil spending, you see more political attention paid than to schools that aren’t ‘apartheid’ schools that are easier for powerful interests to ignore.”

Both Quick and Wong believe a back-to-the-future program of government intervention to make schools more racially balanced is the best solution for addressing the GED gap and overall educational attainment disparities. While no interventions are on the horizon, Wong said she’s hopeful that the mountain of evidence indicating unequal education outcomes—and perhaps a more favorable legal climate—can convince lawmakers to try again, lest the cycle continue and minorities get left behind.

“New legal thinking—or old legal thinking—around the harms of racial isolation and segregation is a critical part of solving this problem,” she said. “You can’t keep educating kids in highly stratified ways and expect that their outcomes are going to be anything other than disparate.”