Here's a new and significant research finding that won't surprise many of No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) school-based critics: high-stakes, test-based accountability—exactly what the law promotes—has a direct, negative impact on graduation rates. That result, from a new study out of Rice University in Houston and the University of Texas-Austin, flies in the face of NCLB's aim: to improve schools and create more equitable educational success for minorities. Between 1997 and 2002, as Texas schools began abiding by their state's accountability system, which rates schools with test scores and targets principals for rewards and penalties, and which was the model for the NCLB Act—"massive numbers of students" left the school system, the study found. Indeed, each year 135,000 students leave Texas public high schools ahead of graduation, and a disproportionate number are African American, Latino, and English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. More importantly, the study says that data collected from 271,000 students from poor high schools in an urban district between 1997 and 2002 showed that the state's “high-stakes accountability system has a direct impact on the severity of the dropout problem." In short, NCLB’s accountability requirements led to the pressures that fed the dropout rate, says Linda McSpadden McNeil, a professor of education at Rice and the study's lead author. "What we found is, the higher the stakes—whether principals get a bonus or lose their jobs, or whether your school could lose funding or even be closed if the scores don't go up—then the greater the likelihood that the adults in the system start to look at the kids according to whether they are assets to the schools' rankings or whether they are liabilities." Specifically, the researchers found that the graduation rate for the students studied was only 33 percent—a radical departure from the "2 to 3 percent" the district officially reported. The researchers also categorized the graduation rate by ethnicity, race, and language. The study found that 60 percent of African Americans, 75 percent of Latino students, and 80 percent of ESL learners did not graduate within five years. Why? The more "punitive" the rules became in high school under NCLB, the more kids left, McNeil says. The dropouts actually helped raise the schools' accountability ratings, the study reports. Accountability, McNeil adds, allows principals to hold back students who are at risk of reducing their schools' scores; students who are retained frequently drop out. Grouping test scores by race, as NCLB requires, also helps to "single out" the lowest-achieving students in their respective subgroups, the study says, thereby increasing incentives for school administrators "to allow those students to quietly exit the system." Further, students affected by the accountability system's zero tolerance for poor attendance and behavior may be put into the court system for minor offenses and absences, the report points out. This "alienates" students and makes them more likely to drop out. “Avoidable Losses: High-Stakes Accountability and the Dropout Crisis” was recently published in the scholarly journal Educational Policy Analysis Archives.