Michael Planty

The Ineffectiveness of High School Graduation Credit Requirement Reforms: A Story of Implementation and Enforcement?

Graduation credit requirement reforms were expected to have a significant impact on the American educational landscape, but scholars have concluded that these reforms have exhibited less impact than expected on a wide range of educational outcomes. Drawing on Lipsky’s theory of street-level bureaucracy, we hypothesize that graduation requirement reforms have been relatively ineffective because of inconsistent implementation and enforcement at the local level. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) and the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002), we assess the viability of this hypothesized explanation. On the whole, the findings are consistent with our contention that inconsistent implementation and enforcement of graduation credit requirement policies contributes to the relative ineffectiveness of these policy reforms.