Difficult Lessons on Social Prediction from Wisconsin Public Schools

Abstract: Early warning systems (EWS) are predictive tools at the center of recent efforts to improve graduation rates in public schools across the United States. These systems assist in targeting interventions to individual students by predicting which students are at risk of dropping out. Despite significant investments in their widespread adoption, there remain large gaps in our understanding of the efficacy of EWS, and the role of statistical risk scores in education. In this work, we draw on nearly a decade's worth of data from a system used throughout Wisconsin to provide the first large-scale evaluation of the long-term impact of EWS on graduation outcomes. We present empirical evidence that the prediction system accurately sorts students by their dropout risk. We also find that it may have caused a single-digit percentage increase in graduation rates, though our empirical analyses cannot reliably rule out that there has been no positive treatment effect. Going beyond a retrospective evaluation of DEWS, we draw attention to a central question at the heart of the use of EWS: Are individual risk scores necessary for effectively targeting interventions? We propose a simple mechanism that only uses information about students' environments -- such as their schools, and districts -- and argue that this mechanism can target interventions just as efficiently as the individual risk score-based mechanism. Our argument holds even if individual predictions are highly accurate and effective interventions exist. In addition to motivating this simple targeting mechanism, our work provides a novel empirical backbone for the robust qualitative understanding among education researchers that dropout is structurally determined. Combined, our insights call into question the marginal value of individual predictions in settings where outcomes are driven by high levels of inequality.