KDE Releases Transitional Graduation Rate Data

In its transition to a public school graduation rate formula that is mandated by the U.S. Department of Education (USED), Kentucky is reporting Averaged Freshman Graduation Rates (AFGR) for the first time this year.

The state will use the AFGR for the next three years to provide public high school data that will be used for federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability purposes. For the 2009-10 school year, the statewide AFGR was 76.68 percent. (Graduation rate data is lagged by one year for accountability purposes.)

The AFGR enables disaggregation of data, meaning that Kentucky can report rates for males, females and ethnic groups.

*NOTE: The AFGR data for 2007-08 and 2008-09 are provided for comparison purposes. Comparisons between formerly reported graduation rates, which used the Leaver Formula, and AFGR-derived data should not be made due to the differences in those formulas.

NCLB requires that states report graduation rates for high schools and include the data in federal accountability determinations. The AFGR formula for NCLB divides the average of prior years’ 9th- and 10th-grade membership (enrollment) by the number of four-year diploma and more-than-four-year diploma recipients in the current reporting year. Students with disabilities whose Individual Education Plans enable them to take more than four years to obtain a diploma are included in this calculation.

AFGR Formula

The number of ’09-10 graduates with diploma in 4 years +

graduates with diploma allowed 4+ years by IEP, x 100

Divided By

Grade 9 Membership ‘06‐07 School Year +

Grade 10 Membership ’07‐08 School Year, divided by 2

Equals

Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate

To make adequate yearly progress (AYP) for NCLB purposes, schools and districts will be required to meet a goal of 82.32 percent or close the gap between the previous year’s rate by at least 10 percent. The Kentucky Board of Education (KBE) approved the interim goal of 82.32 percent as a component of 703 KAR 5:060, the regulation describing the interim assessment process. Graduation goals for reporting in 2012 and beyond must be determined by the KBE during the regulation process for the new assessment system.

Kentucky also is reporting an Adjusted AFGR that will not be used for NCLB accountability purposes. This adjusted rate recognizes non-traditional diploma holders, such as students with severe disabilities who receive certificates of completion. The Adjusted AFGR formula is the same as the AFGR for NCLB formula, with the number of students earning certificates of completion added to the number of four-year diploma and more-than-four-year diploma holders.

USED’s guidelines for graduation rate formulas do not enable the counting of students who earn non-traditional diplomas; however, state regulation703 KAR 5:060 requires that the adjusted rate be reported for district and school use. The Adjusted AFGR for 2009-10 is 80.5 percent.

USED approves graduation rate formulas that states use to generate federal reports, and the agency expects all states to eventually use a cohort formula.Kentucky has worked with USED on a transitional plan for reporting graduation rates with a cohort model, allowing the state time to implement completely the tracking of individual students in the student information system.

The plan includes three steps:

1. Kentucky used the Leaver Graduation Rate for determinations for federal accountability reporting in summer 2010 (using data from school year/class of 2008‐09).

2. For this report, Kentucky uses the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR) as a transitional method to begin reporting graduation data disaggregated by group and for making determinations for federal accountability reporting (using data from school year/class of 2009‐10).

3. Kentucky will implement the Cohort Model with the nonacademic data release in fall 2013 and federal reporting determinations in summer 2014 (using data from school year/class of 2012‐13).

There are several factors that can impact AFGR data. The formula is based on the assumption that membership/enrollment is consistent over time. The formula does not take into account district or community factors that may have caused a loss in population over four years, and those factors can negatively impact the AFGR. Also, a gain in population may impact the AFGR positively.

For this data release, 31 school districts that have district or community factors that have negatively impacted their AFGR. A list of districts and factors can be found in the document District Factors Impacting the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR),which is availablehere.

Complete details on district and school graduation rates can be found in theOpen House section of KDE’s website, by clicking on the item under “Headlines” on the agency’shomepage or by visiting the Nonacademic Data section.

Go here for 2009-10 Graduation Rate Data Posting:

SOURCE: KDE Press release

The Hunt for Missing School Children

An interesting chat at the Prichard blog; Susan Weston has been hunting missing school children.

Weston has been looking for about 3,000 Kentucky students who, sometime after middle school, seem to disappear from the count of graduates and dropouts each year.

The issue matters. Tracking attendance and computing graduation rate tells us whether the opportunity to obtain an adequate education is distributed across the citizens of the Commonwealth, as the constitution requires. Writ large, the K-12 system has only recently become equitable in terms of fiscal support. Similarly, the system has a strong basis to claim advances in student achievement since the Rose decision in 1989. The system is better socially; not perfect.

Anyway, Weston thinks she's found good news - that state information systems are performing better.

the added accuracy is coming from the improved student information system that moved into full implementation two years ago, designed to track students individually from year to year and from school to school across the state.

Overall, though, it looks like a good sign: it looks as though we're getting closer to counting the students who don't collect diplomas accurately, and like we're also getting better at getting many of them through to high school graduation.

She says it could also mean KDE is ...

• Keeping better track of public school eighth graders as they move through to graduations than we did a few years ago 
• More private schools students moving into the public schools than we was a few years ago
• More students who repeat grade 9 nevertheless persevering to graduation.

Kentucky Making Moderate Progress on Graduation Rate

Graduation chatter from the Commish:

Moving Students to Graduation – And Beyond

The Kentucky Board of Education has adopted a strategic goal of a 90 percent graduation rate by 2015, using the cohort graduation rate definition.

This week, the America’s Promise Alliance released the Building a Grad Nation report, and that can be accessed [here].

There was some good news for Kentucky, as we were listed as one of the states making moderate progress in improving the graduation rate. However, we have much work to do. For instance, we must increase the number of current 8th graders who are projected to graduate by more than 5,000. The report lists a number of strategies to address this goal. Among those are high-quality education as a top priority for communities; accurate data; early warning and intervention systems; high expectations for ALL students; higher standards; teacher effectiveness; parent engagement; alternative options and graduation pathways; and new community coalitions supporting graduation.

Commish Declares a New Direction

Following this week's meeting of the Kentucky Board of Education, Commissioner Terry Holliday declared a new direction for education in Kentucky on his blog. He touches on Senate Bill 1, common standards, and a new interim calculation of Kentucky's graduation rate.

This from Dr H's Blog:

A New Direction for the

Kentucky Board of Education

The Kentucky Board of Education meeting this week signaled a new direction for the board’s meetings. The agenda items at the meeting were a comprehensive set of strategies that will eventually lead to regulatory and possibly statutory changes to implement Senate Bill 1.

The board acted on major recommendations from a recent Office of Education Accountability study of mathematics programs in schools in the Commonwealth. A key requirement will be common course codes for core subjects. This is related to Senate Bill 1, since the Common Core Standards (an initiative of the Council of
Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association) will drive the need to have common course codes at the high school level...

Another key strategy is changing the definition for measuring high school graduation rates. The board approved regulatory changes that will allow use of a more standard graduation rate, which allows districts to disaggregate rates by ethnicity and gender. Kentucky will not be able to implement the national graduation rate, called a cohort graduation rate, which follows individual students from the 9th grade to graduation, until 2013-14; however, until that time, we must focus on preparing ALL children to graduate with the skills needed for college and career...

Commish Talks Graduation Rate

This from Terry Holliday at Doc H's Blog:

While Numbers Are Important, Children Matter Most

...While I was impressed with the Kentucky graduation rate of more than 83 percent, I did learn that Kentucky had not yet reported the NCLB four-year graduation rate due to technical issues. We are scheduled to report this data with this year’s entering freshman class when that group graduates in 2013.

Upon digging into the data, I learned that Kentucky had more than 6,500 students drop out of school in the 2007-08 school year. These numbers reflect real children and reflect a real concern for the economic, social, moral and civil rights impact that high school dropouts will have on our Commonwealth...we cannot accept 6,500 students dropping out of school...

There are some that will focus on the numbers and debate the accuracy of those numbers. We do need to ensure we are reporting accurately; however, we need to focus on the children and what we as adults can do to help more children graduate from high school and be prepared for postsecondary work.

The biggest challenge to overcome is the excuse that some children cannot learn due to their economic and social conditions.

Weston's Graduation Pie Bake-off

Susan Weston thinks that,

Public and nonpublic graduates and nongraduates, when combined, should add up to a credible estimate of that year's eighteen-year-olds...

[M]ost approaches to public school graduation rates make the same big mistake. Specifically, they assume that many students who spend two years in ninth-grade can across the stage with their first freshman class and with their second freshman class, collecting diplomas both times. Those approaches either result in implausibly low nonpublic school numbers or implausibly high numbers old enough to graduate.

So she's gone into the kitchen to bake up some illustrative graduation rate pie graphs for your consumption. Yum.

Kentucky Graduation Rate Increases Confirmed in Report

The national high school graduation rate stagnated around 74 percent between 2002 and 2006, but in "twelve states, which can serve as models for the nation, the gains were substantial," according to a new study at Johns Hopkins University.

The report, released by the Everyone Graduates Center, found the largest gain was in Tennessee, where the rate rose from 61 percent to 72 percent.

Gains in these states ranged from an 11.2 percentage point gain in Tennessee to a 3.0 percentage point gain in New Hampshire.

The 12 states (listed from largest to smallest gains) are: Tennessee, Delaware, Kentucky, South Dakota, Arkansas, Alabama, North Carolina, New York, Hawaii, Missouri, Nebraska, and New Hampshire.

Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, New York and North Carolina stand out as states that made good gains, produced significantly more graduates in 2006 than 2002 and saw a decline in the number of high schools with weak promoting power (the nation’s dropout factories) and a gain in the number of high schools with high promoting power.

This progress, however, must be tempered with the acknowledgement that except for Kentucky all of these states still have overall graduation rates below the national average.

Table 1 - State Progress Toward Raising Graduation Rates from (2002 to 2006): Top 25%

The study examined national and statewide progress in raising the high school graduation rate between 2002 and 2006. This is the most recent period for which comparable data across states is available. The period also saw growing awareness of low graduation rates and high dropout rates in many communities across the country, coupled with a marked increase in philanthropic investment and activity among states and school districts, as well as advocacy and social change organizations seeking effective responses to these challenges.

The overall national graduation rate remained essentially flat between 2002 and 2006, at approximately 74 percent.

This period did see a 3 percentage point improvement in promoting power (i.e., the timely progress of students from 9th to 12th grade). Those gains in promoting power were offset, however, by a 3 percentage point decline in the ratio of seniors to diplomas awarded (i.e., the extent to which 12th graders obtain diplomas).

There also was a near 10 percent decline in the number of high schools with weak promoting power, that is, the nation’s dropout factories.

Overall, 300,000 fewer students attended weak promoting power high schools at the end of 2006 than in 2002. Gains were greatest among minority students.

What the analysis of national and state level progress between 2002 and 2006 shows is that the nation’s initial response to its recognition of a graduation rate challenge was not sufficient. The nation as a whole did not move forward, and only one out of three states made measurable progress. The states that did progress show that improvement, indeed substantial improvement, is possible. They challenge other states to match or exceed their efforts.

The good news is the nation is responding.

The last few years have seen both an acceleration of efforts and the beginning of more comprehensive approaches. It has also become clear that the federal government needs to play a more active role. At the close of 2008 the U.S. Department of Education issued regulations aimed at greatly increasing graduation rate accountability. All states must employ accurate graduation rate measures by 2012, establish ambitious graduation rate goals, and require substantial and continuous progress toward those goals for all students as well as subgroups.

President Obama has made it a national mission to insure that all students graduate from high school prepared for, and then enroll in, post-secondary schooling or advanced career training.

SOURCE: The Everyone Graduates Center

Reducing Dropout Rates

So tonight I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be a community college or a four-year school, vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma.And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself; it's quitting on your country. And this country needs and values the talents of every American.

--President Barack Obama

This from Ed Week:

“Grad Nation: A Guidebook to

Help Communities Tackle the Dropout Crisis”

One of the first steps for anyone wanting to reduce the dropout rate in a community may be to convince others that a dropout problem exists, according to a guide released this month.

The publication, “Grad Nation," lists some statistics that may help demonstrate the seriousness of the problem. It notes, for example, that nearly a third of public high school students don’t graduate with their class, and that in 2,000 high schools, 40 percent of freshmen typically drop out by their senior year...

Ed Department Releases Guidance to Assist in Establishing Uniform High School Graduation Rate

Last week, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced the release of non-regulatory guidance to implement a uniform and accurate measure of the high school graduation rate that is comparable across States. The uniform high school graduation rate is a critical step toward improving high school accountability.

"The nation can no longer tolerate - much less prosper - with its abysmal graduation rate, particularly among minority students," said Secretary Spellings. "Parents know that a high school diploma is the least their children need to succeed in today's economy. This guidance will help ensure resources are better targeted so that students earn a regular high school diploma."

The non-regulatory guidance released today provides States, local education agencies and schools with information about how to implement the uniform graduation rate regulations, including making data public so that educators and parents can compare how students of every race, background and income level are performing. This guidance provides the following information:

• Defines the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate, the extended-year adjusted cohort graduation rate, and the transitional graduation rates that are allowable until States must implement the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate.
• Guides States in setting a single graduation rate goal and annual graduation rate targets.
  Outlines requirements for reporting graduation rates.
• Answers questions about how States include the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate and any extended-year adjusted cohort graduation rate in AYP determinations, including the use of disaggregated rates for student subgroups.
• Explains how a State must revise its Consolidated State Application Accountability Workbook to include certain information and submit its revisions to the Department for technical assistance and peer review.
• Clarifies the timeline for implementing the new graduation rate provisions, as well as the process for how a State that cannot meet the deadlines outlined in the final regulations may request, from the Secretary, an extension of time to meet the requirements.

ED Announces Final Regulations to Strengthen NCLB

This from the Principal's Policy Blog:

On October 28, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced final regulations to strengthen and clarifyNo Child Left Behind (NCLB), focusing on improved accountability and transparency, uniform and disaggregated graduation rates and improved parental notification for Supplemental Education Services and public school choice. The Secretary made the announcement while speaking to educators, state and local policymakers and business leaders at South Carolina Educational Television in Columbia, S.C.

“NCLB has shined a spotlight on schools,” said Secretary Spellings. “It is compelling grown ups to do the right thing by kids. And it’s working. According to the Nation’s Report Card, since 2000, more kids are learning reading and math. Since this law was passed, nearly one million more students have learned basic math skills. Children once left behind are making some of the greatest gains, but more work needs to be done. That’s why I’ve taken a responsive, common sense approach to implementing the law with today’s announcement.”

The Secretary noted that these new regulations reflect lessons learned over the past six years since NCLB was enacted and builds on work that states have made with their assessment and accountability systems. One area that there is broad public consensus around is the need for a uniform graduation rate.

Recognizing that the nation can no longer tolerate - much less prosper - with its abysmal graduation rate, particularly among minority students, the final regulations establish a uniform graduation rate that shows how many incoming freshman in a given high school graduate within four years.

“As far back as 2005, governors from all 50 states agreed to adopt a uniform, more accurate graduation rate. But so far, only 16 states have done so,” said Secretary Spellings. “Parents know that a high school diploma is the least their children need to succeed in today’s economy.”

Under the new regulations, all states will use the same formula to calculate how many students graduate from high school on time and how many drop out. The final regulations define the “four year adjusted cohort graduation rate” as the number of students who graduate in four years with a regular high school diploma divided by the number of students who entered high school four years earlier, adjusted for transfers, students who emigrate and deceased students. The data will be made public so that educators and parents can compare how students of every race, background and income level are performing....

Rising graduation rate good for state

This from the Messenger-Inquirer by way of KSBA:

It is easy to become cynical about Kentucky's high school graduation rate, even though the picture is improving.

After all, in this day and age of ever-higher demands for an educated work force, when close to 30 percent of students do not graduate from high school either on time or at all, we wonder what the future holds for those individuals.

We also wonder what the future holds for this state when so many of its people enter adulthood sorely lacking in the ability to get ahead and forge a good future for themselves.

But the fact is, a higher percentage of Kentucky students are completing high school than ever before, and solid gains have been made in recent years, and that is good news. Couple that with the Kentucky's on-to-college ratio also improving over the years and it means that the state's overall education attainment level is going up. It can't help but pull Kentucky in the right direction.

Here in the Owensboro region, the picture is brighter still. The new report titled "Diploma Count 2008: School to College: Can State P-16 Councils East the Transition?" tracks high school graduation rates in all 50 states and the District of Columbia by congressional and school districts.

The report puts Kentucky's 2005 graduation rate at 71.5 percent. That represents an increase of 6.2 percentage points since 2001, a growth rate more than double the national average. The 2nd Congressional District, which includes most of the Owensboro area, has a graduation rate of 74.8 percent, beating the state and national averages. Every district in this area had better rates than the state and national average, led by McLean County's 86.8 percent and Daviess County's 86.5.

Part of the reason for success here is the work of the local P-16 Council, called The Greater Owensboro Alliance for Education. The membership includes regional college presidents and school superintendents plus leaders from the work force and early-childhood learning, the chamber and economic development presidents, the mayor and The Learning Community director.

The goal of the council is to strengthen connections between elementary, secondary and higher education.

Much work remains to be done to push Kentucky's high school graduation rate to a more acceptable level, but with the stakes so high, even gradual improvement is cause for celebration.

Students, teachers, school officials and parents working together with the support of the community is the only winning formula that will keep the progress going.

States move toward uniform graduation rate reporting

This from USA Today:

SEATTLE (AP) — Comparing graduation rates from one state to the next or even one school to another can be as difficult as trying to help your children with their math homework: everyone has their own way of coming up with an answer.

That challenge is expected to go away within the next five years, but not without more pain, aggravation and money.

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced in April proposed new rules that would require states to assign each student a unique ID number to facilitate tracking from the time a student enters 9th grade until he graduates or drops out of school.

Spellings' call — which mirrors an agreement from the National Governors Association — will force every district to face up to the reality of a more scientific graduation rate, and quit hiding behind more positive estimates.

Washington state assigned a unique ID to every student four years ago, so this year's senior class will be the first with four years of data, so the 2008 graduation rate will be based on the method Spellings wants to mandate for all states.

State officials don't know if the new method will help or hurt Washington's steady 70% on-time graduation rate, said Joe Willhoft, director of assessment for the Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

But, Willhoft adds, the point of the effort is to come up with a number that tells the truth...

Kentucky public schools increase graduation rates

Secretary Spellings has vowed to nationalize the definitions related to dropout/graduation rates. This is a good thing. In fact, it's the approach NCLB should have taken form the start - national goals and definitions, but state level efforts to reach those goals.

Be that as it may, using the current nationally recognized, if flawed, definitions, new state data shows slightly more of Kentucky's public school pupils are graduating high school and fewer are dropping out.

The Kentucky Department of Education released data on Wednesday that shows Kentucky's graduation rate has increased from 83.26 in 2006 to 83.72 percent last year. The data shows the percentage of high school dropouts fell from 3.3 percent in 2006 to 3.2 percent in 2007.

While the current definition may not be perfect, it is consistently used in Kentucky and is valid for verifying the positive change.

SOURCE: KDE press release

A formula for all

This from the Daily-Independent:

Standards for reporting high school dropout rates needed

Not waiting for Congress to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush has directed Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings to establish by edict a common formula for schools in all 50 states to use to calculate high school graduation and dropout rates. Such a formula is long overdue because using data released by different states and different school districts within the states makes it currently impossible to determine just how many students are not graduating from high school.

Nationwide, the graduation rate is assumed to be 70 percent, with as few as half the students completing high school in many urban areas. But to read the numbers reported by individual schools, the graduation rate is much higher than that.

The Southern Regional Education Board reports that when the number of graduating seniors reported by Kentucky high schools in 2003 is compared with the number of high school freshmen four years earlier, Kentucky’s graduation rate was 73 percent, or just below the national average of 75 percent. However, at the same time individual high schools in the state were reporting very low dropout rates.

Why the discrepancy? Well, some school systems count only the percentage of seniors who graduate, omitting everyone who dropped out in the ninth, 10th or 11th grade. Some states count GED recipients as graduates, and others counted as graduates are dropouts who only promised to get a GED.

Suppose a student informs his high school that he is transferring to another school, but he never enrolls in the new school. Instead, he drops out. But his old school counts him as transferring to a new school instead of dropping out, and his new school doesn’t count him as a dropout because he never enrolled there.

After a period of public comment, Spellings plans to announce a common formula for calculating graduation and dropout rates that all schools must implement by the 2012-13 school year. Of course, by that time Spellings will no longer by secretary of education and the formula her department devises may be long forgotten. Nevertheless, we commend her for belatedly attempting to establish a universal formula.

A common formula will make for transparency, a reliable database and state-by-state comparisons. And it is hardly a new idea. In 2005, the National Governors Association endorsed a common formula and proposed the relatively simple measure of dividing the number of graduating seniors by the number of ninth-graders who entered the school four years earlier.

In some ways, No Child Left Behind encourages school districts to fudge on graduation rates in order to look good. However, in an era in which those without high school degrees are not even likely to qualify for the most basic of jobs, it is important to know just how serious the nation’s dropout problem is. If we can’t even define the size of the problem, we are not likely to solve it.

How Much Does a Dropout Cost?

This from the Ashland Daily Independent:

The real cost

The entire state loses when teenager drops out of school

Believe it or not, high school dropout rates are among the most difficult numbers to accurately determine.

That’s because the rates annually reported by individual schools and school districts show only a small percentage of students quitting school. But one gets a much different picture when comparisons are made in the number of students in a high school’s freshman class and the number of graduating seniors four years later. Those numbers show that as many as 30 percent of the students in a freshman class fail to complete high school.

A 2006 report by the Southern Regional Education Board found that a higher percentage of Kentucky teenagers are dropping out of school than their counterparts in other states, and the numbers are even more alarming when broken down by race and gender.

For example, in 2003, 83 percent of the white females and 76 of white males graduated from high school in the U.S. However, in Kentucky, the graduation rates for white females was a dismal 69 percent and an even lower 63 percent for white males. A higher percentage of black males and female and Hispanic males did graduate in Kentucky than the national average, but the numbers in both Kentucky and the nation as a whole were dismal.

Nationwide, the SREB reports that only 45 percent of black males and 50 percent of Hispanic males completed high school in 2003. In Kentucky, the graduation rate was 56 percent for black males and 62 percent for Hispanic males. Kentucky also reported that almost two out of every three black females (65 percent) completed high school, compared to the national average of 59 percent.But those are just faceless numbers.

Other statistics show that those lacking at least a high school degree are destined to spend their lives on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. Today’s economy demands more and more college graduates; those without high school degrees simply cannot qualify for most jobs. And that impacts not just the economic stability of the dropouts but also the economy of an entire state and region.

In fact, according to an estimate by the Alliance for Excellent Education — a privately funded education advocacy organization headed by former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise — the more than 16,000 dropouts from the class of 2007 in Kentucky cost the federal government some $788.1 million in additional tax revenue.Nationwide, Wise adds that “had all of the dropouts from the class of 2007 received their high school diplomas, they could have contributed enough money in additional tax revenue over the course of their lifetimes to match the amount of discretionary funding that the U.S. Department of Education received for an entire year. If that isn’t the best example of how education pays for itself, I don’t know what is.”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average annual income for a high school dropout in 2005 was almost $10,000 less than for a high school graduate. In a single year the average high school dropout pays $1,302 in federal income taxes compared to $3,085 for a high school graduate.

The message is clear: When young people drop out of high school, it not only negatively impacts their economic status for the rest of their lives, it affects us all. Nowhere else is that more evident than in this region where a poorly educated adult population is a major obstacle to economic development.

Spellings Pens Regulatory Changes Without Congress

"Graduate" = leave on time with a regular degree

This from the Associated Press:

No Child Left Behind faces changes

WASHINGTON (AP) — Unable to push education fixes through Congress, the Bush administration is taking its own pen to the No Child Left Behind law.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings says she plans to make a host of changes to the education law through regulations being unveiled Tuesday.

Among the biggest changes will be a requirement that by the 2012-13 school year, all states must calculate their high school graduation rates in a uniform way.

States currently use all kinds of methods to determine their graduation rates, many of which are based on unreliable information about school dropouts, leading to overestimates.

States will be told to count graduates, in most cases, as students who leave on time and with a regular degree...

...While states will no longer be able to use their own methods for calculating grad rates, they will still be able set their own goals for getting more students to graduate. Critics say that allows states to set weak improvement goals.

...Lawmakers recently tried but were unable to pass an updated version of the law due to disagreements over how to judge schools and teachers, among other things. Without a renewal, the existing law stands.

Spellings has been taking steps in recent months to make changes from her perch. However, the proposed regulations amount to the most comprehensive set of administrative changes she has sought so far.

"The Congress, I guess because of the political and legislative climate, has not been able to get a reauthorization under way this year," Spellings said in an interview. "I know that schools and students need help now, and we are prepared to act administratively." ...

...The administration is seeking public comments before finalizing the regulations in the fall...

States’ Data Obscure How Few Finish High School

I don't know what the current data is...but a few years back when I served on the Fayette County School Equity Council, we saw data that showed half of the entering freshmen at a local high school never graduated. In 2007 that high school reported a graduation rate of 72%. This is either tremendous progress...or a big honkin' statistical lie. My money's on the latter.

This is a topic Dick Innes pounds on over at the Bluegrass Institute. While we may disagree about what should be done about it - we can agree that accounting for Kentucky's graduates and dropouts ought to be accurate.

Without a standard definition of dropout/graduation rate and accurate accounting we will always have stuff like this ...from the New York Times:

JACKSON, Miss. — When it comes to high school graduation rates, Mississippi keeps two sets of books.

One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.

The state schools superintendent, Hank Bounds, says the lower rate is more accurate and uses it in a campaign to combat a dropout crisis.

“We were losing about 13,000 dropouts a year, but publishing reports that said we had graduation rate percentages in the mid-80s,” Mr. Bounds said. “Mathematically, that just doesn’t work out.”

Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later...

The multiple rates have many causes. Some states have long obscured their real numbers to avoid embarrassment. Others have only recently developed data-tracking systems that allow them to follow dropouts accurately.

The No Child law is also at fault. The law set ambitious goals, enforced through sanctions, to make every student proficient in math and reading. But it established no national school completion goals...

Florida School District Sued Over Low Graduation Rates

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a class action against the Palm Beach County, Fla., school district, claiming its low graduation rate is a violation of the Florida Constitution. Even using the “most generous” measures, the lawsuit says, almost a third of the students in the 175,000-student district do not graduate. The graduation rates of black and Hispanic students, which are lower than those of white students, further establish that the district is failing its students, it says...

This from Education Week (subscription).

And this from the EdJurist Accord.

High School graduation rate as a measure of school success

Dick Innes posted a thoughtful item on graduation rates this afternoon over at the Bluegrass Policy blog.

He worries that as Congress considers the reauthorization of NCLB that requirements might be reduced.

I think I heard House Education and Labor Committee Chair George Miller tell the National Press Club that the house bill he introduces in September will allow the use of additional measures to assess school performance more comprehensively and that "one such measure for high schools must be graduation rates."

But he stopped short of saying there would be a uniform definition of what that means. Without an agreed upon definitions - as with "proficiency" -the term "graduation rate" will remain meaningless.

Innes talks about a recent Ed Trust report and the circumstances in Kentucky.