Diplomas count—but counting grads remains difficult
Published: June 15, 2007
With the release Tuesday of “Diplomas Count,” Education Week’s national report on high school graduation rates, an online resource provided by the National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education can help school board members better understand how researchers arrive at differing estimates of this important data. Measures of California’s graduation rate vary from around 70 percent to 85 percent, for example, but until an individual student tracking system is funded and implemented to account for students who transfer, earn GEDs, spend more than four years in high school or otherwise skew the statistics, accurate rates will remain elusive.
The issue of graduation rates, both at the state and national level, is complex. The No Child Left Behind Act requires states to report their rates but gives them considerable flexibility on how they come up with the numbers, and their methods vary widely. In addition, states lack the kinds of sophisticated data collection systems that would permit them to track the progress of every student—information that’s critical to calculating an accurate graduation rate.
“Three or four major reports on graduation rates come out every year,” said Jim Hull, policy analyst at the NSBA center. “They all measure something different, and they all have different methodologies. If members of the education community get confused by all the numbers, can you imagine what it’s like for folks on the ground? We try to explain why rates differ and what they mean.”
Hull said it’s crucial that members of the public understand that a 70 percent graduation rate does not mean that 30 percent of students dropped out.
“There’s a tendency, especially here in Washington, to take the inverse of the graduation rate and assume that’s the dropout rate,” Hull said. “That’s just not the case.”
For the “Diplomas Count” report, researchers devised what they called a “cumulative promotion index” to estimate the likelihood that a ninth-grader would complete high school on time with a regular diploma. This methodology does not track transfer students or count as graduates students who earn GEDs or certificates of completion, or those who take an additional year or two to finish their high school requirements. In most cases, the graduation rates calculated by Ed Week researchers were lower than rates calculated by individual states.
California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell said the disparity between various graduation rate estimates underscores the need to continue developing CALPADS, the longitudinal student tracking system that’s scheduled to be completed in 2009. Once that system is in place, O’Connell said, Californians will finally have an accurate assessment of how many students are graduating from high school and how many are dropping out.
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