Honest High School Dropout Reporting in California Brings Huge Rate Increase

California recently started a high quality student tracking system, and the first results just came out. The state now admits that one out of four kids didn’t make it through high school.

The new dropout rate for California is listed as 24.2-percent. Last year, using a calculation the Los Angeles Times now labels “discredited,” Californians were told only 13.9-percent of the students were lost during the high school years.

Here in Kentucky, we are still waiting for our troubled student tracking system to even start. The first attempt, the STI system, has been cancelled, and the replacement, called “Infinite Campus,” is generating lots of complaints from the pilot school districts. Never the less, the Kentucky Department of Education says they are going state-wide with Infinite Campus anyway by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Kentucky remains where California was, using officially “discredited” data from our CATS nonacademic reports that do nothing beyond inflating CATS school assessments and No Child Left Behind results.