Honest Dropout Reporting May Generate Better Performance

The State Journal reports that a Kentucky school system formally designated a “dropout factory” in a 2007 Johns Hopkins University report may be starting to turn things around.

The key lesson here is that Kentucky’s much vaunted CATS assessment program and its nonacademic data, which includes dropout calculations, wasn’t the trigger for improvement.

It was a much more honest, though stinging, set of data from Johns Hopkins that finally woke this school system up.

Our state board of education should take note and change our highly inaccurate state dropout formulas to something more honest, and more effective.