High Dropout Rates –

Too Many Still Ignoring Them

“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.”

From: Reducing Dropout Rates - “Grad Nation: A Guidebook to Help Communities Tackle the Dropout Crisis”

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It’s nice to see that the Gates Foundation and others who supported this new report agree that a major problem exists with graduation rates in this country. The only question is why they took so long to see the obvious.

Of course, understanding the real dropout problem in Kentucky is made far harder because the official graduation and dropout rate reports paint far too rosy a picture. While our legislators seem happy to mostly just stand by, even after an official audit condemned the accuracy of our dropout rate reporting, the Kentucky Department of Education continues to crank out fictional graduation rates about 10 points higher than the likely reality.

The situation for minority dropout reporting is even worse. Aside from an overall, statewide average, there isn’t any decent reporting of disaggregated rates for minority graduation rates. The Bluegrass Institute had to use an approximation measure from Johns Hopkins University to do our “How Whites and Blacks Perform in Jefferson County Public Schools” report because not one school leader in this state is held separately accountable for biases in whom they do graduate.

Graduation rates are part of the CATS accountability system; but, no one in the legislature is talking about requiring this part of the assessment to become more accurate. After all, when all you see are inflated numbers, it’s easy to be fooled – if you want to be. Meanwhile, far too many kids don’t just get left behind – they get left out all together.