Graduation Rates – Who Ya Gonna Trust?

Kentuckians and their policy makers have been inundated over the past few years with all sorts of figures about how many kids actually graduate in Kentucky.

Unfortunately, because Kentucky doesn’t have high quality graduation rate data – and won’t get that until 2015 or so under current plans – a bunch of different formulas are being used here to estimate the proportion of kids who graduate within reasonable amounts of time from our high schools.

Bluntly put, those formulas don’t produce the same numbers, as this graph, which comes from a new item at the freedomkentucky.com Wiki site shows.


Sadly, the most inflated rates of all come from the formula officially being used by the Kentucky Department of Education. The department has announced changes to that formula, but I think they need to make them faster than currently programmed. With the confusion from all the rates shown above, a little more rational approach to calculating graduation rates won’t come a moment too soon.