What Honest Dropout and Graduation Rates Tell Us

– California knows, Why Doesn’t Kentucky?

Two years ago, California’s public education system began to get honest high school graduation and dropout data after switching to a high quality student tracking system. Two days ago, the state got its second set of trustworthy data, and it showed that only 68 percent of California’s students graduate with each class and an alarming one out of five – yes, 20 percent – drop out of high school each year.

Meanwhile, here in Kentucky, our state education establishment continues to feed us exaggerated claims about how many kids graduate from Kentucky’s public schools. Part of the problem is that while the huge state of California has managed to implement a good student tracking system, here in Kentucky our program has gone through a number of fits and starts and is still several years away from being able to provide what California started getting two years ago.

What makes this more unacceptable is that we could be getting a more accurate graduation rate figure from a decent estimation formula while we wait for our student tracking program to become fully operational. That formula was extensively researched by the US Department of Education several years ago and is called the “Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate” (AFGR).

The latest available AFGR are in Table 106 in the Digest of Education Statistics 2008 and cover the 2005-2006 school term. For California, the AFGR was 69.2, which is a point or two higher than the rate California just reported for two years later (federal research shows the AFGR tends to return a slightly high rate).

Kentucky’s 2005-06 AFGR was 77.2, and that is probably a point or two higher than the true graduation rate. However, the graduation rate Kentucky officially reported for No Child Left Behind purposes was notably higher at 83.26 percent (see Page 16 in the latest Kentucky Nonacademic Data Report).

Thus, Kentuckians are being fed a picture that is probably about 8 points better than the truth. We are talking about somewhere around 3,000 students – every year – who don’t graduate even though our educators are misleading us into thinking they do.

Anyway, we won’t know anything for sure about graduation rates in Kentucky for several more years at least.

Out in California, they know the truth now.