Where Did They Get That Graduation Rate?

A fairly new group has been researching the performance of public school systems in the “Urban Core” of Greater Cincinnati, which includes downtown Covington and Newport in Kentucky.

Known as “Strive Together,” or simply “Strive,” the organization has been working hard with the often weak education data available to develop a useful picture of what is going on in schools in “Cincy’s” Urban Core.

Strive pretty quickly realized that the current graduation rate reporting in both Ohio and Kentucky is a mess, and the organization put together a nice little white paper on some of the more commonly encountered formulas.

Strive points out the graduation rates that Covington and Newport claim for state purposes, including CATS and No Child Left Behind accountability, look a whole lot different from the results of another, more widely accepted formula, as this Strive table shows.


In all cases, what the schools report to the state is wildly different from what the respected Education Week researchers report.

If you would like to know more, you can find Strive’s white paper on graduation rate reporting here.