Honest high school graduation rates

– All we’ve gotten so far is broken promises

Back in 2006, the Kentucky Auditor of Public Accounts did an official audit of the dropout and graduation rate reporting from the Kentucky Department of Education.

The auditors found the department was seriously under-reporting dropout rates and over-reporting graduation rates.

In their response to that audit, the Kentucky Department of Education claimed it would start to compute high quality graduation rates starting with the Class of 2009 (Page 44 in the audit).

In the same audit, the software vendor who was creating the program to generate that high quality data took issue with some of the audit findings, pointing out that the software was quite capable, but it was KDE policies that were getting in the way of good student tracking (Pages 45 to 46).

Also in 2006, the Kentucky Department of Education reported to the National Governors Association (NGA) that it would start high accuracy graduation rate reporting using the “NGA Compact Rate” in 2009 (Page 14).

Well, it’s 2009. Anyone seen any high accuracy graduation rate data for Kentucky?

What’s more, Appendix B in the latest Nonacademic Report from the Kentucky Department of Education now says that we won’t see high quality rates until 2014.

In the mean time, we will get two more years of the same inflated “stuff” that the auditor found. Then, only because the federal government is going to make us do it, we will get two years of somewhat more accurate estimates.

But, we could get those somewhat more accurate estimates now. Why all the foot-dragging?

And, why is the department now going to be five years late on its promise to give us accurate information?

Was it software screw-ups, or bad department of education policy decisions? Inquiring minds want to know.