Governor’s wife getting serious about high school dropouts

Next weekend, Kentucky First Lady Jane Beshear hosts a conference on Kentucky’s continuing problem with high school dropouts.

She now recognizes a problem that I have been highlighting since the mid-1990s – despite all the hype about KERA, Kentucky continues to have far too many high school dropouts.

How many?

Well, don’t trust the numbers in the Kentucky Enquirer article. They are the “official” numbers from the Kentucky Department of Education, but the process that generates those numbers was officially audited by the Kentucky Auditor of Public Accounts in 2006 and found to seriously understate the true number of dropouts. The true numbers are at least several thousand students higher than the department is willing to admit.

The interesting thing in all of this is that there are better formulas to use, right now, to give Kentucky a better idea about high school completion rates. Maybe, just maybe, one outcome of the First Lady’s conference will be a call to move to those more accurate reporting methods right away.

Maybe.