Gaps and trends in Kentucky’s graduation rates and readiness rates for white and black students also problematic

I recently blogged about the overall trend in high school graduation rates found in Kentucky’s Unbridled Learning school accountability results for 2016. Now, we separately examine graduation rates for Kentucky’s whites and blacks. We also examine the white minus black graduation rate gaps and the changes in those gaps over time. As we did in that earlier, more general blog on all student graduation rates, we also take a look at the proportion of Kentucky’s whites and blacks who didn’t just get a piece of paper but actually got an education that effectively prepared those students for what comes next, either college or a career.

To briefly overview, while the official graduation rates for white and blacks have increased since the 2012-13 school term, there has been no notable improvement in the gap for white minus black graduation rates. However, when we look at the percentages of those graduates who were found to be college and/or career ready, the gap for whites versus blacks notably increased.

Furthermore, when we examine a far more credible graduation rate figure – namely the proportion of entering ninth grade students who leave high school after four years with an effective education that allowed them to qualify as college and/or career ready, the trend in the gaps gets even larger, resulting in blacks being left even farther behind.

Those who have the interest (courage?) to click the “Read more” link will find disturbing stories lurk behind the official numbers. Basically, the official numbers don’t begin to provide the full picture about dramatic slowdowns in improvement – especially for blacks – and the white minus black graduation rate disparities in Kentucky.

First, let’s look at the overall trend in a more credible graduation rate calculation we developed at the Bluegrass Institute about a year ago. This rate is called the “Effective High School Graduation Rate.” For new readers, we need to explain the Effective High School Graduation Rate. As briefly explained in our earlier blog, the Effective High School Graduation Rate shows the proportion of entering ninth grade students who leave school on time after four years in high school with a good enough education to qualify under at least one area of Kentucky’s official College and/or Career Ready standards.

Essentially, the Effective High School Graduation Rate shows the proportion of entering ninth grade students who leave high school at the end of four years with an education that effectively prepared them for what comes next in their lives. The Effective High School Graduation Rate sheds a lot of the impact of obvious social promotion to diplomas that is going on in Kentucky.

You can read more about the Effective High School Graduation Rate in our “Blacks Continue Falling Through Gaps in Louisville’s Schools, The 2016 Update” report beginning on Page 13.Now, let’s look at some Effective High School Graduation Rates for whites and blacks in Kentucky. Figure 1 shows how the Effective High School Graduation rates have trended for both races in Kentucky.

Figure 1

effective-hs-grad-rates-2013-to-2016-whites-and-blacks-graph

As we found in our earlier blog, which looked at the overall trend for all students, there is a noticeable flattening of the trend lines for both races. However, while the white rate continued to increase a bit in the new 2015-16 data, the black trend has nearly gone flat. That trend information is easier to understand when you check the data in Table 1, which was used to assemble Figure 1.

Table 1

effective-hs-grad-rates-2013-to-2016-whites-and-blacks-table

Notice that the change in the Effective High School Graduation Rate for whites has been decreasing constantly, with only a 2.4 point change in the rate between 2014-15 and 2015-16.However, improvement in the black Effective High School Graduation Rate has almost ceased entirely, with the difference between 2015-16 rate and the previous year’s rate now down to only half a point.

Let’s take an even deeper look at the graduation rate data. Table 2 shows the full set of data used to calculate the Effective High School Graduation Rates shown in Figure1 and Table 1 plus still more (click on the table to enlarge if necessary). 

Table 2

grad-rate-and-effective-grad-rate-trends-for-whites-and-blacks-2013-to-2016

Table 2 first breaks the data down into two separate areas for the whites’ and the blacks’ graduation rate and college and/or career ready figures. The next section of the table looks at trends in the gaps between those rates.

White performance

The first section of the table under the blue border shows several officially released sets of data for white students. These data come directly from the Kentucky School Report Cards web site operated by the Kentucky Department of Education.

The first column of data shows the “Official 4-Year Adjusted Cohort High School Graduation Rate” (ACGR) for Kentucky’s white students by year. These numbers show the percentage of first time entering ninth grade students who graduate “on time” after four years in high school. These white student graduation rates range from 87.6 percent back in the 2012-13 school year to the new 2015-16 rate of 90.0 percent. There has been a small, 2.4 point rise in the officially reported white Four-Year Adjusted Cohort High School Graduation Rate in this time interval according to the officially released numbers.

The next column shows the officially reported “Official College and/or Career Ready Rate” (CCR) for Kentucky’s whites. The CCR numbers range from 57.6 percent of the high school graduates back in 2012-13 to 72.4 percent most recently. These numbers show the percentages of all the graduates who were able to qualify as either college ready or career ready using one of the various options officially established in Kentucky to show such readiness. Over the past four years the CCR rate for Kentucky’s white graduates has risen from 57.6 to 72.4 percent according to the official data, an increase of 14.8 points. Sadly, even as of 2015-16, more than one in four white high school graduates in Kentucky didn’t get the effective education needed to be ready for what comes next in their lives.

The next column shows our calculation of the “Effective High School Graduation Rate” for whites for each of the school years listed. The latest Effective High School Graduation Rate for our white students is nothing to cheer about. Only 65.2 percent of the entering white ninth graders who graduated on time in 2015-16 were able to meet even one of the state’s official readiness measures for college or careers. The Effective High School Graduation Rate for Kentucky’s whites increased from 50.5 to 65.2 percent in the four years listed, an increase of 14.7 points.

Finally, the right-most column in the whites section of the table shows the difference between the officially reported Four-Year Adjusted Cohort High School Graduation Rate and the Effective High School Graduation Rate for each year. Back in 2012-13, the difference between the Four-Year ACGR and the Effective High School Graduation Rate was 37.1 points. Most recently, the difference between the Four-Year ACGR and the Effective High School Graduation Rate was notably reduced to 24.8 points, a reduction of 12.3 points. Still, there is a very large difference between the proportion of white students in Kentucky who got a diploma in 2015-16 versus the proportion of students who actually got an effective education along with that piece of paper.

Black performance

Things look much worse when we examine the graduation data for Kentucky’s black students, which are shown in the next section of the table under the orange border.

For one thing, whether we look at the official graduation and CCR data or the Effective High School Graduation Rate, all are much lower for Kentucky’s blacks.

Examining the black Four-Year Adjusted Cohort High School Graduation Rate shows an increase of 2.5 points occurred between 2012-13 and 2015-16. That’s hardly different from the 2.4 point increase for whites.

The CCR data for blacks shows an increase of 11.0 points occurred during the period covered by the table. As mentioned earlier, the white CCR increased by 14.8 points. So, there was an increase in the gap between white and black CCR rates.

Things start to look very bad for Kentucky’s blacks when we take a look at the Effective High School Graduation Rate statistics. As of 2015-16 only 34.9 percent of Kentucky’s first time ninth grade black students left high school after four years with a good enough education to qualify under any of the state’s official CCR criteria. Nearly two-thirds of these children of color didn’t get an effective education with their diplomas, or they didn’t even get a diploma after four years of high school.

Finally, when we look at the difference between the official and effective graduation rates for blacks and compare those to the differences for whites, we see much larger differences for blacks. As of the 2015-16 school year, for example, while the white difference was only 24.8 points, for blacks the difference was much larger at 46.0 percent. So, a larger proportion of Kentucky’s blacks didn’t get an effective education with their diploma. Instead, they just got a somewhat hollow piece of paper that made their schools look good although these graduates were actually not ready for either college or a career.

Also, when we look at the difference between official and effective grad rates for blacks, there has only been a small reduction over time from 53.2 percent to 46.0 percent, a drop of only 7.2 points. Recall we earlier showed that the whites saw a reduction of 12.3 points. That provides another indication that the gaps situation isn’t going to look good, which brings us to the next section in the graph.

White minus black graduation rate and CCR achievement gaps

The next section of the table shows the gaps between white and black cohort grad rates, college and/or career ready rates and Effective High School Graduation Rates by year.

Notice in the column for the White minus Black 4-Year Adjusted Cohort High School Graduation Rate Gaps that there has been virtually no change in the official graduation rate gap for whites and blacks.

However, there has been a change in the White minus Black College and/or Career Ready Rate Gaps, and it has moved in the wrong direction. The already large gap in readiness in 2012-13 got larger by 3.8 points by 2015-16.

The change is even more unsatisfactory when we look at the White minus Black Effective High School Graduation Rate Gap. This gap has grown by 5.0 points from 25.2 points in 2012-13 to 30.2 points as of 2015-16.

Very simply, Kentucky’s blacks are being left behind when it comes to giving them an effective high school education. As of 2015-16 only 34.9 percent of the state’s black students were graduating on time with an effective education that made them ready for college or a career. And, it looks like progress in improving the black Effective High School Graduation rate has almost come to a complete halt.

Technical Notes: Data used to compile the graduation rate and CCR rates came from these Kentucky School Report Cards “Data Sets” files:

Sources: DELIVERY_TARGET_GRADUATION_RATE_COHORT 2013-14DELIVERY_TARGET_GRADUATION_RATE_COHORT 2014-15DELIVERY_TARGET_GRADUATION_RATE_COHORT 2015-16ACCOUNTABILITY_CCR_HIGHSCHOOL 2012-13ACCOUNTABILITY_CCR_HIGHSCHOOL 2013-14ACCOUNTABILITY_CCR_HIGHSCHOOL 2014-15ACCOUNTABILITY_CCR_HIGHSCHOOL 2015-16