Good news: Kentucky is graduating more kids

New high school graduation rate data for all 50 states were recently released by the US Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

Buried in the release is what at first looks like some good news for Kentucky, as our state-to-state rankings improved for the overall “All Student” rate and for the rates for our white and black students.

However, I am a little cautious about these new numbers, because there are other statistics that indicates some of the increases in graduations may be due to social promotions. If you want to see the new rankings and learn more about why I am somewhat cautious about them, click the read more link.

This table shows those new graduation rates.

AFGR for 2010 from NCES, All States, Ranked by Race

In the “All Student” category, Kentucky’s rank improved from 32nd place two years ago (2007-08 school year) to 23rd place in the new results. In 2007-08 Kentucky’s All Student graduation rate was 74.4 percent.

For whites, Kentucky ranked in 37th place among the 46 states that reported graduation rate data in 2007-08, posting a high school graduation rate of 74.2 percent. Kentucky now ranks notably higher at 30th place with an 80.9 percent grad rate.

Still, with whites accounting for more than four out of five students in the state’s public schools, this is not nearly as good as we need. Too many of the state’s dominant racial population are not graduating at rates commensurate with their counterparts in other states.

The really amazing story is for Kentucky’s black students. Two years ago in 2007-08 only 67.8 percent of the state’s black students graduated from high school. Now, that figure is up nearly 8 percentage points to 75.6 percent. Sadly, we are still losing one in four of our black students, unfortunately. Also, this very dramatic jump in just two years seems awfully large.

That leads to some concerns I have about the new numbers. Are we are socially promoting too many kids all the way to a high school diploma without providing them the real skills they need for college and careers?

Evidence to support my concern comes from the Benchmark Score results the Class of 2010 achieved as 11th grade students on the ACT college entrance test during the 2008-09 school year.

The Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE) has set score levels that indicate whether students are adequately prepared for postsecondary schooling. As shown in this table, extracted from an Excel spreadsheet from the Kentucky Department of Education (available by clicking here, and then selecting the link titled “Percent of Students Meeting CPE Benchmarks Spreadsheet”) less than half of the graduating Class of 2010 reached those Benchmark Score levels.

Percent of Students Reaching CPE ACT Benchmarks 08 and 09

Thus, a notable number of Kentucky’s Public High School Class of 2010 needed remedial classes as soon as they stepped through the doors of our two- and four-year colleges. In fact, in math, only about one in three students in the Class of 2010 met the CPE’s Benchmark Score when they took the assessment as 11th grade students in 2008-09.Even worse, the Benchmark score performance fell a bit from the previous year’s testing in the 2007-08 school year. That raises my concerns a bit more that we may have increased our graduation rate numbers in 2010, but we may not have increased real education in the commonwealth much, if at all.