Here's the rest of the high school graduation rate story

Recently, there have been some pretty interesting claims about Kentucky’s public high school graduation rates. A few days ago, the Northern Kentucky Tribune ran an article based on a report which in turn was based on data from United Health Foundation’s AMERICA’S HEALTH RANKINGS® 2022 ANNUAL REPORT. The article says Kentucky ranks 4th among the states for high school graduation rates for students who have attended high school for four years (in other words, on-time graduations).

Meanwhile, the also recently released Prichard Committee’s Big Bold Future report for 2022 says KY Ranks 3rd for High School Graduations.

Whether the answer is third or fourth place, this sounds pretty good.

But there is a “rest of the story” as the late Paul Harvey used to put it so nicely.

There are no consistent cross-state standards for the award of high school diplomas. Comparing statistics for something that doesn’t have the same standard in different states is, well…. Simply put, just comparing this statistic across states is clearly highly problematic.

Even worse, there’s some compelling evidence that Kentucky has lower standards for issuing diplomas.

In 2022 ACT college entrance testing, for example, among the states with similar ACT participation rates to Kentucky's (96% of graduates tested or more), Kentucky's 2022 graduates' ACT Composite Score for white students was only 19.3. White students in all the other seven states in this group (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, North Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming) had an ACT Composite Score for their white students at least 0.2 points higher.

Yes, even Mississippi scored higher at 19.9.

Kentucky might be handing out more paper, but those diplomas don’t represent the same level of education that diplomas represent in other states.

If you are wondering why I looked at ACT scores for white students only, there is a problem with comparing ACT (or the SAT, or even the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP], for that matter) across all 50 states. The percentage of white students in Kentucky’s public school classrooms is much higher than found in most other states. So, if you look at overall average scores, you actually wind up comparing lots of white students in Kentucky to students of color in other states. That inflates Kentucky’s apparent performance. This graphic, which uses demographics extracted from the NAEP Grade 4 Reading Assessment in 2022, shows how that works.

Bottom line: You have to break things out by race, at least, to get fair comparisons across states.

But, where the ACT is concerned, things get even trickier.

In many states, far fewer than 90% of the high school graduates take either college entrance test. In 2022, for example, ACT data show Kentucky tested 96% of its high school graduates with this college entrance test. In sharp contrast, in the states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland, Michigan, Vermont, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, Delaware, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, California and Maine fewer than 10% of the 2022 high school graduates took the ACT, and the samples of students were not randomly selected, either. There is simply no way to compare ACT performance across such states to Kentucky.

So, again, the results are not readily comparable in many cases.

If you want more information and still more examples that Kentucky’s education system isn’t producing a third or fourth ranked product, see how we compare on the NAEP in our recent report, While Kentucky’s Education System Was Sleeping….

In fact, you might want to be sure your legislators know about how Kentucky’s education system realistically ranks, because the Bluegrass State is not likely to fix problems it really doesn’t understand.