As previously mentioned, I had a chance to participate on KET’s Kentucky Tonight program on education on August 13, 2018, and it was an interesting time.

I was also pleased to find a number of areas discussed on the show where there was more consensus than contentiousness, as well.

One such area where another show guest, the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence’s Bridit Ramsey, and I strongly agreed was with concerns about the quality control over Kentucky’s current high school diplomas and what is planned to address those problems.

You can find a quick, one-page summary of the proposed changes here, and you can read additional information in a staff note to the Kentucky Board of Education, as well.

Kentucky Tonight participants started to talk about their concerns with these issues at 35 minutes 45 seconds into the broadcast, but here is a quick summary of some of the comments.

For sure, Ramsey and I both agree that there is a huge disconnect between the number of students getting diplomas and those graduating with an education that has effectively prepared them for life. There is clearly a problem with quality control over what currently passes muster for graduation across the commonwealth, and that needs to change. So, the general effort to add some specific quality control over those diplomas is welcome and badly needed. However, there remains concern that the proposals might not be aggressive enough.

One example is reducing the supposed current requirement for competency in math through Algebra II to only require math accomplishment through Algebra I. While there is very strong evidence that the current Algebra II requirement is being largely ignored in Kentucky, that doesn’t mean today’s high school graduates don’t need to reach at least this level in mathematics. Algebra is where students really start to demonstrate higher order thinking skills with material that does have right and wrong answers. It has also been strongly linked to better readiness for college and/or careers by a number of organizations including the ACT, Inc., which knows something about such readiness due to its extensive history with college readiness testing and workforce testing with its Work Keys tests. ACT has pointed out that today the same skills needed by college freshmen are also needed by people going into many non-college workforce careers. And, many sources such as the Princeton Review show that doing well on the ACT requires Algebra II.

Now, some are saying ACT, Inc. is wrong.

Well, Ramsey and I don’t buy that, and we are far from alone. So, I hope there will be more work done on the details of the new diploma requirements, but for sure we need a higher quality diploma, and the new effort to create that is very welcome.

By the way, Ramsey and I also agreed on the show about some of the compelling evidence that our current diploma quality is very poor.

That evidence comes partly from a new statistic I first discussed in a blog back on October 1, 2015. I developed this new statistic to examine the credibility of Kentucky’s high school graduation rates, calling this new statistic the “Effective High School Graduation Rate.”

The Effective High School Graduation Rate shows us the percentage of students entering the ninth grade in Kentucky’s public school system who complete their four years of high school and graduate on time with an education that has effectively prepared them to qualify as college and/or career ready (CCR) using official readiness criteria developed by the Kentucky Department of Education.

The Effective High School Graduation Rate is easily calculated by multiplying the Kentucky Department of Education’s officially-reported 4-Year Adjusted Cohort High School Graduation Rate by the department’s officially-reported CCR figure.

The 4-Year Adjusted Cohort High School Graduation Rate shows the percentage of entering ninth grade students who graduate on time after four years of high school. The official CCR figure shows the percentage of those graduates who were able to qualify under at least one area of the state’s various, formally-defined college and/or career ready criteria.

For certain, the message from the Effective High School Graduation Rate does not look good for Kentucky. For example, the Effective High School Graduation rate was an important area of research in our February 2016 report, “Blacks Continue Falling Through Gaps in Louisville’s Schools, The 2016 Update.”

That report identified major differences between the officially reported graduation rates and the effective rates in Jefferson County’s individual high schools and across Kentucky.

There was a major equity problem uncovered, as well, because a much larger proportion of black graduates compared to whites are getting rather hollow diplomas in Kentucky.

BIPPS is not alone in using the Effective High School Graduation Rate, either. I discovered to my delight in November 2016 that the Prichard Committee was using the same calculation, calling it the “Ready Graduation Rate.”

Like us, Prichard was also very concerned about the implications of the Effective/Ready High School Graduation Rates around the state and was calling for changes.

As you will be able to tell if you watch the Kentucky Tonight video, Prichard and BIPPS remain highly concerned about these issues today. So, both generally favor efforts currently under way at the Kentucky Department of Education to create quality control standards for the state’s high school diploma, with some reservations as already noted above.

How does the Effective High School Graduation Rate data look? Take a look at the table below, which contains some of the data points I mentioned on Kentucky Tonight.

The first section of the table contains the official 4-Year Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate data for Kentucky by race for 2014-15 and the latest 2016-17 results. This information comes from the Kentucky School Report Cards web site. Note that in every case, the official high school graduation rate increased between the 2014-15 and 2016-17 school years.

Next, examine the second section of the table, which has the official College and/or Career Ready Rate (CCR) data, which also comes from the Kentucky School Report Cards.

In particular, notice that the proportion of high school graduates who were able to qualify under at least one of the states’ official CCR data dropped between 2014-15 and 2016-17 for all three categories, all student numbers and for both white and black numbers, too.

That’s not good. This shows the state passed out more diplomas with less true academic preparation behind them in 2016-17.Now, look at the third section of the table, where the Effective High School Graduation Rate data are calculated. Note here that for both all students and for blacks, these numbers also declined between 2014-15 and 2016-17. Again, that’s not good. It also shows an achievement gap problem getting worse.

Finally, check the far right section of the table. This shows the differences between the official cohort graduation rates and the effective graduation rates for each race. For example, in 2014-15 the all student official graduation rate was 88.0 percent and the effective rate was 58.9 percent. The difference for all students is 29.1 percent.

Now, notice that the differences between the cohort rates and the effective rates grew in every case between 2014-15 and 2016-17. For example, the all students difference rose from 29.1 to 30.9, an increase of 1.8 points. So, the inflation in awards of rather hollow diplomas got worse for all students in Kentucky, and it actually got worse for both whites and blacks, too.

Finally, looking at the two far right columns in the table, note that the difference between the cohort rate and the effective rate for whites in 2016-17 was 27.7 percentage points, indicating a disturbing percentage of whites got a diploma but not the education they needed. However, for blacks in the same year the discrepancy between the officially reported graduation rate and the effective rate was 49.4 percent, nearly double the already bothersome 27.7 percentage point figure for whites. This indicates a major equity problem where many more blacks than whites are being socially promoted to a rather hollow, education-thin diploma.

So, the Effective High School Graduation Rate data abundantly establishes the need for much better high school diploma quality control in Kentucky. We know it at BIPPS, and folks at Prichard fully get this, too. The question is, will the new controls being established set the right level of rigor to insure every Kentucky student who gets a diploma also gets something even more important – the education needed to succeed? If you have thoughts on the proposal, let us know or contact your state school board member.