Kentucky’s high school graduation rates look good but hide problems
One of the bright spots in the official release of the 2015-16 Unbridled Learning report is the high school graduation rate situation. The official rate for on time graduations all students rose again from 87.9 percent last year to 88.6 percent in 2016. This rate, officially called the Four-Year Adjusted Cohort High School Graduation Rate (ACGR), is based on tracking each student from school entry to exit to insure that students entering each high school are properly credited as a success or not.
However, the Bluegrass Institute has done a lot of research recently into the quality behind Kentucky’s high school diplomas. There is major cause for concern that our rising high graduation rates may mostly indicate a lot of social promotion to diplomas is going on in the Bluegrass State.
One serious indication of the quality problems with Kentucky’s diplomas comes from our comparison of the official graduation rates to the percentages of those graduates who are able to meet even one of the state’s official College and/or Career Ready (CCR) standards.
After all, what value does a high school diploma really have if a graduate isn’t adequately prepared to be a success in follow-on pursuits? Inadequately prepared graduates really don’t get an effective education; hence we call our new metric of true graduation success the “Effective High School Graduation Rate.”
Very briefly, 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 (Read more about how we calculate the Effective High School Graduation Rate in our “Blacks Continue Falling Through Gaps in Louisville’s Schools, The 2016 Update” beginning on Page 13).
So, for our first look at the 2016 graduation rate data from Unbridled Learning, we examine how the officially reported Four-Year ACGR and officially reported CCR data relate to the percentage of students that really got an effective education with their diploma. The graph and table below show how that turns out for each school year where the Four-Year ACGR is available.
effective-hs-grad-rates-2013-to-2016-all-students-graph
Notice in the graph that the Effective High School Graduation Rate’s trajectory is notably flattening. The Table below makes that trend clearer.
effective-hs-grad-rates-2013-to-2016-all-students-table
As you can see in the far right column of the table, the rate of increase in the Effective High School Graduation Rate seems to be getting cut in half in each succeeding year. From 2012-13 to 2013-14 the rate increased by 8.1 points. It went up only half of that amount between 2013-14 and 2014-15. The rate of improvement was basically cut in half again between 2014-15 and 2015-16. This rapid slowing in improvement is obviously of great concern when the 2015-16 Effective High School Graduation Rate is barely more than 60 percent.
There is another takeaway here. The table shows that the official graduation rates being reported by the Kentucky Department of Education are MUCH higher than the Effective High School Graduation Rates. Even as of 2016, there is nearly a 28 point gap in the two rates. While most of us tracking education would be very happy with a meaningful graduation rate of 88.6 percent as of this year, I don’t think anyone would cheer a rate as low as the 2016 Effective High School Graduation Rate of just 60.7 percent.
Sadly, that big disparity between the officially reported high school graduation rate and the Effective High School Graduation Rate indicate a lot of social promotion to diplomas happened with the Class of 2016, just as we found in our earlier investigations of the 2015 class’ data.
During the ramp up press conference for the release of the 2016 Unbridled Learning report it was mentioned that because all states now report a Four-Year ACGR, that we can compare our results to those elsewhere.
That really isn’t correct.
Even though the Four-Year ACGR is supposed to be calculated the same way in each state, the Bluegrass Institute recently learned that there still are inconsistencies in the way each state actually calculates their graduation rate. Page 9 in a federal document that accompanies the official graduation data in the US Department of Education’s EdFacts web site makes it clear that – even on a technical basis – the federally reported graduation rates might not be fairly comparable from state to state. The document says:
“Although the regulatory adjusted cohort rates are more comparable across states than were rates submitted in previous years under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) as amended, there are still some differences in how states have calculated their rates. These differences include: how students are identified for inclusion in certain subgroups, how the beginning of the cohort is defined, whether summer school students are included, and which diplomas count as a regular high school diploma.”
Even more importantly, there is no cross-state standard for the award of a high school diploma. Thus, growing numbers of diploma awards in Kentucky cannot be assumed to indicate better education performance than is found in other states.
For the most part, there isn’t data across all 50 states to allow comparison of graduate performance. However, a limited 12-state study using ACT results that I recently developed indicates that Kentucky is doing more social promotion to diplomas than those other 11 states do. So, there is cause for concern that Kentucky’s relatively good appearing graduation rates might not really indicate true educational improvement.
Kentucky’s very high official graduation rate numbers need to be considered in the light of the foregoing comments. In the current world economy where real education is becoming more and more important, it probably doesn’t do much good to pass out large numbers of watered down diplomas. About the only thing that happens then is education makes itself look good without really delivering much to our kids.
Kentucky deserves better.
By the way, stay tuned for more on the 2016 graduation rates. In future posts we will be talking about white minus black graduation rate gaps and new evidence that social promotion to diplomas varies widely across Kentucky’s school districts.
Technical Notes: Data used to compile the graduation rate and CCR rates came from these Kentucky School Report Cards “Data Sets” files:
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