The Kentucky Legislature’s Office of Education Accountability (OEA) presented an interesting report to the Education Assessment and Accountability Review Subcommittee on August 15, 2017 with some really attention getting information.

I already discussed one stunning OEA finding that a majority of Kentucky’s public school students meet the legal definition of being truants.

Today, I briefly touch on results from an OEA survey of the state’s school superintendents on the issue of changing the state’s mandatory minimum dropout age to 18. This change in the minimum dropout age was set in motion in 2013 by Senate Bill 97. The bill was heavily pushed by former Kentucky First Lady Jane Beshear and was heralded as a way to improve graduation rates even though research at the time indicated most states that had raised their dropout age were not reaping much in benefits.

The OEA says by January 2015 all districts had adopted an Age 18 minimum dropout requirement.

So, OEA asked some questions in its superintendent survey about what has happened since SB-97 came along, and, not surprisingly, there were unintended consequences.

OEA reports that:

“The majority (52 percent) of survey respondents indicated that SB 97 (2013) had increased the number of truant students and nearly two-thirds (65 percent) said it increased the number of students entering home school.”

OEA provided some numbers to back this up, as well, as Table 1 below shows.

Table 1

Notice in the upper left corner of Table 1 that 46.8 percent of the superintendents in the OEA’s survey said they saw a decrease in their dropouts after this legislation became effective, but there is much more to this story.

Most surprising, despite the legislation’s intent, the bottom line in Table 1 shows a solid majority of the superintendents said that either there was no improvement in the high school graduation rate (47.8 percent) or the rate actually declined (add another 11.5 percent).Furthermore, over half of the superintendents, 51.6 percent, said they also saw a rise in their truancy rates.

Also significant, well over half of the superintendents, 65.4 percent, said they saw an increase in students leaving the public school system to supposedly home school. Legislators at the EAARS meeting latched onto that because there are concerns that some students might be claiming to go to home school but really are just using this as a dodge to get around the minimum age of 18 to dropout. Some other data in the OEA’s presentation bears on this issue.

Table 2 primarily comes from Slide 37 in the OEA’s presentation, but I added some additional items in the yellow-shaded area at the bottom of the table.

Table 2

As you can see, while dropouts decreased between 2012 and 2016, there has been a notable rise in the number of high school students moving to homeschool compared to the transfers to homeschool for students in elementary and middle school grades. That is already cause for concern, but I looked at something additional the OEA didn’t consider.

Since all districts didn’t adopt the Age 18 rule until 2015, I added a set of calculations for the one-year change from 2015 to 2016. Here the difference in high school versus lower grades transition to homeschool is much more pronounced. In fact, the change in the percentage of transfers in high schools is more than three times the change for elementary and middle school grades, 18.6 percent versus only 5.8 percent.

Also quite notable, the increase in high school transfers to homeschool between 2015 and 2016 of 531 students is much larger than the decrease in the number of dropouts of only 64 students between those years. If the supposed transfers to home school are really just a dodge to work around the Age 18 dropout restriction, then the real dropout situation might be much worse than the official numbers indicate.

During the meeting the OEA team mentioned that Kentucky’s rules for home schooling are fairly loose, and it isn’t really possible to investigate the veracity of the supposed home school transfers due to restrictions found in the Kentucky constitution that severely limit the legislature’s ability to pass laws regarding home schools.

So, the real impact of Kentucky’s Age 18 to drop out law is not as clear as you might suspect. A lot fewer kids might really be getting an education than the drop out data would suggest.