“Leaking” students at a flood rate
We told you so. Kentucky’s high schools are losing a lot more kids than you have been told.
The Kentucky Office of Education Accountability (OEA) presented “Analysis of Kentucky Career and College Readiness using the P20 Database” to the Kentucky Legislature’s Education Assessment and Accountability Review Subcommittee today. It was a first look at what happens to our public school students between high school entry and college, and one slide showed how our high schools leak students to dropout status like a sieve.
OEA's Pipeline Analysis for Class of 2009
If you look at the “Total” column, this table shows that there were 55,056 students in the graduating class of 2009 when the group entered high school in the fall of the 2005-06 school term. One year, later, there were only 49,518 left to take the PLAN test, which is required for all the state’s 10th grade students. One year after that, only 42,929 had survived to take the ACT college entrance test, which again is a requirement for all public school juniors in Kentucky.
Finally, in the spring of 2009 just 42,657 students made it all the way to graduation. That left 12,399 students that didn’t graduate, at least on time, with their class. The OEA euphemistically calls those the “Leakage.” I would call most of them dropouts.
Compare the OEA “Leakage” for the Class of 2009 to the numbers of students that state educators officially say dropped out from this class as it worked its way through high school. That is shown by the numbers circled in red in the next table, which I assembled from dropout data released by the Kentucky Department of Education.
Official Dropouts By Grade, Class of 2009
Officially, this class lost only 6,272 students as it worked its way through high school. Where did the other 6,127 “Leakage” students go? According to a KDE Excel spreadsheet for graduations in 2010, only a small number from the “Leakage” graduated later – just 1,025 were listed as graduates in 2010 who took more than four years to get their diplomas. That leaves 5,102 students who just leaked away, somewhere else.
By the way, the OEA brief discussed the often heard excuse that these kids just moved out of state. Not so. US Census reports indicate Kentucky’s population has been slowly growing over time. So, any kids that did move away were replaced by others, perhaps in somewhat larger numbers.
We’re leaking students, all right. We’re leaking many of them right into jail, where kids who don’t finish a high school education far too frequently wind up.
Before closing on this, go back to the first table and note that “Leakage” isn’t equal for either males versus females or for blacks versus whites. Being male, or being black, isn’t a very good ticket to a high school education in this state.