Diploma deception?

Back on January 23, 2016, I wrote about some important problems with the credibility of high school graduation rates in Kentucky. Very simply, Kentucky’s education leaders have been pushing the states officially reported high school graduation rates as though they were really meaningful and fairly comparable to other states.

But, are such comparisons valid? In fact, do Kentucky’s diplomas always indicate solid educational accomplishment?

The recent “The State of Education in the Commonwealth of Kentucky” report from the Kentucky Department of Education celebrates the graduation rate numbers on Page 25.

But, that same section of the report says something else very interesting, claiming Kentucky achieved these high graduation rates even though the state is one of a select group that require Algebra II for high school graduation.

Clearly if the graduation rate is 88 percent, and if the granting of a diploma is predicated on passing Algebra II, wouldn’t you expect a similarly high number would pertain to the percentage of students who reach proficiency on Kentucky’s Algebra II End-of-Course exam? But, the reality is that in the past three years, the proficiency rate for Kentucky’s Algebra II End-of-Course exam has never been more than 38.2 percent, tops.

If Algebra II truly is a graduation requirement, how do you reconcile an 88 percent graduation rate with such low and fairly consistent, 38-percent-level proficiency rates in the end-of-course tests?

The obvious answer: Kentucky is handing out a lot of diplomas to students who probably don’t meet what the state’s educators tell the public is an essential requirement to get those diplomas.

In fact, if Algebra II really is a graduation requirement, the proficiency rates on the Algebra II exam show somewhere around half of the total number of diplomas awarded in 2015 probably should not have been issued.

Since this is school choice week, I decided to break the data out by race to see if the performance of our major minority group and the state’s less affluent students was being particularly inaccurately portrayed. This table shows what I found.

Not surprisingly, the proficiency rates from the Algebra II End-of-Course exams for the past three years are MUCH lower for our major disadvantaged student groups. Black students have little more than half the pass rates on this assessment that whites post. Students truly eligible for the federal free and reduced cost school lunch program don’t fare much better (see technical note at the end of the blog for more on lunch data).

So, here are some take-aways from the table:

• Kentucky’s graduation rate data appears inflated because the state is passing out diplomas to students when other state data indicate those students probably are not qualified to receive such documents.

• The misrepresentation of accomplishment based on diploma awards is bad for all student groups, but the misrepresentation is clearly worse for minorities and poverty students.

• If Algebra II really is a graduation requirement in this state, only a depressingly low proportion of our students should be walking across the stage each spring for graduation. For minorities, those depressing effective graduation rate numbers would be below 30 percent.

This sad situation cries out for programs that will really challenge our traditional public school system to do better. Keep in mind, these misleading graduation rate figures didn’t just come from Frankfort. Local school people – lots of them – are also involved in creating this mirage of progress.

It is clear that alternative school systems operating largely outside of the traditional establishment are needed. We are talking about school choice options here that would have improved reporting requirements and would face penalties for providing the sort of misleading images that Kentucky’s current graduation statistics clearly present.

The data in the table come from the Kentucky School Report Card for the state for 2012-13, 2013-14 and 2014-15. All are available here.

Technical note: School lunch eligibility reported in the school report cards is still is a good poverty proxy in Kentucky because the rates of lunch eligibility reported there still reflects only those who are financially eligible. That isn’t true in many other states where a new lunch option allows all students, even the children of rich parents, to get taxpayer funded lunches in many schools.