If it did nothing else, a recently released, rather disappointing report about For All Kids, How Kentucky is Closing the High School Graduation Gap for Low-Income Students did focus attention on how Kentucky’s low-income students are faring. So, for Part 3 of our blogs about the problems with Kentucky’s high school diplomas in 2016, let’s take a look at an Algebra II versus graduation rate analysis for Kentucky’s low-income kids.

As we have seen in Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog series, Kentucky's high school diploma has some really serious credibility issues.

Because I have to algebraically calculate the performance for the non-low-income students, I restricted my analysis to statewide data only. Especially for the Algebra II case, doing a district by district analysis, while possible, would be rather time-consuming.

The table below shows the published Kentucky-wide results for all students, school lunch eligible students and non-lunch eligible students for high school graduation rates in 2015 and 2016 versus the proficiency rates one year earlier on Algebra II End-of-Course Exams.

I use this particular cross-year comparison because most students in Kentucky reportedly take Algebra II in the 11th grade.

The bottom lines in each section of the table show the numbers I have to calculate from the all student and lunch only student data because the Kentucky Department of Education currently does not report the non-lunch eligible student data (Note: there have been Kentucky Board of Education discussions about adding this in the future, and I hope that happens).

So, what does the table show?

For one thing – no surprise – the graduation rates for non-lunch-eligible students are higher than those for the lunch eligible students. The difference was 6.1 points in 2015 and 6.2 points in 2016.

The Algebra II End-of-Course Exam (EOC) proficiency rates are also higher for non-lunch students. In 2015 that difference was 22.6 points and that went down a bit to 22.2 points in 2016.

Perhaps the real issue is the difference between the graduation rates and the Algebra II EOC proficiency rates. Those who have been following the column know that competency in Algebra II is an official requirement under Kentucky Administrative Regulation 704 KAR 3:305, “Minimum requirements for high school graduation.” So, you would expect a fairly close agreement between Kentucky’s high school graduation rates and the Algebra II EOC proficiency numbers. Sadly, that relationship does not exist.

In 2015 there was a 41.1 point gap in the grad rate to Algebra II rate for non-lunch students and a notably larger 57.6 point gap for the lunch eligible students. So, more lunch eligible students were getting diplomas though their real competency in Algebra II seems more suspect than for the non-lunch students.

In 2016, those numbers didn’t shift much. In 2016 there was a 42.1 point gap in the grad rate to Algebra II rate for non-lunch students and a notably larger 58.1 point gap for the lunch eligible students. Thus, the already large discrepancies grew even larger, indicating that even more social promotion to diplomas was going on in 2016 than in 2015.Clearly, the quality control for Kentucky’s high school diploma is problematic and seems to be getting even more so over time.

Technical Note: Sources of the graduation rates and the Algebra II information are Excel spreadsheets for the appropriate years from the Kentucky School Report Cards “Data Sets” area.

The graduation rate data came from the DELIVERY_TARGET_GRADUATION_RATE_COHORT Excels and the Algebra II EOC data come from the appropriate years’ ASSESSMENT_KPREP_EOC Excel spreadsheets.