Last week I started this blog series, which shows why we’re concerned at BIPPS about the quality of high school diplomas being awarded in Kentucky.

I looked at two separate indicators of diploma quality in each of Kentucky’s 168 school districts that have high schools.

One approach analyzed the variation between high school diploma award rates and the proficiency rates on the state’s Algebra II End-of-Course Exam (EOC). This approach is worthwhile because Kentucky’s regulations require competency in Algebra II material to graduate. While success on the Algebra II EOC is not a graduation requirement, districts with very large variations between graduation rates and Algebra II EOC proficiency rates still should raise flags. This is particularly true when other Kentucky school districts are producing graduation rates much more in line with their Algebra II numbers.

The second analysis compared high school diploma award rates to the proportion of graduates able to meet at least one of Kentucky’s official college and/or career ready (CCR) criteria. Since readiness is a stated goal in Kentucky, students that cannot even meet the modest requirements in the state’s official CCR criteria raise doubts as to their true academic performance. If Kentucky is to live up to its readiness promise to the students and citizens of the commonwealth, we must not have high graduation numbers with only small proportions of those graduates able to meet at least one official readiness criterion.

Since we earlier created two separate analysis spreadsheets, for today’s blog, I combine the results from those two separate spreadsheets into one, overall examination of diploma quality. The table below contains the top 10 and bottom 10 districts from the combined listing. A full Excel spreadsheet with all districts listed is available as Grad Rate Combined Comparison Alg II and Eff Grad Rates Together Clean Final.

Once again, you want your school system to be at the bottom of this listing where we find school districts like Beechwood and Murray.

School districts ranking at the top, such as Williamburg Independent, generate the most concern regarding the quality of their high school diplomas.

Let’s talk a bit about what the table shows. The school district that generates top concerns about high school diploma quality in our combined study is Williamsburg Independent.

Williamsburg reported an above-state-average four-year adjusted cohort high school graduation rate of 93.4 percent. That probably makes citizens in the district very happy.

However, only 17.5 percent of Williamsburg’s students scored proficient or more on the Algebra II End-of-Course Exam one year earlier, the year when 2015 high school graduates were most likely to have taken Algebra II according to the Kentucky Department of Education. Don’t forget, as we discussed in our earlier blogs, Kentucky’s state regulations require competency in Algebra II material to graduate.

So, Williamsburg’s very large, 75.9 point difference between its graduation rate and its Algebra II proficiency rate is a real concern. The district ranks high for concern – in 19th place – in this analysis.

Next, consider that only a rather low 41.1 percent of the Williamsburg 2015 high school graduates were able to qualify as college and/or career ready using any of the state’s official readiness criteria. The other diploma recipients in Williamsburg were not able to qualify in any readiness area, not for college and not for a career, either. Combining the official graduation rate for Williamsburg with its college and/or career ready rate, the Bluegrass Institute calculates that only 38.4 percent of Williamsburg’s entering ninth grade students in 2011-12 graduated on time in 2015 with an education that effectively prepared them for life. The 55.0 point difference between Williamsburg’s official and effective high school graduation rates ranks only one spot down from the worst performance in this part of our analysis.

Combining Williamsburg’s rather high rankings for both our analysis approaches indicates this district creates the greatest concerns about diploma worth of any district in Kentucky.

Following close behind Williamsburg are a number of other Kentucky school districts which also produce high concerns in both of our analyses approaches. Given limited resources at the Kentucky Department of Education and the Kentucky Office of Education Accountability, if someone wants to dig further into what is going on – and we think that needs to happen – then these districts are the place to start.

Even better would be for local boards and professionals in these districts to examine their diploma policies to see why they have bubbled to the top of our spreadsheets and what they might want to change to insure they are providing quality with their diplomas. That could include working with the Kentucky Center for Education and Workforce Statistics to see how their graduates perform in college or follow-on careers.