Those large Kentucky high school graduation rates – The school-level story

I wrote recently about the fact that Kentucky’s recently reported high school graduation rates might be more due to social promotion than real improvement in education. That first blog in this series looked at overall statewide averages for a statistic we have developed called the Transition Ready Graduation Rate (TRGR). This shows the proportion of entering 9th grade students who graduate on time with more than just a piece of paper, ready to transition to the next phase of their lives.

The earlier blog shows that statewide only about 59 (58.7) out of every 100 entering 9th grade students who became the Class of 2019 graduated from high school with an education that allowed them to qualify for at least one of about a dozen different ways they could be considered ready to transition to the next phase of their lives. That’s a TRGR of only 58.7%. NOT IMPRESSIVE!

Things get even more unsatisfactory when we drill down to look at each Kentucky public high school’s TRGR. I set up an Excel spreadsheet you can view by clicking here to see that information sorted in several different ways. But, one of the most disturbing examples is exemplified by this table, which shows the high schools that reported a top-of-the-list 4-Year Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate of 100%.A 100% graduation rate really sounds great, but – oh, boy – does the real picture vary for some of these 11 schools once we consider their TRGR and the difference between the officially reported ACGR and the TRGR.

First, some good news. At the top of the list for ACGR, the Burgin Independent School does a really great job on both its graduation rate and its transition rate. So, there isn’t much difference between this school’s grad rate and its TRGR. Diplomas from this school pretty consistently mean something.

Incredibly, Burgin even edges out the highly selective duPont Manual High School from Jefferson County when we look at the difference between both schools ACGR and their TRGR. Burgin is keeping it honest, and so is Manual.

If you check out the Excel spreadsheet I developed, you’ll find other schools where diplomas seem to really mean something. They show up at the bottom of the “TRGR to Grad Rate Gap” tab in that Excel spreadsheet. Schools where the difference between their ACGR and their TRGR is less than 10 points include:

Perry County, Buckhorn School, Owsley County, Owsley County High School, Jackson County, Jackson County High School, Jefferson County, Dupont Manual High, Burgin Independent, Burgin Independent School, Monroe County, Monroe Co High, Bullitt County, Bullitt East High School, Beechwood Independent, Beechwood High School, Augusta Independent, Augusta Independent School

But, there is plenty of bad news, too. That same “TRGR to Grad Rate Gap” tab shows most schools have a pretty wide variance between their ACGR and their TRGR. That points to schools increasingly handing out a lot of paper, but not so much education. That’s a big problem.

Returning to the table above, read down to the bottom of the list for Pike County’s East Ridge High School’s data. The school passed out paper to every student in the 12th grade in 2019, but only a disappointing 39.1 percent of those graduates were able to meet muster under even just one of the Transition Ready indicators. That’s all. It looks like the majority of this school’s graduates, more than 60 percent of them, missed out on the education they need to move on successfully in life.

As you read down the listing in the table of 11 schools above, you don’t get very far before the TRGR falls below 80%. I think that starts to get really problematic for our kids.

Here are more observations from the spreadsheet.

On the “Sort on 4-Yr Grad Rate” tab you can see that the school with the lowest ACGR is Iroquois High School in Jefferson County. Iroquois has a really abysmal official graduation rate of only 73.7 percent. Even worse, it has an incredibly low transition rate of only 16.5%, which happens to be the lowest rate for any school. This gives Iroquois High a TRGR of just 12.2%! That’s really unacceptable.

Four other Jefferson County high schools appear just above Iroquois in the “Sort on 4-Yr Grad Rate” tab. The best TRGR for the entire group is a dismal 33.4%. If you look at the bottom of the “Sort on Trans Rate” worksheet that is sorted by the Transition Rate, there again is plenty of population by Jefferson County schools.

If you scroll around in the “Sort on Trans Rate” tab, you will see that those 11 schools listed in the table above are pretty evenly distributed from high to low Transition Rates. The worst case is East Ridge High School in Pike County, which appears only eight rows up from the bottom of this worksheet. A real high graduation rate coupled with a really low transition rate should set off alarms all over. Will that happen?

There were 227 high schools in 2018-19 with the data to compute the TRGR. When we look at the “Sort on TRGR” tab, we don’t move very far down from the top before we start to see rates below 80%. Only 36 high schools, just 15.9%, have a TRGR above this minimally acceptable threshold. Fully 136 high schools have a TRGR below 70%. And, 71 schools have a TRGR below 60%.If you like to work with spreadsheets, I am sure you will find more interesting points. If you find something of interest, how about adding a comment to this blog?

In any event, the bottom line is that many Kentucky high schools seem to be handing out relatively hollow diplomas on a rather frequent basis. That just fools the public and cheats kids. We need to do better.