Summer may be down time for students and teachers, but it is the busy season for education data. Right now, Ohio’s school districts are double-checking reports from the state about test scores and attendance and graduation rates, in preparation for the August public release of their report cards.
That’s when an odd problem with graduation rates will resurface.
Ohio’s most recent official data shows a statewide graduation rate of 86.9 percent, which sounds pretty good. Except that rate might not be real. A nonprofit group called Editorial Projects in Education says the percentage is actually 10 points lower.
Who’s right? Hard to say.
There are several different methods that states use to calculate graduation rates. Ohio’s approach, called the “leaver rate,” is considered a relatively good measure and is used by most states. But the rap on it is that school districts can “code” kids who depart as either dropouts or transfers. Critics say districts may err on the side of listing kids as transfers if they are unsure, which artificially inflates their final graduation rate.
Editorial Projects in Education’s more stringent approach essentially counts any unaccounted for kids as dropouts when comparing a class as it moves from grade to grade and, finally, to graduation. Neither approach is perfect, but if the country and the state are serious about pushing more kids to graduate, policy makers need valid, comparable data. That requires having a common method for calculating graduation rates.
The good news is that this thought has occurred to a few people. The National Governors Association even got Ohio and other states to promise they would go to a common standard by 2014, and last year former U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said the federal government would require it.
While President Barack Obama is expected to continue Secretary Spellings’ graduation rate initiative, there hasn’t been much talk about it. This could put Ohio, which was aiming to make the change in 2011, and other states in a holding pattern.
Converting to a common approach isn’t as simple as it might seem. Some states have far worse data systems than Ohio and will need a few years of building up information just to be able to do the math the right way.
Meanwhile, Ohio is in the midst of implementing a new data system that will assign every child a unique identification number. That should make it much easier to track where kids go when they leave a school. With today’s computing power, it’s crazy that kids routinely disappear from school and nobody can say for certain whether they ended up elsewhere or dropped out.
But the ID system is several years away from being ready to use for calculating graduation rates.
The method Secretary Spellings favored had some differences with what the governors had proposed. President Obama and his education team need to weigh in on what they want and when they want states to convert. They need to keep this ball rolling.
— Cox News Service
