Graduation Rates

Graduation Rates Are Missing in Action, But May Soon Be Found

If you were to ask the principal of your local high school the graduation rate of the class of 2001-02, she might whisper the unofficial answer to you discretely. But if you asked her in public for the data, she would have to tell you that she doesn't officially know.

Their reason: the higher-ups at the California Department of Education (CDE) decided that only an exact answer will do. And an exact answer depends upon a student tracking system, something currently lacking from the K-12 landscape. No tracking system, no precision. No precision, no answer.

Of course, precision is out of reach. The class of 2001-02 is a dynamic bunch. Some stay in the same school for four straight years. But others transfer to other schools in the same district, or to other districts. Some take leaves of absence and return. Some leave school altogether. This makes it impossible to identify exactly how many students of the freshman class of four years ago were awarded a diploma in June.

But the federal law known as the No Child Left Behind Act requires that states report their high school graduation rates. Do CDE higher-ups intend to refuse to answer to Uncle Sam, too?

Well, the CDE now offers dropout rates as the next best thing, a sort of surrogate data point. Certainly the U.S. Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, is not likely to fall for this stand-in statistic. Let us hope the public is equally skeptical. Here's why.

Last April, the CDE announced a statewide dropout rate of 2.8 percent. Yet the Census Bureau reports about 25% of 18-to-24-year-olds in California are lacking a high school diploma, eight times the CDE reported dropout rate. This credibility gap can only lead skeptical citizens to wonder whether educators are cooking the books.

At a time when shareholders and employees mistrust their companies' financial statements (think Enron or G.E.), and citizens are questioning their utility company's truthfulness (think PG&E), educators need some help if they are to avoid being lumped together with these devious demons.

That help is likely to come from State Senator Dede Alpert (D-San Diego), who is championing a bill (SB 1453) to create that student tracking system. It won't cost much, and it won't take long to implement. On September 27, this bill was signed by the Governor.

One reason this bill passed is that without it, California stood to lose federal funding for public schools. The new federal education law calls for graduation rates to be reported, and for adequate yearly progress to be measured. If states fail to meet these requirements, the folks in the enforcement division of the federal Dept. of Education are ready to bring down the hammer.

Now that this bill has become law, we'll also get school specific graduation rates, more exact dropout rates, and improved interpretation of testing. With 18% of households moving every year, tracking students with a statewide identification system is the only way for us to understand how schools and their students are really doing.

SB 1453's student tracking system also lays the foundation for measuring adequate yearly progress in a way that's both smarter and fairer than the API. Insiders call this value-added assessment, and it makes each student's year-to-year progress the measure of a school's progress. Its power is that it gives schools neither the credit nor the blame for what students know when they start the school year. Rather, it measures what each student has gained over the year. Tennessee has been evaluating its teachers and schools this way since 1992, and it's been so successful that even the teachers union has supported it.

By 2004, this new longitudinal student tracking system will give us real data, leveraging an already huge investment in accountability systems. Then we can anchor our public debates to a better body of education data, enabling education leaders to steer both public policy and public education with more care. Now that S.B. 1453 has become law, we have the tools to make that happen.

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