Graduation rates are the most important performance factor within a school system. Illinois just saw its official graduation rate fall. Does this mean things are getting worse? Not exactly. But there are a number of officials with some explaining to do.
Federal law created tougher data standards for graduation rates, beginning this year. From Diane Rado at the Trib:
The new method, required by the federal government, was used for the first time this year in Illinois, with sobering results: Across the state, about 75 percent of high schools saw small dips to big drops in graduation rates, causing educators to adjust to a new reality.
This “new reality” shouldn’t have caught anyone by surprise. Jay Greene and Education Week have separately been reporting for years that official graduation rates used bunk methods that created inflated results.
In 2008 and 2009 I wrote reports for the Illinois Policy Institute about the coming changes. Looking at 10-year data trends in five districts, I tried to predict what stats would result from the new, more reliable method.For Springfield’s District 186:
…if we adjust the freshman enrollments to eliminate the potential double counting of freshmen who are held back, the district’s ten-year graduation rate is still only 71.7 percent.
When I presented my analysis to district officials, they insisted that these figures were far too low. I suggested that they use a more rigorous method, if only for internal accountability purposes; a blue ribbon commission from the mayor’s office made the same recommendation. Nevertheless the district reported a 2009 graduation rate of 90.2 percent. The following year, 87.8 percent.
But in 2011, when a new state method that actually tracked individual students went into place, the official graduation rate plummeted to 76 percent. Let’s put this in perspective.
A “non-graduation” rate is simply the opposite of the graduation rate. In 2010, Springfield’s official non-graduation rate was 12.2 percent. In 2011 it was double that at 24 percent. The old method understated a critical problem by half.
In Springfield public schools, there are roughly 10,500 students enrolled in preschool through 8th grade. They’ll feed into the district’s high schools. For those kids as a whole, the difference between an 87.8 percent and a 76 percent graduation rate is more than 1,200 dropouts.
Springfield, and as the Trib shows plenty of towns like it, need to get serious about high school reform. The new statistics show that.* An obvious first step would be to bring in people who are running successful high schools in Illinois’s toughest neighborhoods. I nominate Noble Street and Urban Prep.
* The new method of calculating graduation rates must have some loopholes. Chicago Public Schools, according to the new state method, has a 73.8 graduation rate. This is implausibly high. CPS uses a more rigorous method for its own internal accountability purposes, which puts the five-year grad rate at 58.3 percent. The state obviously needs to get even stricter on its graduation data; if that happens the “new reality” for districts like Springfield is going to feel even harsher.