What is Georgia’s real school dropout rate?

Getting good data not just a local issue. From the AJC.

Mystery meat, mystery data
Numbers on school performance often murky, easily fudged

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 04/20/08

Education data can be as rubbery as the baked chicken in the school lunchroom, making it tough for parents to figure out how well a school is actually performing.

If they know where to look, they often have access to school test scores, discipline reports and graduation rates, all useful in evaluating a school’s strengths. But that same data can be confusing, misleading and manipulated.

Faced with the threat of sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, for example, school systems and states have had plenty of motivation to massage data so that their school discipline incidents appear lower or their graduation rates appear higher.

That information ought to be clearer and it ought to be uniform, so that parents can compare schools across counties and states. If such comparisons are impossible — if it’s impossible to identify weak schools that need to be improved, and good schools that can serve as models — then it’s hard to drive improvement.

The most pliable education statistic may be high school graduation rates, which are more the result of art than science. Many states inflate their graduation rates by either undercounting dropouts or using a formula that overlooks ninth and 10th grades, where most kids disappear.

The Georgia Department of Education, for example, reports a 72.3 percent statewide graduation rate, but independent estimates have placed the rate at 56 percent.

Such inconsistencies have finally caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Education, which plans to require every state to adopt the same method to calculate how many students graduate from high school on time and how many drop out.

“One reason that the high school dropout crisis is known as the silent epidemic is that the problem is frequently masked or minimized by inconsistent and opaque data reporting systems,” Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings pointed out in a recent speech.

“For example, in some districts, a student who leaves school is counted as a dropout only if he or she registers as one,” she said. “In others, a dropout’s promise to get a GED at an unspecified future date is good enough to merit graduate status. With such loose definitions of what it means to graduate, it’s no wonder this epidemic has been so silent.”

Spellings said the new graduation data will be public “so people nationwide can compare how students of every race, background and income level are performing.”

But even when the data is transparent and provided by a credible source, parents can’t be sure what it signifies. A few weeks ago, the National Assessment of Educational Progress — an important series of benchmark exams often dubbed the “Nation’s Report Card” — released the much-anticipated results of eighth-grade writing tests. Reaction was swift and contradictory.

“These NAEP results offer further proof that our new curriculum is making a big difference,” proclaimed a delighted Kathy Cox, Georgia’s superintendent of schools. “National and state results lead to the same conclusion — Georgia students are making tremendous progress in writing.”

But Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia and president of the Washington-based advocacy group Alliance for Excellent Education, was far less upbeat.

“Of the students entering high school in Georgia, 71 percent are writing below grade level, which means they don’t have the writing skills they need to succeed,” Wise said, also citing NAEP results.

Neither Cox nor Wise was wrong. NAEP ranks student performance in four categories: below basic, basic, proficient and advanced. Cox noted the overall improvement in the writing scores, rather than the number of Georgia students writing at the highest levels. She accurately stated that 88 percent of Georgia students scored at the basic level or higher, a six-point jump since 2002, the last time the NAEP writing test was given.

Wise didn’t see as much to celebrate in the jump in the overall scores. He wasn’t encouraged that 12 percent of Georgia students scored below basic and 58 percent scored at basic, which reflects “partial mastery of the prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work.”

Instead, Wise focused on the fact that only 28 percent of Georgia eighth-graders performed at the proficient level — which NAEP defines as “solid academic performance” — and 1 percent performed at the advanced or superior level. (For those who contend that higher spending doesn’t correlate with higher academic performance, the states with the highest percentages of students in the proficient and superior ranges were New Jersey and Connecticut, which are also among the top education spenders.)

Despite its intentions to help parents by grading schools, the No Child Left Behind law has added to the confusion. For example, a strong school can end up with a scarlet letter — the dreaded “failure to show adequate yearly progress” — even if most students are doing well. Under the law, schools are penalized if they don’t show sufficient progress among subgroups, such as low-income, special education students and English-language learners.

Legislators like to talk about giving parents more choices. But parents can’t make good choices unless they first get more lucid and relevant information.

— Maureen Downey, for the editorial boar