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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2008 > March > 20 > Entry
The mystery of graduation rates
In today’s New York Times, Sam Dillon takes a run at an age-old problem: Graduation rates. States have never been consistent about how they calculate graduation rates, which creates confusion and sometimes leads to false comparisons or inaccurate impressions.
For some states, that’s just fine with them.
The federal government requires one method of reporting. States dutifully send up the data, while keeping their own, in many cases nicer looking, numbers to share with the public in their states.
There is an honest debate over graduation rate calculation methods. And in many states the data systems just aren’t up to keeping track of every student in a way that would give truly useful numbers.
Should it really be this hard to figure out how many kids graduate?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Comments
By Mark
March 22, 2008 10:06 AM | Link to this
Mary: Allow me to “out” my esteemed colleague, Mr. Elliott. The University of “That State Up North” hosted Scott for an academic year after he accepted a prestigious Knight-Wallace Fellowship. I’ve heard rumors he’s actually a UD grad and — ahem — a Buckeye fan. But enough thread drift. When the DDN first took a look at how the Ohio Department of Education kept graduation rates back in the ’80s, the department simply divided the number of graduates by the number of 9th-graders that school districts had four years earlier. So fast-growing suburban school districts that were experiencing large influxes of new families were able to report “graduation rates” of 105 percent, 113 percent, etc. Now THAT’S classroom magic!By Oldprof
March 21, 2008 9:01 AM | Link to this
No, Scott, it isn’t hard. The state boards just don’t want to do it. It’s the old “Lake Woebegone Effect”, first demonstrated back around 1990 in the study that showed that each state chose standard assessment tests on which their students scored above average—thus, every state in the USA was “above average” (which is, of course, statistical nonsense). In the heat of discussion of the future of Ohio’s state board of education, I wonder if Carl Wick and Susan Tave Zelman will come clean about how they’ve done a Garrison Keillor riff on standard measures of educational effectiveness?By Mary
March 21, 2008 7:41 AM | Link to this
Well, schools and colleges seem to be quite capable of keeping meticulous records on individual and team athletic statistics. Graduation rates impact funding and other things the public might not think of, such as National Merit cutoff scores that vary from state to state. The numbers are also fishy when it comes to per student spending in a district. Try to get a straight answer on that since quite a few expenses are excluded in some calculations. Even the number of students enrolled in a district is a major counting exercise. The NCAA goes through hoops and controversy to keep statistics on college graduation rates of athletes, which are sometimes pretty darn low. As I recall, those numbers impact scholarships and other sanctions. Graduation rates are not significant unless education quality is also taken into account. Dayton Daily News had a sports article yesterday about the University of Michigan having soft classes for some of its athletes. (Did you say Michigan was your alma mater, Scott?)