The Elusive Graduation Rates….

When I was in school "back in the day" as my son would say, a dropout was someone who "dropped out" of school and went to work or joined the military. For us, a "dropout" was someone who never finished high school.

Alas, today's use of the words "dropout" has an entirely different meaning. When you hear the startling statistics about the number of "dropouts" you might be hearing incredibly high numbers, and wondering just how horrible our schools have gotten! Before you lose all hope, you might want to explore a little about what, exactly, all these numbers mean! When you hear the term "dropout" it might be used in quite a number of different ways. For example, it could be that I was a dropout in high school. I "dropped out" of high school, since I did not graduate with my class. In fact, I remember going by Lee High School and saying "hi" to everyone as they were preparing to go to Panama City during their break to celebrate their upcoming graduation. I was heading to Panama City as well, only in my case the Panama City was in the Republic of Panama. I graduated at the end of the Fall Semester of my Senior Year, and enlisted in the army. It is very likely that a "cohort graduation rate" would have missed the distinction that I graduated early. The easiest (but not particularly accurate) way of determining a "cohort graduation rate" for a school district is to take the number of graduating seniors at the end of a given year, and divide by the number of ninth graders four years earlier. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it.

A "cohort dropout rate" on the other hand, would be the "cohort graduation rate" subtracted from 100%. OK, that sounds fairly straightforward. A district with a cohort graduation rate of 58% would be one where 42% of the students do not graduate. For the record, I just intentionally made the same mistake made in article in The Advocate this morning; and by so many politicians who are trying to show us just how bad our education is! What was the mistake? To put it simply, whenever talking about the "cohort" rates, we need to distinguish that we are talking about students graduating on time! It seems simple to include those two important words, but the number of Presidents, Governors, and so called "education reformers" who forget to mention the two words is phenomenal. In today's parlance, a dropout is anyone who does not graduate on time, that is to say with her or his classmates who started together.

So, does the cohort graduation rate above mean that 42% of seniors did not graduate? No. Does it mean that 42% of students in the school did not ever graduate? Again, the answer is no. It indicates that 42% of those in the freshman class did not graduate exactly four years later. Some of them might have taken an extra semester to graduate based on illness, or failing a particular course. Some of them might have moved, and lost credit for a course they didn't finish at one school that was not offered at the new school. Some might simply have left the school system, and so they did not graduate with their peers. The most important point to make, I believe, is that many, if not most of these students, actually do graduate or pass their GED tests, signifying that they have in fact mastered high school level material.

For perspective, and something that is almost never mentioned by the politicians and "reformers" doing everything they can to tell the public how important it is that we all sup at the table of their particular educational changes currently being promoted, remember that when many of us were young, life was simpler. We didn't need to do that much math. If you dropped out of school, and did not graduate, at all, then you were considered a "dropout." Today, it is necessary to do a chronological study and determine when you should have graduated! For another perspective, colleges evaluate their progress by determining their graduation rates in a different way. They use a standard "six-year graduation rate" for their undergraduates, even though most, if not all of their undergraduates are in four-year degree programs. Their numbers, in most cases, are "worse" than the average high school "four-year graduation rate."

Now… let's look at some other complications when calculating our "graduation rates" for school districts. As The Advocate newspaper reported today, East Baton Rouge Parish public schools were highlighted in the national Schott Report as having the ninth highest "cohort graduation rate" for African-American males among all large school systems in the country with at least 10,000 African American males. This report, as do others from the Louisiana State Department of Education, likely contains some common errors. For example, how do the rates calculated account for the fact that EBR schools four years ago included Central High School, one of our larger high schools. For the last few years, those students continued to graduate, but they were no longer in the EBR system, since the citizens of Central formed their own school system. So dividing the EBR graduating class by the number of EBR students four years earlier gives you an error! Do the math! It is interesting to note that the effect of the error is much greater for white students than for African-American students, since the vast majority of African-American students in Central High School returned to EBR schools, since they were in a variety of choice programs, whereas most other students did not. So the Schott report likely underestimates the graduation rates for all EBR students.

What other ways can you imagine that graduation rates can be misleading? Or asking the question in another way, why should we always ask how such rates are being determined? Take a look at www.noelhammatt.org to see some of the things EBR has been doing to increase the real graduation rates

An important note: I cannot criticize the author of the article in our newspaper this morning, for he is relying, in a quotation in the story, on one of the following two statements from the same Schott Report! See if you can spot the subtle, but important, differences in meaning!

Yes We Can, The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males, starkly illustrates that only 47% of Black males graduate from high school—far short of the trajectory and post-secondary credentials needed for our nation to be globally competitive by 2020. (Page 1)

Yet, unfortunately, the graduation rate for Black male students for the nation as a whole in 2007/8 was only 47%, that is, most Black male students did not graduate with their cohort." (Page 6)