A version of this story appears in The Daily Norwalk.
What’s the real high school graduation rate in Norwalk? Nobody knows. Connecticut’s State Department of Education says in 2007, it was 96.8 percent, but a recent study by Education Week, a leading national education magazine, puts it at 68.7 percent -- a 28.1 percent difference. The wide gap was highlighted last month by the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCAN), an education advocacy group. It’s the fourth year in a row that ConnCAN has published such findings.
"This comparison was conducted in previous years to draw attention to the discrepancies between the state’s methodology, which significantly underreported the number of students who did not complete high school, and Education Week’s, which provides a more accurate accounting," said ConnCAN in a statement.
“Graduation rates are a really complex area,” says Thomas Murphy, Dept. of Education spokesman who questions the accuracy of Ed Weeks findings. That's not to say the state's information was perfect. According to Murphy, the state's graduation rates have historically been estimated from a combination of annual dropout data and district-reported aggregate graduate data. The information was tracked manually and had errors.
Recognizing there was a problem, Connecticut signed onto a National Governors’ Association agreement four years ago to develop a new national system that would more accurately track graduation rates. The new system assigns every student a unique ID number according to their state and district. “The new system eliminates the vagaries of paperwork,” says Murphy. The Class of 2009 was the first class tracked using the new statewide system.
Preliminary data released in March indicated that the 2009 graduation rate, Connecticut-wide, is 79 percent. Next year, the information will be available by school district.
Murphy acknowledges the state's problem with high school dropouts. Only 58 percent of Hispanics and 66 percent of African-Americans graduated from high school in 2009. “We have some work to do, especially when considering different racial breakouts.” Commission of Education's Marc McQuillan said in a statement, “The new data shows that the graduation rates in the state are worse than reported in previous years. For Black and Hispanic students, the rates are alarming; we must act now to do more.”
Friday, July 9, 2010
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Why is a student who takes more than 4 years to graduate not considered among the graduates? For whatever reason, some students take longer. Some of them simply do very badly during one year of school, and so it takes them longer. It isn't what we want, but so what? They don't have to be labeled as non-graduates for their schools.
ReplyDeleteIf that doesn't work, why not have two categories, one for students who graduate in four years, one for students who graduate in five years?
If a student doesn't graduate in 4 years, then they are not a conventional graduate and shouldn't be counted in conventional averages. Alwyas there are exceptions, but when we start relaxing the requirements, the medians will drop. And we already do that elsewhere in Norwalk. Expectations are so low already, all we need are kids thinking they can graduate HS in 5 years or more!!!!!
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