Monday, November 22, 2010

Tracking graduates and drop outs

Maybe it's just me, but if I were in charge of educating 6,000 students in the Snoqualmie Valley,  I would want to know how many end up graduating and how many drop out.  The U.S. Department of Education agrees with me and recently provided guidance on how to report this information.  Basically, the on-time graduation rate is "the number of students who graduate in four years...divided by the number of students who entered high school four years earlier (adjusting for transfers in and out ...)."
The Snoqualmie Valley School District's most recently reported on-time graduation rate is 85%.  They report that 9% drop out and 6% take longer than 4 years to graduate.  This might sound okay, but is it?  Out of seven Eastside districts, the Snoqualmie Valley has the lowest on-time graduation rate.  Did you know that?  Has anyone focused on this and put into place measures to address it?  And are you also asking:  Are these rates even accurate?  Could the on-time graduation rate be even lower?
These last two questions are important.  When I was analyzing reports of Mount Si High School graduates who go to college, I was surprised that only 260 graduated in 2009.  My children graduated in 2008 and 2010, and I thought their class sizes were in the mid 300's.  So I grabbed the yearbooks laying around our house and flipped through them.  What I discovered raises some serious questions. 
The freshman class in the 2006 yearbook (which is the 2009 graduating class - use your fingers like I did) had 391 kids in it, but only 260 graduated four years later.  By the time this class became seniors, there were 318 kids, including 54 new students not in the freshman yearbook.  To ensure that I accounted for intra-district transfers with Two Rivers School and used a source rather than yearbooks,  I looked at district-wide totals per the state's Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI).  District-wide, the beginning freshman class totaled 410 and the on-time graduates in 2009 totaled 260.  So, using simple math, there were about 204 students (410 freshmen + 54  new students - 260 graduates) in the class of 2009 that did not graduate from the district.
If 85% is the accurate on-time graduation rate, then does that mean that about 1/3 of freshmen transfer out of the district before graduating?  Does that make sense?  In a growing district? 
To see if other districts experience similar declines,  I looked at the ratio of the 2009 graduating class to the beginning freshman class for 7 Eastside districts.  In 2009 the Snoqualmie Valley School District had the lowest percentage (63%) of on-time graduates to freshman class in this list of 7 peers.  The average of the other six districts was 83%.    Yet,  the Snoqualmie Valley is one of the fastest growing school districts in the state.  It even seems possible to me that the number of graduates in a growing school district could exceed the size of the beginning freshman class because of transfers into the district.  I don't get it. 
So where did all of these students go?  Are they really transfers, or is the dropout rate here even higher than 9%?  Do we really lose 1/3 of high school students to home schooling and private schools?  Is this taken into account when we estimate enrollment for building new schools? 
I have raised these questions with the superintendent three times.  I was told that "We provide OSPI  with the data and they run the calculations...The whole process is extremely complex."  Really?  The district must keep lists of students to track for attendance and grades.   Not only do I think that it would be easy for the district to create a list of students from freshman year to graduation and to identify dropouts and transfers,  I think it is the district's job to do so.  I could practically do this myself  from my home computer in just a few hours.
What really surprises me is that I have seen no curiosity on the part of the administration as to whether the dropout and graduation rates are accurate, even after I raised the question.  Nor does anyone seem to care that we have the lowest on-time graduation rate in a group of 7 Eastside school districts.  
Please join me in encouraging the school board and the administration to be accountable for the graduation and the dropout rates.   I have heard over and over in school board meetings and in committee meetings: "It's all about the kids."  If it is all about the kids, then where did they go?  Why are so many not making it to graduation?