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crib sheet
March 9, 2010
What to look for in today’s graduation rate presentations
State and city officials are preparing right now to unveil graduation rates for students who entered high school in 2005.
The state has already dumped several massive sets of data on its Web site: One document shows overall 4-, 5-, and 6-year rates by local school district, and a second, much larger document shows each the graduation rate for each school in the state. A list of city schools only is at the end of this post.
But we still don’t know the city’s overall graduation rate, which last year was 56 percent. The 2009 figure will be in the presentation that State Education Commission David Steiner is delivering in just a few minutes (as soon as the Board of Regents finishes hearing about the space crunch in the state libraries). Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein are holding a briefing on the city’s graduation rate later this afternoon.
Here are some other important data points to look out for today:
- How are students with special needs faring? The city saw a 10-point jump in the graduation rate for students who considered English language learners last year, which Klein attributed to the growth of high schools catering to new immigrants. Has that trajectory continued? And have city schools done any better graduating students with special needs? That rate has remained stubbornly low.
- What type of diploma are students earning? Students have the choice to earn a “local” diploma or take more Regents exams and get the more rigorous Regents diploma. But the state data groups students earning both types together. The distinction is important because soon, all students will have to earn the more rigorous diploma type, a change that has some advocates concerned about a graduation-rate drop-off, especially among the highest-need students.
- The city has made low graduation rates a key element of its argument for closing high schools. Do the schools that are being closed have the lowest graduation rates in the city? Or, as the Independent Budget Office suggested in a recent report, are the newest schools to be closed merely some of the city’s worst?
- Who are the worst performers? Of schools that aren’t being closed, Manhattan’s Washington Irving High School has the lowest graduation rate, at 39 percent. Washington Irving also has the highest dropout rate in the city, at 33 percent. That means that one third of all students at the school formally drop out by the August when they should have graduated. A year ago, that figure was 23 percent. The school with the second-highest dropout rate, Peace and Diversity Academy, opened in 2004.
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March 9th, 2010 2:34 pm
I work in a school and I will tell you that the numbers for the progress report, report card, and the data that is being unveiled today (which is March 4th) are all different for our school’s four and six year graduation cohort. No idea why.
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March 9th, 2010 3:27 pm
Someone ought to ask the administration what has happened to the discharge numbers, which they have stopped releasing since we released our report showing an increase in the numbers of students discharged from HS without diplomas.
There were over 20,000 students discharged in the class of 2007, none of them counted as dropouts. The number of students discharged in their first year of HS has doubled in recent years. This is the black-hole of DOE accounting; the more students are discharged, the higher the graduation rate. -
March 9th, 2010 7:46 pm
Philissa,
Earlier in the day, after Mike and before Leonie, I posted a comment suggesting a link between the rising graduation rate with principal and teacher cheating. I cited the Comptroller’s report on Regents inflation and noted the undisputed fact that high stakes tests are correlated with increases in test tampering. I cited chapter 2 of “Freakonomics” as a source.My comment seems to have disappeared. I know I pressed “submit” and I think I noticed my posting. But I can’t be certain. I pray that I did not bump into censorship.
What happened?
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March 9th, 2010 7:50 pm
Leonie, you’re so right. All you have to do is look around our school. We have two 9th grade English teachers, math teachers, and history teachers. By 11th grade we only need one. Half the students have disappeared. Yet our school brags about its 90% graduation rate. I guess that’s 90 percent of the 50 percent of kids who are still in the school after 4 years.
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March 9th, 2010 8:19 pm
PN,
Your comment did appear.
On the other similar string (”Graduation Rates Are Up”… etc).
Different Mike, same Leonie. ; - ) -
March 10th, 2010 5:13 am
The NYC and NYS rates do not include kids in the NYC DOE’s District 75, nor the kids in various BOCES around the State. This is a large and significant number of kids. These schools aren’t even mentioned in the State’s reports.
If the City and State can’t start releasing the same data for kids with mild to moderate disabilities as they do for all other students, then perhaps it’s time for a discrimination complaint to be filed with US DOE’s Office for Civil Rights. OCR announced a big civil rights enforcement initiative earlier this week. Getting parents of kids with disabilities the same information as is available for all non-disabled kids, so that the parents can make the same kinds of intelligent choices as other parents can, seems to me be to be a very good place to begin.
If anyone would like to join me in an OCR complaint to force NYC and NYS Ed. to release the identical dataset for kids with mild to moderate disabilities as they do for all other kids, please feel free to contact me so we can draft something up and get it submitted quickly.
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