If we want Montana schools to do a better job of educating, graduating and preparing students for the real world, it might not hurt to have a clear sense of what constitutes “better.” For that, we need the most accurate picture possible of the job schools are doing now.
Unfortunately, two of the basic markers of school success - dropout and graduation rates - lack the kind of clarity needed to assess school performance, much less improve it. An assessment of the way Montana schools collect and use graduation and dropout rates, made public last week by the state Legislative Audit Division, shows much room for improvement.
5 percent, the bulk of them pegging the rate at under 2 percent.
The good news, however, is that a new computer system intended to track students as they progress - or don't - through the schools starting this fall could be the key to ensuring educators and the public have the meaningful information they need to better guide schools. That is, the tools at hand are capable of generating meaningful statistics, if educators will use them.
Legislative auditors found that Montana schools very accurately report their graduation and dropout rates to the Office of Public Instruction for public dissemination, but variation in the way different schools classify students undercuts the reliability of that information.
For example, one school might describe a student who doesn't report for school one year as a no-show, while another might wait another year to see if the student eventually returns to school. State guidelines say a student passing a General Education Development test administered by the schools has “completed” high school and GEDs issued by other institutions don't count in the graduation rate; some schools count them the same. Kids who leave the system to be home-schooled don't count as dropouts, but schools generally don't verify whether those kids actually are home-schooled. In some instances, auditors report, schools are believed to be classifying kids as home-schooled so they don't have to add them to the dropout column. Also, a student transferring from one school to another might be reported as a dropout unless his new school requests a transcript. Inconsistencies in the way students are classified were found at nine of the 14 schools examined by auditors.
Auditors are recommending better training of school personnel who compile these records and measures to verify the status of home-schooled students and GED test-takers. Surely, of all the many challenges faced by educators, accurately determining whether a kid is attending school, has graduated or has dropped out should be among the easiest to get right.
Beyond all the potential for classification errors, Montana schools - like most in the country - use a simplistic and misleading method of calculating dropout rates: dividing annual enrollment by the number of students who dropped out that year. That tells you how many kids dropped out in a single year; it doesn't reflect what percentage of, say, the Class of 2006 failed to graduate, since it doesn't show the cumulative attrition from one year to the next. While generally accepted as valid in education circles, this method grossly understates the dropout rate - which, in turn, leads to the calculation of misleadingly high graduation rates. This serves no useful purpose and, in fact, can mask serious problems that bear attention.
A more useful method of calculating those rates is dividing the number of students who graduate 12th grade by the number who entered the ninth grade four years earlier (adding and subtracting for transfers). This “longitudinal” look at school completion would, as the legislative auditors noted in their report, better conform to the public's notion of what constitutes graduation and school success. Right now, the state has no method in place to track students through the public schools.
Soon, though, it should be relatively easy to produce these more meaningful numbers. As part of a $2 million reporting system approved by the 2003 Legislature, the Office of Public Instruction this fall will begin tracking individual students through school, filling a “data warehouse” that will make it possible to accurately assess individual progress as well as aggregate student trends. Two-thirds of the states already have such capability.
As more accurate information emerges about graduation and dropout rates, expect schools to place greater emphasis on those students at risk of falling through the cracks and failing. That's what we should all be working toward - reducing dropout rates and increasing graduation rates through success in the classroom, not through accounting gimmicks.
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