Graduation rates

According to a new study of graduation rates in large cities, only 58.2% of Austin's high school students earn a diploma.

AISD reassures us the real number is over 77% -- the study "doesn't adjust for things like students moving into private schools, students moving out of state and students entering home-schooling. The data our state prepares are much more precise because they are actually tracking a student over time."

I dunno.  Just eyeballing AISD's own enrollment data (pdf), the study seems plausible:

 

12th grade classes have only 80% or so of the enrollment of the 10th grade classes two years before.  And that's enrolled 12th graders.  I imagine well under 90% of enrolled seniors graduate each year.   

The pertinent question anyway is how many 9th graders graduate.  9th grade attrition is probably much higher than 10th grade because weaker students are retained in the 9th grade (note the persistent bulge in 9th grade enrollment). 

I'd be surprised if much more than half of the students who start the 9th grade end up graduating from AISD.

This is a small sample, of course; perhaps these figures are just anomalies.  And, yes, this is a crude, seat-of-the-pants analysis.  But if 77% of all high school students graduate, you'd expect that to be reflected in relative class sizes.

As for AISD's explanation for the drop in class sizes:  Sure, some of these students move away.  But some students also move into town.  I suspect that families who move to the suburbs for the schools tend to do so before their kids hit the 10th or 11th grade.  I also have trouble believing that there is a large exodus from public to private school in the middle high school years (although I'm sure it happens). 

This study blames low graduation rates -- and the alleged under-reporting of graduation rates -- on high-stakes testing.  I realize that graduation rates are ideologically fraught statistics.  But the theory makes sense to me:  High-stakes testing (and No Child Left Behind) incentivizes principals and administrators to demonstrate yearly academic improvement.  Since they (and probably teachers, too) have little real control over student improvement, their natural incentive is to run off the bad students and jigger the graduation rates to disguise what's really going on.

(Of course, this incentive exists for all schools, not just AISD, and I know that the state has elaborate rules for reporting drop outs -- I'm not accusing anyone of fraud, perhaps just creative accounting.)

Perhaps AISD should consider incentivizing those who can actually make a difference.  I don't have a problem with paying students to study -- we subsidize college education; why not high school?  There are large, positive spillover effects from education, which means people typically underinvest in their own education.  This is a classic market failure that can be fixed (perhaps) by the government setting the proper incentives.

Comments

[M1EK]

Well, they can't say anything about the real reasons - having to do with illegal immigration, so do you blame them for making up something which otherwise sounds plausible on the surface?

[AC]

Very low "real" graduation rates are a problem even in cities that don't have large populations of immigrants. (See http://creativeclass.typepad.com/thecreativityexchange/2008/04/urban-schools.html for partial list.)

[M1EK]

We have nearly nothing in common with those cities (most of which are the stereotypical donut holes) - we have a unique set of problems presented by a more-transient-than-usual population, though.

[bittergradstudent]

Paying students to learn terrifies me. They are already very, very much more concerned about their grades than they are about knowledge acquisition. If there's money on the line...

[Tim]

Any teacher you talk to will confirm that the drop-out rates they observe do not match administration reports. So that's part of the problem.

My friend who used to teach at Travis, observed that your freshman bulge, is actually due to the age at which you can get a job. Once they turned 16 a substantial number of her male students dropped out to help support their families.

While that's anecdotal, I would be interested in having AISD explain why it is more likely that a student transfers to private school at age 16 than for them to get a full time job.