What is the Real 2009 Graduation Rate for Georgia?

The graduation rate of high school students is a factor used in most states under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to measure a concept of educational progress known as “adequate yearly progress” (AYP).  Determining a graduation rate, however, is not as simple as it sounds, and the method of calculating a graduation rate varies from state to state.

The graduation rate calculation used by the state of Georgia has been roundly criticized as overstating the percentage of students who are graduating from high school.  The official explanation of Georgia’s graduation rate can be found on the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement web site at http://gaosa.org/reportinfo.aspx#indicators.

The state of Georgia reports the official graduation rate for the Class of 2009 to be 78.9 percent.  This seems difficult to believe:

1. In the fall of 2005, the 9th grade enrollment was reported statewide to be 145,243.
2. In the spring of 2009, 88,003 high school diplomas* were awarded.
3. Only 60.59 percent of the students enrolled in the 9th grade in 2005 received a diploma in 2009.  (We will refer to this as the “diploma rate” to differentiate it from the “graduation rate.”)
4. How can the state of Georgia report a “graduation rate” of 78.9% - 18 percentage points higher than the “diploma rate” of 60.59%?

The primary difficulty in calculating an accurate graduation rate in Georgia is due to the fact that the state does not have a student information system that can track individual students over time from school to school, system to system, or state to state.  Thus, we cannot say with absolute certainty that a student who started at High School A who did not receive a diploma from High School A could not have transferred to High School B and graduated from High School B.  High School B could be in the same system, another system or another state – we simply have no way of knowing.  Some systems are better than others at tracking students within the system, and the state is making progress at tracking students within the state, but there is still not an operational data system that the public can access to analyze this type of data.

What we do know is that the 2008 Census data shows that the total population in Georgia has increased 18.3 percent since 2000.  Simply put, more people are moving into the state of Georgia than leaving it, including those in the 14-19 year old age group.  So in the aggregate, students are not moving to other states and graduating causing our numbers to decline. In fact, we have more potential graduates entering the pipeline. Once could argue our “real” graduation rate must be lower than reported simply due to this factor alone.

A second reason that the Georgia graduation rate is overstated is that it depends on official drop-out reports as part of its calculation.  Many students never bother to fill out the paperwork – they simply disappear. Students who disappear are simply not counted. Students are often reported as transfers, rather than drop-outs, even if they never show up somewhere else. 

A third reason there is such a gap between the graduation rate and the diploma rate is because of what the 9th grade enrollment number actually reflects.  Enrollment numbers do not actually reflect the number of students, but rather “Full Time Equivalents” or FTE’s.  FTE is based on the notion that a day is divided up into a certain number of periods and students on average take six classes, but some take more and some take fewer.

What happens in the 9th grade is a “bubble” – unlike grades 1-8 where promotion occurs an entire grade at a time, a student does not move from the 9th grade to the 10th grade until the student has passed a certain number of courses.  If a student cannot pass algebra, for example, it is unlikely he or she will ever make it out of the 9th grade.  What coincides with the bubble is the magic age of 16 – the age at which students can legally drop out of school.  Thus, we see a huge decline between 9th grade enrollment and 10th grade enrollment.

The National Governors Association (the NGA) recently adopted a method to calculate a graduation rate using a three-year average to acknowledge the bubble and to mitigate the effect of using only 9th grade enrollment.  The NGA method would compare the number of students receiving a diploma in one year to the average enrollment of the 8th grade five years earlier, the 9th grade four years earlier, and the 10th grade three years earlier.

In our 2009 graduation rate example, we would then use the following:

1. The 8th grade enrollment in 2004-2005 was 122,432.
2. The 9th grade enrollment in 2005-2006 was 145,243.
3. The 10th grade enrollment in 2006-2007 was 121,715.
4. The 3-year average enrollment is 129,797.
5. The number of students receiving a diploma in 2009 was 88,003.
6. The NGA graduation rate would be 67.8 percent, still 11.1 percentage points below Georgia’s officially reported rate of 78.9 percent.

Click here to access an Excel spreadsheet that compares the graduation rate and diploma rate for every school system in Georgia.  All data was obtained from the 2008-2009 Report Card posted on the Georgia Department of Education web site in February of 2010.  (One problem with the Report Card is that the state may update data without indicating that it has done so. Thus, sometimes the number of students receiving an exit credential and/or the graduation rate will change over the course of a year as the DOE updates its data.)

A caveat to keep in mind when reviewing this information:  Without a statewide student information system it is impossible to track individual students.  Thus, it is impossible to determine whether the difference in the number of students between the ninth grade and the twelfth grade within a specific school system is due to drop-outs or due to transfers to other schools systems in the state or other states.  Similarly, a system with a high graduation rate may benefit from students who are attending from other neighboring school systems or from a new business that has located in the community and attracted additional population. Unfortunately, we simply don’t know the answers.