Decatur Only Metro District Where School Dropout Rate Didn’t Increase Under New Formula
Decatur Metro | August 20, 2012 | 10:40 amSteve points out that the City Schools of Decatur were the only local school district in the metro Atlanta area that didn’t see an increase in high school dropouts under a new, stricter graduation rate formula recently imposed by the State of Georgia. Here’s the AJC’s bar chart of old and new graduation rates..
And here’s the AJC’s more in-depth article about the new dropout formula’s effect on the metro Atlanta region. I’m seeking comment from CSD on this recent finding.
The above graph really reflects “graduation rate, not “dropout rate”. Not a big deal, just confusing.
Decatur schools ROCK!
Wow. Some of those changes are startling.
Agreed that CSD is Rocking the Casbah. But I prefer stories in which Decatur schools look good because of an outstanding positive achievement rather than ones in which Decatur looks good because it’s an oasis of competence in a vast desert of Fail.
+1. CSD staff, teachers, leadership, families and students deserve recognition and thanks for sustaining valid and increasing graduation rates over time. But the proper comparison is not the surrounding school districts, especially because our families are more affluent on average than those in many other parts of Metro Atlanta. Given that we want to be among the top 20 school districts in the country, what are the graduation rates of those top 20? That’s the pertinent comparison if we are serious about our school system being tops for all students in the system, not just those who would probably do well no matter where they landed. I would like to see a graduation rate of 5% or lower. Then the norm would truly be graduation. Right now, a DHS student is going to know about 22 classmates who drop out. That’s not yet a rare event.
More importantly, I’d love to know who drops out of DHS and why. There’s probably a range of reasons but the patterns hold the key to increasing the graduation rate. Hopefully, DHS has that info well studied and discussed. But I’d like to know as well. Anyone know if there’s a report out there somewhere? A committee?
Just to be pedantic, I’m sure you meant “5% or lower” drop out rate, not “graduation” rate.
These are nits we pick when we are all pretty much in agreement.
Whoops, yes, I would like the graduation rate to be 95% or greater.
Damn, I thought that trembling yesterday might have been a small earthquake or something. Turns out it was just our property value skyrocketing overnight!
No, it was an earthquake. See today’s “Eye on the Street.”
If you follow the link through and then click on Decatur City you get slightly different grad rates (12 dropouts old method= 88.4%, 9 new method =89.4%)
Based on reading the AJC article, the published rates have less to do with graduation/dropouts and more to do with transfers:
“counting a student as a dropout unless the district can show that he or she enrolled elsewhere.”
I doubt that most transfers send back word of where they went. People move and that’s that.
This is also a good explanation for the huge change in Clayton County’s numbers. People transferred out of that school system en masse the last few years as it lost accreditation.
Don’t schools send student transcripts off to new schools for kids who are transferred, etc? If I send a transciprt off, I wouldn’t think there would be a need to add that student to my did not graduate list.
I respectfully disagree with TeeRuss’s take on the discrepancy in the numbers. Obviously, Decatur schools have had many students both drop out and transfer. It is clear that the CSD staff made the the needed effort to determine whether a student had indeed transferred.. or dropped out. Thus their numbers remained constant under both the new and old criteria. The AJC article pointed out that the Cherokee County school system has been putting in an effort to accurately report the transfer/drop out data for several years, and their numbers shifted by only 7.3 percentage points in this latest kerfuffle.
I have lost faith in most of the administrators of most of the metro area school systems. Like one person (Cathy Henson) in the article stated, “They spent more time trying to fix the numbers, than they did trying to fix the problem”. Their is no doubt in my mind that some of these “educators” were intentionally fudging (is it acceptable to call a 25%+ error rate “fudging?) the numbers.
Hopefully the numbers that result from the new methodology of tracking transfers/drop outs will settle down in the next year, as school systems are forced to expend the needed effort to find out what really happened to those students that have left school. I will be truly disheartened if some of our local school systems are graduating less than 60% of their students.
I’m not sure if we disagree. All I was saying is that this statistic is not an accurate measure AT ALL of actual drop outs or graduates. Not the way it is calculated today, and not the way it used to be calculated. The truth is somewhere in between the two stats, and can only be determined with more information (in most school districts, not Decatur).
The difference in numbers for Marietta City are also stunning!
The state has tracking software, so it’s not up to the school to document that a student enrolled elsewhere, it is about the student actually enrolling elsewhere. Sometimes a school might think a student moved or transferred, but then they never show up in the system again. Students are funded when schools “transmit” data to the state, with each student having a unique number. This number follows them from school to school. However, if a student moves out of state, the schools will keep records on file to verify, but then the “code” transmitted to the state shows an out of state transfer, which is not supposed to count “against” a school.
Also, students that have some special needs, meaning they attend school but may not meet the state’s graduation requirements, might be considered graduates by their school, having met their plan’s goals. However, they count as “non graduates” in this metric because they did not meet the graduation requirements set out by the school. That said, given the percentage of students with special needs in any given community, it is highly unlikely a high school will ever have ALL students “graduate”.