The Virginia Department of Education released data yesterday about the statewide four-year graduation rates for high school students who entered ninth grade for the first time in the 2005-06 academic year and were expected to graduate in 2009. Compared to the data for the class of 2008, the graduation rates increased and dropout rates decreased slightly for most demographic groups in Charlottesville, Albemarle County and the statewide average.
Albemarle County's black student graduation rate, however, was lower than that of last year, and the dropout rate was higher.
This is the second year during which the DOE has released statistics on a high school cohort that was tracked using a recently implemented methodology. The new approach looks at the number of students who entered ninth grade for the first time and then tracks them by using the same Virginia testing identifier that students use on their Standards of Learning tests, DOE Director of Communications Charles Pyle said. Earlier methods often did not track individual students.
"High school graduation, traditionally, has been one of the most poorly tracked indicators of school quality," Pyle said.
One of these methods was to simply compare the number of diplomas earned to the number of students who had been enrolled in ninth grade three years prior to the graduation year. But this method is problematic, Pyle said, in part because it overlooks the fact that some students enrolled in the ninth grade are students who have had to repeat that year of high school. By contrast, the current system makes sure to track individual students to see whether they graduate within four years.
In addition, the past method made it so that students who transferred out of a given school system artificially lowered its recorded graduation rate and increased the rate in their new school system. Because the current method tracks individual students, transfer students are removed completely from the data set for their original school district and are added to both the entering ninth grade and graduating 12th grade data for their most recent school system.
The 82.2 percent statewide four-year graduation rate from 2008 and the 83.2 percent rate from 2009 both showed increases from estimates made using previous methodologies, which often reported graduation percentages in the 60s or 70s, Pyle said. Nevertheless, the state sees room for improvement, and the new data may be useful for this purpose.
"We can look at this [graduation data] and break it down and analyze the data and really look at students who don't graduate on time ... and find common factors, patterns, the kind of information that educators can use to [help] students," Pyle said.
Though the state funds programs to assist students who are at risk of not graduating on-time, much of the responsibility for identifying and assisting individual student needs lies with local school districts, Pyle said.
This year, Albemarle County Public Schools had higher graduation rates than the state average for most demographic groups. But the county's black graduation rate fell from 83.7 percent to 76.1 percent between 2008 and 2009, and this change appears connected to a large group of ninth-graders who did not progress to the 10th grade for the 2006-07 academic year, ACPS Communications Coordinator Maury Brown said.
"As you can imagine, when you need to repeat a year, it makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to graduate on time," Brown said, adding that only about one in five retained ninth-graders graduated on time.
In response, ACPS hopes to do what it can to help struggling students in the ninth grade, and perhaps even in earlier years.
"It's not a matter of getting a quick fix when they're in 11th or 12th grade," Brown said.
Though none of its graduation rates dropped in the past year, Charlottesville City Schools also plans to continue its current programs to aid struggling students. For example, city schools will look to the Work Achieves Lasting Knowledge program for students who are behind in credit requirements, and will also look closely at the fall assessments of its ninth grade students, Supervisor of Assessment Laura McCullough said.
"These are things we would be doing whether or not we had the specific data," McCullough said. "I think the on-time graduation rate gives us another good piece of information ... that helps us direct our efforts towards where they are going to make the most difference."
The two years of data that have been collected so far should prove valuable to school systems, but the collection of data in coming years may reveal additional trends.
"I would say for Charlottesville [the 2008 to 2009 rate increase] is a step in the right direction," McCullough said. "One year really isn't enough to tell. We want to see those increases occur every single year"
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