Uncovering Lies and Damn Lies in Arne Duncan’s Graduation Rates | Cloaking Inequity

Uncovering Lies and Damn Lies in Arne Duncan’s Graduation Rates | Cloaking Inequity:

Uncovering Lies and Damn Lies in Arne Duncan’s Graduation Rates

Has your state experienced a meteoric rise in its graduation rate since Arne Duncan’s new graduation standards went into effect? Do you think it too good to be true? Nobody likes to be lied to. The latest Arne Duncan sleight of hand is the reporting and trumpeting of graduation rates. The Washington Post related:

Calling it “a profound milestone,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday that the country has reached its highest graduation rate in history, with 80 percent of students receiving a diploma in 2012, the most recent year for which statistics are available.

Fusion.net (ABC News-Univision joint venture) in the piece reported:

Texas is one of the exceptional performers; the state boasts a graduation rate in the upper 80s.

The fact that Texas is in that list is remarkable, given some of the unique challenges it faces in educating young people. More than half of the state’s students receive free or reduced-cost lunches, and there is a sizeable population of non-native English speakers.

What does TEA say about the amazing success of the Lone Star State?

“You can’t address the problem until you define it,” she said. “You’ve got to know that John Smith is the kid at risk of dropping out, not just look at percentages.”

or REDEFINE your “data”… what do I mean by that? The Fusion.net piece concluded the article with the following:

Skewed numbers

But Rodriguez and several other people with knowledge of the state’s education system said that some of the uptick in graduation rates may actually come from the way Texas reports numbers to the government. In other words, the improvement might not really be as great as the state says it is.

Julian Vasquez Heilig, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been vocally critical of the state’s graduation measurements.

“What they’re doing that’s amazing when it comes to graduation rate is lying to the government,” he said.

There are a couple of ways for the state to calculate graduation rate. One, called the Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate (ACGR), lets states make adjustments for students who leave, through transferring out of state, homeschooling, passing away and some other scenarios.

The measurement is intended to let states get a more accurate count of where their students end up, but it also gives the state control over which “leaver” code they use and, depending on the code, they can let themselves off the hook for any follow up. If the state enters the homeschool code, for instance, the kid might actually not continue their education and really be a dropout, but they aren’t flagged as a dropout by the state.

“It allows Texas to tell the feds what the denominator is,” Vasquez Heilig said. “People are really good at hiding dropouts.”

The other measurement to determine the graduation rate is something called the Adjusted Freshman 

Uncovering Lies and Damn Lies in Arne Duncan’s Graduation Rates | Cloaking Inequity: