Data shows inconsistency in Georgia dropout, graduation rates

Georgia loses track of thousands of students each year, suggesting the dropout rate may be higher and the graduation rate lower than the state has reported, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis found.

Last year, school staff marked more than 25,000 students as transferring to other Georgia public schools, but no school reported them as transferring in, the AJC’s analysis of enrollment data shows.

State officials said their records confirm the mismatch. After the newspaper asked where the students went, the state searched further using student names — which are not public information — and other personal details.

That search located 7,100 of the missing transfers in Georgia schools, state education spokesman Dana Tofig wrote in an e-mailed statement. The state does not know where an additional 19,500 went, but believes other coding errors occurred, he wrote. Some are dropouts but others are not, he said.

State officials have touted their statewide student tracking system as among the more advanced in the country. The missing transfers, however, are only the most recent students caught in an informational black hole due to coding errors.

The system should give the public and federal officials a clear picture of how many students graduate and how many don’t; instead, it remains riddled with errors.

“Garbage in, garbage out,” said Cathy Henson, a Georgia State education law professor and former state board of education chairwoman. “We’re never going to solve our problems unless we have good data to drive our decisions.”

Counting dropouts is more than a numeric exercise. High schools are judged as passing or failing to meet federal standards in part by their graduation rates, which rely on a dropout count. Political and business leaders point to the graduation statistic as a measure of how well their schools are performing.

Companies consider the rate, too, when deciding whether to relocate to Georgia. Executives at existing businesses worry about it when contemplating future job applicants’ qualifications.

States and schools don’t gain anything from using bad data that overstates the graduation rate, said Bob Wise, president of the national non-profit Alliance for Excellent Education and former West Virginia governor. Dropouts are more likely to become a drain on the community.

“Entering rosy data won’t get you a bed of roses,” Wise said. “In a state like Georgia that is increasingly technologically oriented, it will get you a group of people that won’t be able to function meaningfully in the workforce.”

The AJC’s findings come at a time when researchers are also questioning the dropout counts Georgia and other states report. Some have said dropping out of school is a “silent epidemic” that, for too many students, leads to poverty and prison.

Transfer numbers don’t match

The AJC analyzed a state database of nearly 1.8 million enrollment records and compared the number of students coded as transferring out to a Georgia public school with those coded as transferring in over eight months last year.

The numbers should match, but don’t. The AJC found 25,800 more transfers out than in.

The state, citing student privacy concerns, declined to provide data that would allow the AJC to track individual students from school to school, even anonymously. But in response to questions, state officials said records show almost 26,700 transfers out who did not have re-enrollment records in the state system.

Neither approach explains the mismatch, but both make it clear that inaccuracies are not unusual in data entered by clerks at the schools. The AJC’s analysis suggests nearly one in three students marked as transferring in-state were miscoded last year.

Categorizing transfers is crucial for calculating graduation and dropout rates. A student coded as a transfer to another public school does not count as a dropout. Neither do transfers to private, out-of-state or home schools, which have separate codes.

However, the withdrawal reason for a student who disappears without enrolling in another school is supposed to be listed as “unknown” or “removed for lack of attendance.” Those students are classified as dropouts.

Possible rise in dropout rate

Many more students disappeared in each of the first three years of high school than in each of grades seven and lower, the AJC’s analysis shows. Georgia reported nearly 19,000 students dropped out of high school last year.

If every missing high school transfer was actually a student who quit school last year, the state’s dropout rate would rise from 3.6 to more than 5 percent of students – even after factoring in the students the state eventually found.

The number of high school transfers missing each year has grown since 2005, the AJC found.

By state law, children ages 6 to 16 must be enrolled in a school or home school.

In his statement, Tofig wrote that counting all of the missing transfers as dropouts is an irresponsible way to use the data because it’s not clear where all the students have gone.

While the data does not offer evidence of deliberate miscoding, schools concerned about their reputations have a motive to choose the transfer option instead of one that counts students as dropouts when their whereabouts are unknown.

The state education department and the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement said they are working to reduce that type of miscoding.

The two agencies sent new guidance to districts last fall on what documents are required to code a student as a transfer. The student achievement office plans to release its own study of dropout rates and transfer coding this summer and in the fall will begin auditing schools’ dropout data.

“Certainly, the way Georgia schools report, code and track students needs to be improved …” Tofig wrote. “But this is a process and it takes time.”

The state believes it will have “cleaner, more accurate reporting this year and in years to come,” he wrote.

Record frustration

The reporting of dropout and graduation rates has provoked national frustration. Critics say states’ formulas — which differ — don’t always capture students who quit school without degrees.

Yet Georgia leaders have for years trumpeted a rising graduation rate and declining dropouts.

Each year, a state education department news release cheers the graduation rate hitting a new high. Gov. Sonny Perdue, who called for placing graduation coaches in each Georgia high school, has joined in.

“The progress we have made in our graduation rate has been nothing short of remarkable,” he said in a statement last fall. The state reported a graduation rate of about 75 percent for 2008.

But outside researchers say too many dropouts are not being acknowledged. They point to classes that shrink dramatically from freshman to senior years.

While Georgia said its graduation rate in 2005 was about 69 percent, for instance, Editorial Projects in Education used a different formula to calculate the rate at 58 percent. In May, another group estimated Georgia had the highest dropout rate among the dozen largest states in 2007. More than one in five 16- to 24-year-old Georgians are high school dropouts, reported Northeastern University in Boston and Chicago non-profit Alternative Schools Network.

The U.S. Department of Education said last year it will require states to use a common graduation rate formula that compares the number of students who enter schools as freshmen with the number who graduate four years later.

But because that formula also factors out transfers, Georgia’s problems are likely to persist if schools and the state don’t clean up their data.

“There’s not enough discussion about this issue,” said Christopher Swanson, director of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center. “We may be very disappointed in the quality of information that comes out of these systems.”

In Georgia, business leaders are watching the state’s efforts to improve schools closely.

The Georgia Chamber of Commerce sees public schools as crucial to the state’s competitiveness and quality of life, said Charles Tarbutton, a railroad executive who chairs a chamber committee on education.

The chamber wants to see a student tracking system that doesn’t lose students. The task should not be insurmountable, Tarbutton said.

“We want to make sure what we’re doing is real and verifiable,” he said. If students are disappearing from one school to the next, that should be reflected in the dropout rate, Tarbutton said.

Stephen Dolinger, president of the education and business group the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education, said he, too, hears frustration from business leaders.

“If we’re moving in the right direction, they want to celebrate that and if we’re not, they want to know why and what they could do then to fix that,” he said.

More errors

Georgia has reported to the national group the Data Quality Campaign that it has a unique student identifier that follows students in the state over time.

Yet state officials said in their statement that school systems’ use of the number has been inconsistent. “Too often a student that transfers has a different ID at his or her new school than at the school they just left,” Tofig wrote.

At a meeting Thursday, the board will consider revising its rules to say schools cannot change students’ identifiers and must print them on the student’s transcript.

The state has received an $8.9 million federal grant to help schools, districts and the state exchange electronic records more frequently than once a year — which will allow the state to flag problems earlier, Tofig said.

Bert Brantley, Perdue’s spokesman, said the state is working to make the system more reliable. The effort is not complete, he said, “but we’re getting there.”

The graduation rate is not the only state measure that appears to contain errors. Schools’ attendance data includes riddles such as 1,486 students who were marked as “removed for lack of attendance” yet coded “absent” zero days, analysis shows.

Students who rack up more than 15 days of absences can count against a school’s attendance rate, which is also used to determine whether schools meet federal standards.

Tofig said the state will look into the apparent contradictions in the attendance data.

Schools appoint “data clerks” to handle their data entry. Most have other jobs at their schools. The state provides annual training on coding, but it canceled last summer’s because of budget cuts. This year’s training will go forward.

Another chance

Knowing which students have dropped out can be a first step toward convincing them to give school another chance.

Myles Perkins, 18, is glad he did. He dropped out of Marietta High School in December after skipping classes and falling behind in credits. He was hanging out with friends who smoked marijuana and got into trouble. Perkins, whose three older brothers also quit school, promised his mother he’d get a job to help pay bills.

But he quickly found no one was interested in hiring a teenager who wasn’t even trying to finish high school. After four months, he decided to try again. Now, he’s studying at the Marietta Performance Learning Center, a nontraditional district program that helps students catch up.

“I’m loving it here,” he said. “I can’t wait to graduate.”

— Data analyst John Perry contributed to this report.