School audit finds undercounts in dropouts, discipline

Clayton officials said they accepted the findings and made fixes. But the report and its recommendations met strong objections from State Superintendent Kathy Cox, who called them “grossly unfair” in a March letter to federal officials.

While the inspector general urged the state to bolster its monitoring of schools’ data, state education officials said in a statement Friday that their procedures are adequate and consistent with “best practices.” Those processes include fixes that predated the audit, the statement said.

“We feel we meet the requirements of the law,” it said. “The IG feels we should do more than is required by Federal law, regulation or guidance.”

The audit issued this month did not recommend fining the district or state. The U.S. Department of Education plans to review the recommendations and decide what action to take, spokesman Jim Bradshaw said in an e-mail.

The findings are the latest rap on state education officials’ handling of student information, which is supposed to track the academics, discipline and location of every public school student in the state.

Government officials at all levels rely on that information to steer policy choices as well as make routine determinations such as which schools meet federal standards each year.

But critics charge errors have plagued the data system for years — particularly in the areas of dropouts and discipline. Business and civic leaders complain that, despite millions of dollars and years of effort, the state’s information system still isn’t producing reliable enough statistics on how Georgia students are faring.

“How does the state get away with not verifying the data that is submitted to it?” asked Cathy Henson, a Georgia State education law professor and former state Board of Education chairwoman. Some school districts, she added, are likely to misrepresent their numbers if not monitored.

Last June, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation reported the state couldn’t locate nearly 20,000 students who local districts said transferred to other Georgia schools during the 2008 school year, but who never re-enrolled. The findings suggested the state’s dropout rate could be higher and its graduation rate lower than state leaders boasted.

Undercounting dropouts is a serious problem, Henson said. “If the state is putting out officially inflated numbers, then it takes the urgency away from the reforms needed to make sure more kids are graduating from high school,” she said. “You lull people into a false sense of security.”

Misclassifying dropouts?

The federal audit began early last year and examined Clayton County’s reporting of dropouts, graduates and disciplinary incidents to the state in 2006-2007. It then looked at how the state reported that information to the federal government.

The inspector general’s office declined to say why it picked Georgia and Clayton. The agency, which examines the effectiveness and efficiency of federally-funded school programs nationwide, generally does not reveal why it chooses audit targets, Public Affairs Liaison Catherine Grant wrote in an e-mail.

Among the report’s findings: Clayton officials failed to withdraw and report as dropouts 15 students who had racked up 50 or more days of unexcused absences. The district could not produce documents explaining why.

Auditors also found errors in the district’s coding of 99 students who enrolled in Clayton schools but never showed up. The district marked them as transfers to new Georgia schools despite lacking support for that designation.

The district could not provide auditors with notes from parents or students about switching schools, withdrawal forms or requests for transcripts from another school to prove the students transferred. The state looked but could not find enrollment records elsewhere in the state for the students.

Not all were in high school. But auditors said the district should have listed the students’ whereabouts as “unknown,” a code the state considers a dropout. As a result, auditors said, Clayton understated its dropout rate in the 2006-2007 school year.

In addition, three students that Clayton had identified as dropouts were not reported as such by the state when it forwarded data to the federal “EDFacts” system.

The auditors found problems with discipline, as well.

The report said Clayton improperly marked 4,110 discipline incidents with a district code that gave school staff the discretion to exclude some incidents from state reports. The audit found the district failed to make sure schools used the code correctly.

The auditor’s sampling of those incidents found some appeared “violent” in nature — involving behaviors such as fighting, bullying, choking and punching — but weren’t reported even to the state. Violent incidents are also supposed to be reported to EDFacts. Auditors cited other errors, including at least two cases that were not serious enough to be reported to the state but were.

In a written response to AJC questions, Clayton officials said the district has instituted a range of new procedures and spot-checks to make sure dropouts and disciplinary incidents are coded correctly. Some changes predated the audit.

The fixes included providing schools a checklist of documents that support using non-dropout withdrawal codes, as well as new protocols to clarify and monitor the classifying of discipline incidents.

“We will not hesitate to institute new or revised strategies as needed to achieve full compliance,” the district’s statement said.

‘Transfers’ not checked

The audit also chastised the state department for lacking processes to make sure it was sending accurate dropout and disciplinary data to federal authorities.

For instance, the state department checked each student labeled as a dropout to ensure he or she hadn’t re-enrolled elsewhere. However, the state did not examine students who stopped coming to school but were coded as transfers or another non-dropout category.

The state information system generates warnings when students are marked as transfers but never re-enroll, the audit said. Until last year, however, the state did not send such error reports back to school districts requiring them to correct the data before the state uploaded it, the report said.

Auditors also found the state didn’t have an adequate process for detecting inaccuracies in discipline data and hadn’t told local districts what types of incidents they should consider “violent” until the 2007-2008 school year.

Auditors recommended the state include a process for checking student data as part of program reviews the department currently conducts.

In their objections to the audit, state officials said it was based on program requirements that aren’t part of federal law or rules — even though auditors cited the regulations by number that require states to monitor their contributions to federal programs such as EDFacts.

Asked whether the state would make any changes because of the audit, Georgia officials said in their statement they will continue to offer training to data personnel and provide reports to districts “as another avenue for districts to verify the completeness and accuracy of the data.” They said the department “firmly believes” that correct data is important.

But the state has no plans to fix the incorrect data from Clayton in its archives, as the audit recommends.

Another suggestion is for the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, a separate accountability agency not faulted in the report, to review “a sufficient number” of districts’ student data annually to assure accuracy. The audit did not define “sufficient.”

The achievement office began an auditing process to do similar checks in 2008. However, the agency has only seven employees, with five additional positions frozen because of the state budget crunch. The office’s 2009 audits were two major probes into potential cheating on 2008 and 2009 state standardized tests.

Executive Director Kathleen Mathers said the office started to look into withdrawals and transfers, but set the task aside to handle the testing investigations. Determining whether students are accurately coded is a time-intensive process the office plans to revisit, she said.

Georgia was the first state to undergo an audit of its EDFacts reporting, Grant said. Reviews were planned for other states, but the inspector general’s office has not begun any because it has taken on additional work monitoring stimulus money.