It’s prom and graduation season, but sadly, thousands of high school-age kids won’t be donning caps and gowns, having dropped out of school and disappeared somewhere along the way.
It is one of Colorado’s most disturbing problems, and the state really has no way to know if individual students have dropped out, or where they’ve gone. But that’s about to change, thanks to legislation that is now heading to Gov. Bill Owens’ desk for his signature. The bill should be signed into law.
A Denver Post report last Friday detailed flawed and inconsistent local student tracking systems that have no checks or balances by the state. Part of the problem is that Colorado’s many school districts use the state’s current formula for graduation rates differently, with some techniques masking their actual performance. A student who fails to show up at school could be marked as a transfer student, even though school officials aren’t really sure what’s become of the pupil. Some districts actively seek to find out what happened to transfers; others don’t.
The Colorado Department of Education boasts an 83 percent statewide graduation rate, but more realistic surveys place it somewhere from 61 percent to 72 percent.
The figures are more useful than they were a generation ago – when the state provided raw graduation numbers but not the rate – but they’re still suspect.
Lawmakers approved Senate Bill 91 this past session. It will require the State Board of Education to create standard rules for how school districts calculate graduation, dropout and mobility rates, giving the public a more accurate picture of what’s happening in our schools.
“When schools are left to define those rates in different ways, they try to make themselves look good, and that’s not fair to children,” said state Sen. Nancy Spence, R-Centennial. Using the state’s new student identifier numbers, it will be easier to track student whereabouts, including transfers and those not in school but pursuing GEDs.
“I think it will help enormously. This is a huge sea change, but there are still few unknowns,” said Van Schoales, executive vice president for education at the Colorado Children’s Campaign, referring to the fact that the state education board still has to implement the law.
“No matter what, it will be more of an honest description of what’s happening.”
