The State Board of Education will seek public input in coming weeks as it tackles the inconsistent and sometimes confusing ways schools across the state define graduates, dropouts and transfer students.
Under legislation passed earlier this year, the board has until Nov. 15 to develop consistent rules for how high school students are classified.
“The graduation and dropout rates for most districts were fiction,” said Cameron Lynch, a senior policy adviser to Gov. Bill Owens.
“When a district didn’t know what happened to a kid, they would say he was a transfer, (even if) the kid disappeared from the face of the earth,” Lynch said.
In some Colorado high schools, a student who gets a GED – a certificate showing he or she passed a high school equivalency test – is considered a transfer.
In others, that same child would be classified as a dropout.
In other schools, administrators will assume that a student who stops coming to class is a transfer if another school calls for that student’s records. But too often, the home school office doesn’t check to see if the student enrolled elsewhere.
The new rules should not only lead to more reliable graduation and dropout rate data but also should provide data to show how long high school students are taking to graduate. They should also provide graduation rates for categories of students, such as black, special education, white, Hispanic, or English- learning students, Lynch said.
Earlier legislation that introduced identification numbers for all public school students has allowed the state to better track which students have dropped out versus those who transferred to other Colorado schools. The new rules, however, will provide more accurate data that is consistent from school to school, said Jared Polis, a member of the state board and co-chairman of the Colorado Commission for High School Improvement.
Schools, for example, could be asked to follow up with each other to make sure a student who claims to have transferred actually enrolled elsewhere.
Three community forums on the rules have been scheduled as follows:
Staff writer Karen Rouse can be reached at 303-820-1684 or krouse@denverpost.com.
