State sees drop in 4-year grads at high schools

Report card puts statewide Class of 2019 rate at 87.6%

Arkansas’ four-year high school graduation rate dipped in 2019 as compared with 2018 at least partly because of stricter reporting requirements set by the U.S. Department of Education, state leaders said last week.

In 2019, 87.6% of the statewide class graduated within four years — down 1.6 percentage points from the 89.2% four-year graduation rate just the year before in the Class of 2018.

There were larger gaps between the two classes at some individual high schools and in some school districts, according to the newly posted Arkansas School Report Card for 2018-19, which includes graduating class data. The online state report card is accessible at: myschoolinfo.arkansas.gov.

Last week, the Little Rock School District — in response to its 4-point drop from 82.3% in the Class of 2018 to 78.3% in the Class of 2019 — announced proposed initiatives, including the anticipated hiring of Graduation Alliance, to help more students make it to graduation. Graduation Alliance, a national company, works with districts to find their

students who have dropped out and provide those students with instruction and support that can lead to diplomas.

Among the Little Rock district’s five high school campuses, swings in percentage rates, year to year and among campuses, were dramatic. McClellan High’s 2019 rate, for example, fell almost 13 percentage points to 60.6%. Hall High’s rate fell from 65% to 57.2%. Central High’s rate was much higher but still dropped, from 92.5% to 89.6%.

Little Rock district’s Parkview Magnet High on the other hand raised its graduation rate in 2019 from 92.6% in 2018 to 95.4%.

Elsewhere in Pulaski County and around the state, the pattern was erratic — some schools up, some down — rather than a general upward trend.

LISA Academy North, a charter school in Sherwood, for example, went from a 100% to 78% graduation rate, according to the Arkansas report card. And Haas Hall Academy in Bentonville went from a more than 95% graduation rate to 77.1% in 2019, according to the state report.

Luanne Baroni, assistant superintendent for LISA Academy, said a coding error caused the extreme change.

“We unfortunately missed a corrections window with [Division of Elementary and Secondary Education] and could not get the error corrected on the myschoolinfo website, Baroni said, adding that the actual rate should have been 96%.

Deborah Coffman, the state’s assistant commissioner for public school accountability, last week pointed to the U.S. Education Department’s 2017 guidance on high school graduation rates as a factor affecting the 2019 rates.

In short, the federal guidelines required schools to produce more tangible evidence on the whereabouts of students who started at their campuses as ninth-graders four and five years ago but then left school before graduation.

The school systems must provide documentation that a student enrolled at another school — public, private or home — in state, out of state or out of the country. Without that documentation, the student counts as a dropout against the originating school.

The federal requirements took time to be put in place and became fully operational only for the 2019 class, Coffman said.

“When we put together our federal Every Student Succeeds Act plan, we got to make a lot of decisions — this wasn’t one of them,” Coffman said about the graduation calculations and the state’s school accountability system. “As they update the guidance, they send it out to us, and we are to go in and make updates to our system as quickly as we can.”

Ivy Pfeffer, the state’s deputy education commissioner, said the graduation rate calculation depends on the number or cohort of students who started together in ninth grade some years ago and completed the 12th grade in 2019.

“If a student leaves a school and goes to another school, in order for that student to be counted as having graduated on time, the student must be coded properly and found in the other district,” Pfeffer said. “If they are not found in the other district, then they stay as part of the expected cohort — but they never show up as having graduated. They stay in the denominator but they never show up in the numerator as being successful,” she said about the graduation rate percentage.

The federal requirements provided by Coffman show that documentation of a student’s death, transfer to another school — public, private or home school or even to a school in another country — must be in writing so that it can be verified or audited and to help the school or district with accuracy in measuring graduation rates.

“If after multiple attempts, [a school district] cannot obtain official written documentation that a student has transferred out, may the [dis- trict] remove the student from the cohort?” a question asks in the 32-page federal guidance. “No,” is the response.

“Removing from the cohort a student whose status cannot be documented could produce an inaccurate graduation rate if that student dropped out of school rather than transferred,” the regulations go on to say.

“It is critical that [a district] carefully document student transfers and accurately calculate the graduation rate in order to (a) give parents and the public accurate information about the success of a school, [district] and state …. and (b) ensure that accountability determinations are based on valid graduation rate calculations,” the federal guidelines state.

An Arkansas student entering a juvenile detention facility can be documented as a transfer because the facilities are diploma-awarding institutions, Coffman said. That is not the case for a student in prison because the correctional system provides no track to a high school diploma, just access to a General Educational Development certificate. For the inmate’s original high school, the inmate remains in the four-year cohort of students but is counted as dropping out of high school.

Coffman said the recent new rules meant school officials had to find documentation they didn’t know they would need on students who have been gone for two or three years.

“There is no fault,” she said. “There is just new guidance, and it takes a while to work itself out.”

Pfeffer noted that despite the drop in percentage of Arkansas graduates in 2019, there were actually more students to graduate that year than in the previous year. And, the state’s subgroup of students who are not native English language speakers showed an increase in their graduation rates.

CAUSES, SOLUTIONS

In the state’s capital city, the change in graduation calculations and the resulting percentages left Little Rock district leaders searching for causes and solutions for the districtwide drop to 78.3%.

Superintendent Mike Poore said last week that there were multiple factors contributing to the drop, including the transition from the district’s old student information system to the state’s eSchool data management system. Not all students were rolled into the new system.

There were some 24 students in the district’s Class of 2019 cohort who were marked as not graduating on time. Those students registered for Little Rock schools but never actually attended one in the district, Poore said. There were 14 students who left the district on track to graduate but entered other schools at different, lower grades. As a result, they counted against the Little Rock cohort. There were another seven students who couldn’t be found. Another student who required special-education services stayed with the district until age 21 but didn’t graduate.

“We had seven individuals who needed two credits or less, and we didn’t bring them over the finish line,” Poore said and added, “that one hurts maybe the most.”

Poore said the district must approach the graduation issue systematically — cleaning up the processes for enrolling and tracking students and paying attention to individual kids.

“We can’t just say ‘well, they tightened the rules,’” Poore said “That’s a reality, but it doesn’t matter because there are rules, and we have to then figure out how to do a better job within those rules.”

To that end Poore and his staff said last week that the district has developed a personal graduation plan system that will commence with eighth-graders in career orientation courses. Additionally, the district is seeking help from an outside business to recover students who have dropped out of school and have not been found.

“We don’t want to leave a stone unturned in terms of any young person who gets lost — or may have left our state,” Poore said.

District employees will check high school schedules each summer to ensure there are no holes in the student class day, said LaQuieta Grayson, director of student services. There will be regularly scheduled counselor and student meetings to review the students’ path toward graduation, their summer school plans and their postgraduation plans. The product from that meeting will be sent home to parents.

GRADUATION ALLIANCE

The district’s Community Advisory Board voted late last week to recommend to Education Secretary Johnny Key that the state-run district contract with the Graduation Alliance organization to physically find young people via social media or other means who have left Little Rock high schools before graduation.

Graduation Alliance will either help those students return to district campuses or provide the students with online instruction along with any other support needed — be it 24 hours a day, every day — to get them to a timely graduation.

The company provides state-licensed teachers, tutors, academic coaches who set up a program for a student, as well as a laptop computer or tablet, at locations that are convenient and safe for the students.

Ruth Whitney of Little Rock, a consultant for Graduation Alliance, told the advisory board that the Little Rock district would be the first Arkansas school system to partner with Graduation Alliance, which lists its headquarters as in Salt Lake City.

The district will use the state aid they receive for the re-enrollment of found students into the district to pay Graduation Alliance, which has worked with other states and districts since 2007. The district pays the alliance for students who successfully complete course work for graduation, not the time spent searching for students, Whitney said. It’s a performance-pay approach, she said.

Kelsey Bailey, the district’s chief financial officer, said he does not anticipate the service putting the district in the red.