Graduation claim goes awry

Few states top Wisconsin’s K-12 graduation rate — and the rate has gone up in recent years.

State school Superintendent Tony Evers boasted on his Facebook page on Feb. 13 that “Wisconsin’s graduation rates have grown to over 90%” since his election.

Evers is seeking a third term in the April 2017 election against challenger Lowell Holtz, a former school superintendent and principal.

When asked to back up the Facebook claim, the Evers campaign pointed to graduation rates published by the agency Evers oversees, the Department of Public Instruction.

The reports, they say, show a rate of 85.7% in 2009-’10 (Evers’ first year) that rose to more than 90% in subsequent years. Case closed? No. Let’s put our red pencil and green eye shade to work.

How rates are tracked

The state and federal governments employ two methods to track changes in the four-year graduation rate.

The first method — dating to the 1960s — estimates the fouryear graduation rate from aggregate figures on enrollment and graduate counts.

It shows Wisconsin’s rate was above 90% before Evers even took office. The latest figure reported under that method: 92%, in 2011-’12.

The second method, which is newer and more accurate, tracks detailed student-level data.

That method dates to 2009-’10 in Wisconsin. It shows a rising rate from 85.7% in Evers’ first year up to 88.4% in 2014-’15.

So neither approach backs up Evers’ claim.

For the record, the state’s rate of 88.4% for on-time graduation (four years) ranked sixth-highest nationally by the latest numbers, which is actually a drop from No. 2 four years earlier.

Behind the claim

So where do the numbers cited by the Evers campaign come from?

Those numbers look at how many students from a ninthgrade class graduate over five or six years, not four years.

Wisconsin began tracking socalled “extended-year graduation” in Evers’ first year; dozens of other states also collect it.

Viewed this way, Evers campaign says, the four-year graduation rate for the class of 2009-’10 was 85.7%. It rose to 89.5% after five years and to 90.4% after six years.

A similar growth pattern appears in later years, when you track an individual class.

But we can’t judge if the same thing was happening before Evers, because the collection of the extended-year graduation rate didn’t start until his second year.

So we can’t fully evaluate whether these figures show that “Wisconsin’s graduation rates have grown to over 90%” since he took over.

But, even if they did, it would apply to the less-used “extendedyear rate,” not the more conventional four-year rate that is better known to the average person.

Our rating

Evers claimed on Facebook: “Wisconsin’s graduation rates have grown to over 90%” since he became state school superintendent.

By the traditional measure — graduation in four years — Wisconsin’s rate is one of the best in America, but still below 90% using one approach. Using the other, it topped that mark before Evers even took office.

Meanwhile, the extendedyear graduation rate provides an element of truth to the claim.

That puts it at Mostly False.