Real issue not how to tally but to teach

New graduation rates for Georgia schools came out recently, and, if you read only the headlines, you might assume high-schoolers drop out in droves. If you dig deeper, you will find no fewer students graduated from high school this year; the formula for calculating the graduation rate merely changed.

That is not to say we don’t have major challenges or are satisfied with where we are, but it needs to be noted this is a new baseline to better measure future progress.

Using the new formula to calculate the graduation rate revealed a significant percentage of students take longer than four years to graduate. If these students graduate in five years, is that a bad thing (look at how long it takes most students to graduate from college)? I would much prefer a student get a high school diploma because, in today’s labor market, opportunities for success are few without it.

A key requirement of the new graduation-rate formula is having documentation for students coded as transfers, withdrawals and home-schoolers. If a school codes a student no longer in the “cohort” as anything but a dropout, our student data system triggers the requirement for documentation.

In many instances across the state this year, schools didn’t have all the documentation necessary to get credit for those students. As a result, I believe school districts will get much better at keeping documentation, and we will see the graduation rate increase.

However, the real issue isn’t the difference between the old graduation rate calculation and the new one. The real issue is what we must do to ensure more students graduate, regardless of how it’s calculated.

Many exciting initiatives are going on in Georgia’s public k-12 education system that I believe will help increase our graduation rate. Initiatives such as Career Pathways for high school students will promote relevance in the classroom so students connect what they’re learning with what they want to do after high school. The Common Core will toughen standards for our students and let us compare Georgia student achievements with students across the country. Also, the new College and Career Ready Performance Index will give the state and schools a roadmap for student success.

Before accepting the negative commentary you may hear about Georgia’s public schools, take a moment to look more closely into the issue before forming an opinion.