Two reports released Thursday give disappointing figures in two key categories in Connecticut education: the number of students dropping out of high school, and the number of high school graduates who go on to college.
And, the reports are accurate -- unlike those released for years that were accused of being based on "funny math."
The State Department of Education, using a more reliable accounting system than in the past, reported that 80 percent of students in public high schools are graduating on time. For years, the department reported that figure at more than 90 percent.
Translation: 4,000 more students who didn't actually graduate and weren't previously counted as dropping out were added to the rolls.
"We can and must do better," Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor wrote in a statement when releasing the new figures.
"States across the nation, as well as Connecticut, were not wanting to admit just how many students were dropping out. You cooked the books to boost your rates," said Patrick Riccards, executive director of ConnCAN, a New Haven-based education reform group. Earlier this year, his group called the state out in a report for using "funny math" by reporting thousands of students graduating who did not.
Previous graduation rates often included those that earned a GED or a certificate of attendance. It didn't define a student as a dropout if he or she had stopped showing up for school, but were still enrolled. And if a student transferred to another district, the state or district didn't count or track if they graduated.
Six years ago, state officials promised to follow the lead of other states and also begin to accurately count just how many students weren't finishing school. This is the first year the State Department of Education has released a detailed, school-by-school, district-by-district analysis of actual dropout rates.
"You wake up and our graduation rates all of a sudden drop 10 to 12 percent pretty much overnight," Riccards said.
Forty-five states promised to make the same move by this year, according to the National Governor's Association, which helped lead this effort. A U.S. Department of Education regulation also spurred the change.
As expected, the achievement gap that exists between low-income and minority and white students is also prevalent in the dropout and graduation rates. Sixty-three percent of low-income students graduated compared to 69 percent of black students and 89 percent of white students.
College numbers also updated
Similar sketchy accounting was taking place when reporting how many students head off to college each year. The state used to rely on a survey that graduates filled out, with 81 percent of the class of 2009 reporting they would be heading off to college.
But when the Board of Regents for High Education's P-20 Council went to verify if the students made it to college, just 67 percent to 73 percent were found to be enrolled in college after using more than just intent-to-enroll surveys, according to its report, also released Thursday.
"This data enables us to drill down and see where we need to do more to prepare out students for a college degree or a trade," said Robert Kennedy, president of the 100,000-student Board of Regents of High Education system.
We have a system of keeping students in the school system for twelve years. This is too long a period. Education within that time period is not intense but only lackadaisical. Mastery of the subject matter is often ignored. Our eyes, ears, and mind are always on the tests, which do not evaluate the depth and breadth of acquired knowledge. Much more than anything, we should have our students improve their common sense. So, testing must be to verify the use of common sense in using the acquired skills and knowledge under varying circumstance and conditions.
The present system is
Read MoreThere is much educators can do to help students be successful in school or simply to keep them in school. Despite this, there are students who are at risk of dropping out often have serious issues unrelated to school, e.g. parents divorcing, involvement in gangs or drugs. Officials at a school can contact parents for truancy or attendance issues but if the parents don't take action the problem is largely out of the school's hands.
The efforts (simplistic ones at that) to evaluate schools through test scores and graduation rates are often contradictory. The efforts to simply keep students
Read MoreNo child left behind apparently left a lot of children behind. If you compare the quality of education today to what I had 40 or so years ago in CT public schools, the results would shock you. The entire system has gone down the tubes. I believe this is a direct result of those in control of the monetary system taking direct action to insure that critical thinking, literacy, creativity, and individuality are erased from the landscape of public education.
Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but what else explains the decline in quality?
Read MoreCV, I like your point about use of our money. The comparison to yesteryear is an all to common endeavor and terribly invalid. In the early 70s students with special needs were completely marginalized. This was the era of bussing with all its related problems. Today we have students earning 3 or 4 SEMESTERS of college credit through AP exams. That was hardly the case in your perceived hey day of education. In fact, far fewer students even took calculus in high school back then. If you ever took an AP exam you would know that there is ample critical
Read MoreGet into the Community College complaint that too many of the kids are social promotions which inflates drop out rates and non-completion rates and remedial cost expenses at Community Colleges making CT one of the worst CC systems in the nation when measured by costs and results.
Why does this problem get passed along and then caught at the Community Colleges (see the CT Mirror article from 3/16 of this year)?
Many Community Colleges Instructors are adjunct faculty and simply report accurately whether a student passed, failed or attended a class. The free market and part time nature of
Read MoreGoat, I would be very interested in the statistics you are using to justify your claim that CT is one of the most frequent consumers of social promotion. I will bet the ranch you have nothing that is remotely valid in terms of research.
Post-secondary institutions are hardly blameless. The vast majority of instructors, lecturers and professors have no pedagogical training. The primary means of instruction is exposition with a reliance on auditory delivery which is the least effective approach.
The tired attempt at demagoguing unions reflects how little thought many people put into the problems in education when
Read MoreI guess most of you haven't read the CT statutes which state that parents are responsible for their children's education, even specifying what content is expected, including being a good citizen. Now granted it is a simple one liner. I have been a homeschool parent for 20 years and am continueing today. Our school curriculm stress mastery. I stress mastery. You don't go on unless you have learned all the material. You correct your mistakes before you take tests, etc. No failing grades are ever acceptible. You learn to write, write, write,
Read MoreGee and you really have to wonder why graduation rates remain so far behind compare that to Europe, Asia and India. The one thing that makes education a joke in America and especially higher education is that they tack on so many requirements to graduate from college, that no one today can graduate in 4 yrs. They keep tacking on so many requirements that colleges and the Real world have a huge disconnect on what colleges think is required and what the real world think is required. The one thing I have seen in colleges is that they keep adding
Read MoreSusan Bysiewicz, Democractic candidate for U.S. Senate, during a debate with U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy.
"Susan has been using this tired line of attack for the last year and a half, and it hasn't worked."
Chris Murphy
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