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3 Decisions Required to Compute the Indicators
Pages 25-42

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From page 25...
... A number of reports have contrasted popular calculations in terms of their accuracy, bias, and ease of computation (e.g., Mishel and Roy, 2006; National Institute of Statistical Sciences and the Education Statistics Services Institute, 2005; Swanson, 2003; Warren, 2004)
From page 26...
... . There are a number of valid reasons for producing graduation rates that include only students who earn a regular high school diploma.
From page 27...
... specify that they remain in school beyond age 18 or who are ungraded and whose time in high school is not clearly defined. Time limitations may exclude summer graduates or students who take just one extra term to complete school.
From page 28...
... An alternative is to exclude students still enrolled from the indicator -- removing them from both the numerator and the denominator. This allows the completion rate to be the opposite of the dropout rate, which is conceptually easier for a wide audience to understand.
From page 29...
... However, validation costs money,8 and schools that have the greatest demand for validation of transfers -- those with large numbers of mobile students -- may not have the necessary resources. In general, requiring validation will inflate dropout rates and decrease completion rates, because students will be classified as dropouts until their transfer status can be verified.
From page 30...
... . Even grade retention prior to high school can introduce problems in calculating the rates because a student's probability of dropping out is highly correlated with age.10 If larger numbers of students enter high school at age 16 than in the past, dropout rates will rise simply because a larger percentage of the students are at an age when they are permitted to drop out.
From page 31...
... For example, middle schools that contain grade 9 but not grade 12 would not produce a graduation rate, even though they have a full grade 9 class. Incorporating ungraded special education students into grade-based cohorts is also problematic.11 One way to deal with these issues is to define cohorts by age instead of grade level.
From page 32...
... If the students who leave a school are qualitatively different from the students who enter in a way that is systematically related to dropout/completion, the rates will be biased, even after adjustments are made to the denominator. An alternative to defining the cohort on a specific date is to include all students enrolled at any time during the school year, or at any time over the four years of high school, for completion rates (with students entering at higher 12For the Common Core of Data dropout rates, some schools use the official October-to-October definition to define dropouts in the numerator, and some states use a June-to-June definition.
From page 33...
... Most of the graduation rates based on aggregate counts of students (including the Cumulative Proportion Index and the graduation rate in the Common Core of Data) attribute transfers who drop out to their sending school, but those who graduate to both schools -- as a graduate at their receiving school and a nongraduate at their sending school.
From page 34...
... In practice, only nongraduates are at risk of being excluded from the statistics of all schools -- schools tend to want to count all of their graduates. This biases graduation rates upward, leading to more bias than if all transfer students were simply excluded.
From page 35...
... This results in statistics that are unbiased and accurately represent the graduation rate of students who have matriculated at a given college, thus circumventing the problem of overcounting transfer students if statistics are aggregated. The disadvantage is that it underrepresents 15Studentswho transfer in after grade 9 tend to boost graduation rates because they have already shown enough success to move on past grade 9 and because they are followed for fewer years than students who enroll in grade 9.
From page 36...
... is critical both for interpreting the rates and for revealing unintended incentives in the rules. Reporting a variety of rates -- such as both on-time and eventual graduation rates, completion rates that include other methods of finishing high school, rates that do not remove transfer students or incorporate new students, and age-based rates -- can provide a more comprehensive picture of schools' effectiveness at graduating students.
From page 37...
... More importantly, students' English proficiency status changes over time as they acquire sufficient English language skills to be removed from the ELL classification. Many students who are initially classified as ELL in the elementary grades are no longer classified as such in high school.
From page 38...
... This requires data systems to include records on ELL status from the primary grades onward that remain constant as students progress to higher grades -- a requirement not easily met, since many states do not have access to primary grade records for these students. These primary grade records would need to accompany students who transfer, so that receiving schools can correctly classify students who were formerly classified as ELL.
From page 39...
... 18For example, dropout rates in a district with two high schools might represent all students enrolled at each school over a period of four years. If there were high student mobility rates between the schools, so that many students transfer from one to the other, the resulting dropout rates for the schools would still be correct estimates of the percentage of students ever enrolled at those schools who dropped out.
From page 40...
... As described in this chapter, schools and states have different policies for handling transfer students. Documentation of how transfers were handled is critical for interpreting school-level rates.
From page 41...
... The federal government requires states and districts to produce 4-year graduation rates that include diploma recipients only. As discussed above, there are compelling reasons for using this statistic as the primary indicator of high school completion.
From page 42...
... Alternative graduation rates for English language learners (ELLs) should include former ELL students as well as students currently classified in this category.


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