A discouraging meeting and North Carolina's reporting problem
I met with UNC professor Gary Henry in the Department of Public Policy a little more than a week ago.
He uses a massive database of student statistics (teachers, test scores, race, gender, family, absences) and uses this to measue different policies and how effective they are. He gets a lot of this data through a FERPA exemption, but a lot of it has been built through hard work and the labor of numerous Ph.D. students.
He has worked in multiple states analyzing public education and strategies to lower the dropout rate. And he said North Carolina is a frustrating state to work in.
What he told me was rather discouraging: basically, the data we are using are no good and that anything we produce with it will be misleading. It's not really any fault of our own, but rather a problem with the state.
He said the problem lies in an inconsistent method of self-reporting applied by each individual district. He said, while policies are in place, they are not followed strictly, because nobody is looking over the district shoulders. Since there is no way to check these results, LEAs have an incentive to undercount their dropout rate.
This, he said, accounts for the large discrepancy between the cohort graduation rate, which statewide is around 70 percent for four years, and the dropout event count, which says that only about 5 percent of students drop out statewide. For those of you who don't feel like doing the math, the number of students who don't graduate is six times that the number that dropped out. Where do these students go?
He said what the state needs - and what taxpayers have actually already paid for (a program known as N.C. WISE) - is a method that assigns a unique student identification number to each student that stays with the student throughout his or her high school tenure. This is how other states measure their policies.
I'm not sure I ascribe to the idea that anything we do is misleading. I think if what we do is prefaced with this understanding that the data as misleading, we can help highlight the problems with this system
I want to hear what people from the Department of Public Instruction say about tried to get up with Ken Gattis again last week, but with no success. I'm redoubling my efforts starting today.
- Kevin Kiley's blog
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