State Department of Education says graduation rates inaccurate

Published 5:26 pm Tuesday, April 25, 2017

MONTGOMERY — The state Department of Education on Tuesday acknowledged incorrect graduation rate data was posted Friday to the department’s website.

State Superintendent of Education Michael Sentance said there were a number of mistakes made, both in data manipulation and basic protocol, which caused superintendents and others to take issue with the graduation rates posted by the SDE.

The News Courier published state and local data in its Tuesday edition. It was not immediately clear if any local numbers were incorrect.

Athens City Schools Superintendent Dr. Trey Holladay told The News Courier Monday he was upset that numbers were released without any advance warning to the superintendents.

Limestone County Schools Superintendent Dr. Tom Sisk was in Montgomery Tuesday and met with Dr. Dee Fowler, deputy state superintendent. Sisk said a number of superintendents were upset by the way the numbers were released to the public because not all numbers had been validated.

For instance, Sisk said, there were cases valedictorians were not coded as graduates but instead as “completers.” There are also issues with students enrolled in the Essential/Life Skills Courses Pathway, a program geared toward special education students.

“If a student took even one essential English class as a ninth or 10th-grader, it wouldn’t matter if he or she took AP calculus; they are still not treated as a graduate, but instead a completer,” he said.

Indeed, federal guidelines prohibit those students from being counted as graduates because the courses are not fully aligned to Alabama’s academic standards. A release from the SDE said this year, in an attempt to comply with the federal mandate, the department removed courses from transcripts with the Essential/Life Skills designation.

Due to a lack of seamless statewide course coding, however, there were numerous courses that contained similar course names (Essential/Life Skills) or codes, but were not, in fact, the special education courses deemed unacceptable by the USDOE. This resulted in numerous courses being discarded that were indeed valid and acceptable.

In some instances, students with well above the necessary course requirements were counted as non-graduates. In turn, graduation rates dropped in various systems across the state.

Sentance said both the course name/code error and the SDE’s lack of verifying the final results with school superintendents across the state prior to the publication of these numbers compounded the issue.

“We owe it to not only the educators, but the community at large, to make sure our data is solid and reliable,” Sentance said. “At a minimum we should have given local systems the basic consideration of vetting the data we are making public on their behalf. This is unacceptable and cannot continue to happen.”

Sentance said he has begun an immediate investigation into the details of this series of mistakes and is referring new protocols to prevent this from happening going forward. For now, the online portal that hosts this year’s graduation rate data has been taken down and will remain down until the data has been corrected.