Implementing Graduation Counts: State Progress to Date, 2008

In 2005, all 50 state governors made an unprecedented commitment to implement voluntarily a common formula for calculating their state’s high school graduation rate by signing the National Governors Association (NGA) Graduation Counts Compact. The Compact contained four key commitments: to use a common, four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate formula; to build state data collection and reporting capacity; to develop additional student outcome indicators; and to report annually on their progress toward meeting these commitments. More details of the Compact formula are outlined in the 2005 companion report, Graduation Counts: A Report of the National Governors Association Task Force on State High School Graduation Data.

Sixteen states now report that they use the Compact formula to calculate their high school graduation rate. Five more plan to report later in 2008, eight more in 2009, and nine more in 2010. Six states plan to implement the Compact formula in 2011, and one plans to do so in 2012. Five are uncertain about their plans to use the formula.

Thirty-six states now have the information systems they need to collect longitudinal data and are tracking cohorts of students as they progress through the school system. Within four years, 49 states should have high school cohort data that will allow them to use the Compact formula. However, many still need assistance to address data quality concerns and to create audit systems to monitor data quality and accuracy.

The Graduation Counts task force report noted some short-term actions that states could take to improve their graduation data immediately if the student-unit record data would not be available for more than a year. For example, states could develop guidelines for schools and districts on how to collect and code student data; they could adopt a policy that students whose status is unknown be coded as dropouts, which most states have done; and they could conduct audits of local record keeping and data collection, which most states also now do. As previously noted, states could also adopt interim methods of calculation that do not require statewide student identifiers and a student-unit record data system and rely instead on aggregate enrollment and graduation data. Few states have moved to use more accurate interim estimate measures; most are planning to move directly to using the adjusted cohort rate in the Compact.

Finally, the task force report and the Compact called on states to report additional indicators of student outcomes, such as five- or six-year cohort graduation rates, a high school completion rate for those earning alternative credentials, in-grade retention rates, a college readiness rate, and high school dropout rates. Fifteen of the 16 states currently using the Compact rate are also reporting additional indicators of high school student outcomes, and six others are doing so as well. Other states plan to do so in the future. On this point and the others, the NGA Center will continue to track and report state progress toward implementing the commitments made in the 2005 Compact.