Dear Editor:

Apparently, Georgia Department of Education missed the memo attributed to Abraham Lincoln, warning:

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

Georgia Senate Bill 431 (2020) resulted in revising the state’s education law, O.C.G.A. Title 20, to require On-Time Graduation Rate and to provide its definition:

On-time Graduation Rate: “… the term ‘on-time graduation rate’ means the graduation rate of the four-year cohort of students that attend a school continuously from October 1 of the calendar year four years prior to the calendar year of the regular date of graduation of that cohort and graduate on or before that regular date of graduation. This graduation rate shall be calculated in addition to, and not as a substitute for, any other graduation rate provided for by federal, state, or local law or regulation.”

Governor Brian Kemp signed On-Time Graduation Rate into law effective 1 January 2021.

The public can now have a truthful measure of each of its high school’s capability to enroll, retain, and nurture students from the time a particular high school enrolled students in ninth grade for the first time to the time the high school graduated the students four, uninterrupted years later, with “high school” generally meaning grades nine through 12.

Notably, and thankfully, the On-Time Graduation Rate definition makes clear that it is not tied down with any value judgments or incumbencies, not even graduation requirements, although graduation requirements are in effect.

Following each graduation, calculating On-time Graduation Rate can be the simple but powerfully truthful exercise that only requires dividing a high school’s official count of students it enrolled in ninth grade for the first time four years ago as of 1 October and that it graduated in the current year or earlier by its official count of students it enrolled in ninth grade for the first time four years ago as 1 October.

However, for some reason, GaDOE is trying to convince all the people all the time that On-Time Graduation Rate “is a slightly different version” of the wastefully complex federally mandated four-year Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate, what all too often GaDOE, the media, and others call “Graduation Rate” without ever mentioning the “Adjusted Cohort” part.

If the people were to know what the “Adjusted Cohort” part means, then the people would also know “Graduation Rate,” as misleadingly used, means essentially a high school’s 12th grade class graduation rate, not the graduation rate of the high school, itself.

To truthfully and honestly implement On-Time Graduation Rate requires shifting from thinking “students graduate high school” to thinking “high school graduates students.” Making the shift may prove difficult for some accustomed to fixating on students as the central concern.

One may hear this expressed as “doing it for the children,” never mind the school, the system designed to produce graduates but, like all systems, is also designed to produces waste—in this case, non-graduates such as transfers out, push outs, dropouts, etc., for whatever reason. Consequently, an ever-present challenge is to continually learn to minimize producing waste.

There is no such thing as a high school that cannot produce waste in the form of non-graduates. If there were, it would be a perfect high school. Nothing wrong with pursuing perfection and never attaining it, but to claim a high school produces no waste is a kettle of fish that does not exist in reality.

Want to improve a high school’s graduation rate? Then work on improving the school, the system, more so than the students. This is the opportunity On-Time Graduation Rate puts right in front of us.

But, again, for some reason, GaDOE muddies the opportunity rather than help the public learn to see it and to use it as it is supposed to be used.

Instead, GaDOE is trying to make On-Time Graduation Rate be “similar to” the federally mandated Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate.

GaDOE says: “The OTGR is a similar graduation rate but instead of adjusting the cohort as we do for the ACGR, the denominator is based on the students who formed the ninth grade class on October 1 of their ninth grade year. We do not add in students who transfer into the school after October 1 of ninth grade, but we do remove the same students as we do for the ACGR (transfer to another school, emigrate, die).”

Changing the count of a high school’s cohort of students who started ninth grade at that high school for the first time clearly violates the definition of On-Time Graduation Rate.

There are absolutely no needs to make any adjusts for any reasons to calculate On-Time Graduation Rate. Its definition makes clear all that’s required are two data: 1) a high school’s official count of students it enrolled in ninth grade for the first time four years ago as of 1 October and that it graduated in the current year or earlier, and 2) the high school’s official count of students it enrolled in ninth grade for the first time four years ago as of 1 October.

Any violation of the definition in implementing On-Time Graduation Rate opens it up to possibilities for admitting value judgments, such as including students who attended a particular high school “continually” and the high school graduated the students after five or six years. Such possibilities realized will tie down On-Time Graduation Rate with unnecessary and unwarranted incumbencies and effectively destroy what it means.

-Ed Johnson

Thus, the power inherent in the On-Time Graduation Rate definition is that student losses and gains, such as transfers in and transfers out, for whatever reasons, are immaterial, judgment-free factors. In contrast, with Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate, student gains and losses are material, judgment-laden factors.

Done right, On-Time Graduation Rate can encourage a high school to learn to improve, while the politics of Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate can actually discourage high schools from needing or even wanting to learn to improve; once the “graduation rate” comes in, no need to worry about waste, such as dropouts, anymore.

Arguably, in the case of City of Atlanta, some waste effects from Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate are causal factors in the city’s worsened and worsening violent crime.

Important to whole-school improvement purposes, On-Time Graduation Rate puts an onus on leading high schools as educational systems more so than centering students taken as individual performers and test score production workers.

This means On-Time Graduation Rate is more about truth-telling what a high school is capable of doing and not doing, and less about what the high school’s students are capable of doing and not doing. In reality, what a high school is capable of doing and not doing necessarily and unavoidably constrains what its students are capable of doing and not doing. This is not a value judgment; this is a truth—perhaps an inconvenient or uncomfortable truth for some.

Although simple to calculate, given the two requisite data, On-Time Graduation Rate sets a very high bar for truth-telling and trustworthiness that Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate does not and, indeed, cannot do. And it matters not that Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate is federally mandated nor how well GaDOE follows the mandate. Doing the wrong thing right is not at all the same as doing the right thing right.

So, why is Georgia Department of Education trying to lower the bar?

-Ed Johnson

Advocate for Quality in Public Education