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Deep Dive
Ready for what? Postsecondary data on school report cards remains mixed bag
The Every Student Succeeds Act expects states to report college
enrollment data when available. Which ones provide the most information
on their graduates?
By Linda Jacobson and Nami Sumida
April 1, 2020
When the Pennsylvania Department of Education was redesigning its
school report card in 2018, it didn’t limit the data on students’
college and career readiness to the typical indicators of participation
in Advanced Placement courses, admission test scores or even whether
students earned an industry-recognized credential.
Its Future Ready PA Index includes percentages of students from each
high school entering college, the military or the workforce, and a
further breakdown shows the percentage of black, white and economically
disadvantaged graduates following each of those pathways.
“Pennsylvania is looking at projections that six in 10 jobs in our
major industries require some type of postsecondary certification or
training,” said Brian Campbell, director of the Bureau of Curriculum,
Assessment, and Instruction at the Pennsylvania Department of Education.
The state is one of 32 that now includes college enrollment rates on
report cards created for parents and the public. It’s an area of
student performance the federal Every Student Succeeds Act requires
states to report — sort of.
According to 2019 guidance from the U.S. Department of Education,
school report cards should include what students are doing after high
school graduation “to the extent postsecondary enrollment data are
available.” And the data should be disaggregated by racial and ethnic
subgroup and whether students have a disability, are English learners
or are from low-income families.
Currently, 16 of the 32 states include any breakdown of the data by subgroup.
“ESSA did say if you’ve got this data, publish it on the report cards
where parents are looking,” said Paige Kowalski, executive vice
president of the Data Quality Campaign, a nonprofit focusing on making
education data understandable and useful to families and educators.
But Kowalski added that more than 40 states’ report cards are missing
K-12 data on at least one subgroup, required since 2002’s No Child Left
Behind law. So, she’s not surprised states are still in the process of
adding postsecondary data.
“When you tack on a term like ‘where available,’” she said, “it’s pretty tough to get stuff done.”
According to DQC’s 2019 “Show Me the Data” report, 27 states did not
include postsecondary enrollment on their report cards. “Postsecondary
data side by side with graduation rates helps communities better
understand how schools are preparing students for life after the
classroom,” the report said.
Kowalski said she doesn’t expect to see that number grow significantly
this year. (Release of DQC's 2020 report is planned for May.) But even
since last year’s report, there’s been movement in this area. For
example, when DQC compiled the 2019 report, Florida was still updating
its report card. Under the “Graduation and Beyond” section of each high
school report card, there is now a Postsecondary Continuation Rate tab
that includes two drop-down menus. One allows users to generate charts
by the type of higher ed institution — in-state public or in-state
private/out-of-state — and a second dropdown includes choices of
subgroup.
In another example, the Vermont Annual Snapshot includes a section for
“college/career-ready outcomes within 16 months of graduation” and
notes the Snapshot will begin including that data when it releases
2018-19 reports.
‘Tracking what happens’
The higher-level courses students take in high school, their scores on
the SAT or ACT, their grade-point averages and other college and career
readiness indicators are still just proxies for whether students will
enter college, said Anne Hyslop, the assistant director for policy
development and government relations at the nonprofit Alliance for
Excellent Education.
“The point of K-12 education isn’t to just graduate with a diploma; it
is to graduate college and career ready,” she said. “But the only way
you really know if [students] are ready is tracking what happens once
they graduate.”
Strengthening the link between K-12 and higher education data is also
relevant in the discussion over whether states are watering down
graduation requirements or whether credit recovery programs of
questionable quality are contributing to higher graduation rates.
Douglas Harris, a senior fellow for the Brown Center on Education
Policy at the Brookings Institution, wrote that increasing graduation
rates are not a "mirage" and accountability systems "produced some real
and important knowledge and skills for students."
But with another perspective, Marie O’Hara, the director of research at
Achieve, wrote in a recent paper that graduation rates are not met with
“corresponding gains” in measures such as performance on state high
school assessments and 12th grade scores on the National Assessment of
Educational Progress.
“Graduation rates tick up every year, but nearly every other outcome
measure has not seen gains,” O’Hara said, adding that more knowledge
about what students are doing after high school could allow districts
to better understand strengths and weaknesses. “My sense is that most
school level leaders don’t have a good feedback loop.”
The “next step” in this work, Hyslop said, is for states to also report
the rate at which students are first enrolling in remedial courses in
college before they can earn credit.
“If you’re a parent looking at high schools, that is really important
to know,” Kowalski agrees. “That graduation rate means something
different when you find out that the students walking across the stage
in June were not ready.”
The Illinois Report Card includes the percentage of graduates who
enroll in remedial courses at state community colleges. Report cards in
Georgia and North Dakota also include remediation data.
The Nevada Report Card is a different case. It includes the percentages
of students who enrolled in a remedial math, reading or writing course
in the Nevada System of Higher Education in the fall following
graduation. But individual school report cards don’t include college
enrollment rates. Users have to search at the district level and check
boxes to search for that information.
At a district or state level, data on remediation rates also gives the
higher education system “a real sense of the preparedness of the
students you are serving,” Hyslop said. “They are needing to think
about strategies to fill in gaps students have when they are coming
into their institutions.”
Then there’s the persistence issue. Several states, including
Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland and Michigan, provide data on
whether those who entered college in the fall after graduating high
school are still enrolled at least a year later.
In the “Prepared for Success” section of its report card, for example,
Ohio even provides the number of students from a given cohort who
graduate college within six years after high school. And it provides a
link to “transition reports” that include further detail.
Business leaders and workforce development officials are among those who find the information helpful.
“Education data is extremely valuable and useful to our industry
partners,” said Karianne Gelinas, vice president of strategic
initiatives and research at the Lehigh Valley Economic Development
Corporation in Pennsylvania. “Businesses in our region want to know the
size of the labor force and that graduates are prepared for the
workforce.”
Victaulic, an Easton, Pennsylvania-based company that makes pipe
joining systems, is one company in the region following such trends.
“Postsecondary data can drive alignment among the region’s current
businesses as well as the businesses we are trying to attract to the
region,” said Vice President Eric B. Luftig.
In December, Luftig spoke to more than 500 educators at an SAS
conference on “bridging the skills gap.” He told them, “You absolutely
have ‘the product’ we need. We just need to work together to align the
areas of focus and create the career pathways from early education
through vocational/higher education with the employers/companies in the
regions.”
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