In what is now part one on this subject, I pointed to the strong indication in the available data that relatively low graduation rates in Kentucky’s public colleges are due to correspondingly low percentages of students who enter the system with adequate preparation.

I noticed something else in the graph in that earlier post – there are wide variations in the gaps each school has between the percentage of students entering with adequate preparation versus the percentage that eventually graduates (within six years or less of entry).

This graph shows that gap information.

The really big surprise here is Kentucky State University (KSU). KSU doesn’t graduate very many of its students, but considering the extremely poor preparation level of the college’s entering classes (about 85% are under-prepared), KSU actually does a lot better than some other state schools in getting a proportion of those kids through to a degree.

Of particular interest, the two worst performers in my adequate preparation to graduation gap analysis are Kentucky’s most competitive schools, UK and U of L. Considering the relatively high preparation rate of their entering classes, these two schools lose a lot of kids.

Particularly in the case of U of L, the losses seem excessive, especially when you consider that U of L’s graduation rate for students who entered in 2001 was only 44 percent, while UK’s grad rate was nearly 40 percent higher.

For most people, a ‘cut’ means you have less money to spend than you did last year. Not so in Frankfort.

Click here to read entire article.

Over at the Prichard Committee’s blog they have been putting up all sorts of graphs with statistics on college graduation rates for Kentucky’s public universities. While the Prichard folks haven’t come right out and said it, the strong hint they seem to be dropping is that Kentucky’s colleges are not doing a very good job and the problem rests with the colleges.

While I certainly agree that our colleges graduate far too few, I don’t think (with the exception of the operation of teacher training programs) that the major blame rests at the college level.

Very simply, it isn’t reasonable to expect our universities to create silk purses out of the sow’s ears they are getting from the K to 12 public school system.

Anyway, I decided to take a different look at the graduation rate information Prichard was using to see if the problems of inadequate high school preparation showed in the data. To do that, I compared the preparation level of entering college freshmen to the percentage that eventually graduate.

The graph shows what I found.

In a nutshell, the success of first-time entrants into Kentucky’s colleges in 2001 relates extremely well to the best available data on college preparation of incoming freshman the next year in 2002.

The finding, which isn’t surprising, is that when colleges can accept a higher percentage of prepared students, they generally graduate more of those students (For the statistical types, the correlation between preparation rates and graduation rates is very high, at 0.86. A perfect correlation would be 1.0. In social statistics correlations over 0.8 are very significant).

The graph tells us more. Very simply, our four-year colleges cannot find enough fully qualified applicants. Most accept an alarmingly high proportion of under-prepared students. In five out of eight of our public universities, the proportion of students entering with adequate preparation is only on the order of one out of two, or even less.

So, don’t put too much blame on the colleges for our poor postsecondary graduation rates. The data indicates the problem rests with the K to 12 public schools in this state.

Data Sources:

The college graduation rates for the entering class of 2001 in the graph come from a federal Web tool called the “College Navigator.”

Unfortunately, the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education didn’t start to report percentages of students prepared for college until the entering class of 2002, but it isn’t likely that there was much of a change from the actual data for the entering college freshmen of 2001.

That preparation rate data for the entering class of 2002 is found in Table 1 in the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education’s (CPE) “Underprepared Students in Kentucky: A First Look at the 2001 Mandatory Placement Policy.”

Over at the Kentucky School News and Commentary Blog (KSN&C;), they are really starting to talk up charters. Within the last couple of days, the site has posted an interesting list of considerations if Kentucky sets up charter legislation and made comments that Kentucky could be at a strong competitive disadvantage for second-tier education stimulus money if we don’t enact charter legislation.

KSN&C; also doesn’t buy the word put out by Kentucky Governor Beshear and Kentucky Education Secretary Helen Mountjoy that our School Based Decision Making Councils are a suitable substitute for charter schools. Like us, KSN&C; sees right through that terribly misguided comparison.

Site-based councils are no substitute for charter schools.

Click here to read entire news release.

There actually is some very good news buried in “Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States.” However, there also is more evidence that effective analysis of charter schools is very difficult, and even analysts sometimes don’t fully understand the most important messages in the data.

For example, even the Multiple Choice report’s lead author tends to overlook some important messages in the data. As quoted in Education Week, the report’s lead author, Margaret E. Raymond, says, “If this study shows anything, it shows that we’ve got a two-to-one margin of bad charters to good charters. That’s a red flag.”

I think that summary misses some important information.

Perhaps the most important finding in the report is that not all state charter programs are the same. In some states, charters on average do more poorly than what the reporters said were comparable public school results, but in other states charters had a clear advantage.

The report says, “Relative to their TPS (typical public school) peers, the average performance of charter students in reading was significantly positive in Arkansas, California, Colorado (Denver), Louisiana, Missouri, and North Carolina.”

That’s news we can use. If Kentucky establishes charter schools, these are some “go-to” states to look at for model legislation.

Another point, and an area where the report scarcely scratches the surface, is the finding that it takes time for charter schools to overcome the poor educations that new arrivals usually bring with them.

This graph from the report shows that in their first year in charters, students perform notably more poorly than what the report considered to be counterpart performance in public schools. That’s likely due to adjusting to a new, and more demanding, school. In the second year, there isn’t much difference in performance between charter and public school students. However, by the third year of charter experience, the trend notably reverses in favor of students in charters.

What is particularly interesting is the numbers in the graph are averaged across all 16 states in the study, including those with weaker charter school programs. I’d love to see how the graph looks for only those states with strong charter laws. The report in question does not perform that very obviously needed examination, unfortunately.

Still, the data in this new report says:

• Charters in states with good laws do outperform regular schools.

• Students who stay in charters long enough (at least three years) do start to outperform their public school counterparts, even in states with weaker charter school laws.

• Even education researchers at places like Stanford don’t always “get” all the messages in their own data.

Kentucky’s governor and its Secretary Of Education Helen Mountjoy are trying to convince the US Secretary of Education that Kentucky’s School Based Decision Making Councils are a suitable alternative to the charter schools the federal official favors.

But, WFPL radio knows that is anything but a done deal.

Gambling is not the best way to solve state budget, horse-racing woes.

Click here to read entire column.

House Speaker Greg Stumbo, who tried to “persuade” legislators to vote for expanded gambling at Kentucky’s horse tracks by promising that some of the revenue would go to repair crumbling schools, is now saying that those who voted against gambling might be in trouble. Check out this warmed-over political gumbo from Stumbo:

“I wouldn’t want to go home and defend a vote of non-action on behalf of my leadership, that when people expect you to act and also wonder why for example you wouldn’t vote for schools in your own district,” Stumbo said.

Uh…I don’t think that’s the right recipe for success with savvy Kentucky taxpayers. Proof? “Candidates who opposed an expansion of gambling won in each of the three recent special elections in the Senate.”

Gambling is a secondary issue here. This is about the political double-dealing involved in tying a vote for VLTs at horse tracks to repairing crumbling schools. All the while Stumbo refuses to throw the dice on behalf of taxpayers by standing up to the labor unions and against the state’s current policy of paying artificially high wages on public projects.

– Many experts not fooled

It looks like high school dropouts are on a lot of peoples’ minds right now. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that many experts looking at dropout rates for Kentucky and Ohio consider the official rates to be “generous.”

In other words, experts consider the real situation to be definitely worse than the Kentucky Department of Education wants to admit.

The Enquirer quotes Cincinnati State spokesman Bob White as saying, “Everybody involved in this knows that the problem is worse than many of the published numbers. It really has to do with the way Ohio collects its data. Kentucky has a different system. You can tweak it any way you want.”

Well, Kentucky has been tweaking, but that isn’t going to pass muster much longer. The Enquirer also reports, “At the urging of the nation’s governors, the U.S. Education Department has ordered all states to use the same graduation rate methodology by 2012.” Why we have to delay to learn the truth isn’t mentioned, but we have talked about this extensively in this blog.

Why not ask your state school board member why they are delaying going to a better formula for two more years. We have the data to calculate better graduation rates with that formula now. Why are we delaying until the feds make us do it?