Another way to look at this question is to take a step up the scale and look at states as the unit of measurement. To show what this looks like, I pulled college-going rates and high school completion rates for each state from the National Center for Education Statistics. The most recent state-level college-going rates come from 2009-10, so both variables use that year as the reference point.
The graph below shows the results. Each dot represents one state, and the solid line represents the trend, such as it is. As the flat trend line suggests, a state’s graduation rate tells us basically nothing about how many of its graduates go on to college.
Now wait, you may say, students have to graduate from high school before they can go to college. These two trends have to be linked.
Well, yes and no. It’s true that students have to make that linear progression, but it isn’t at all clear that this same linear pattern holds for schools or districts. That’s because some schools with low graduation rates may do a really good job for their high-achieving students, and all of that sub-population goes on to college. But the reverse of that can also be true. A school may just be bad across-the-board, bad on graduation rates and bad on college-going rates.
The same is true at “better” schools. They might be great at getting kids through to graduation but terrible at providing counseling or advice on how to go to college. Or they might not value higher education. Schools in rural areas tend to have lower college-going rates, suggesting geography and values play a role in these things too.
Either way, high school graduation rates just aren’t a great measure for accountability purposes. They are easy to count, and we now have a more standardized way to measure them. But if policymakers care about concepts like student growth or college-going, they can’t rely on graduation rates alone to measure them.
Article Appeared @http://aheadoftheheard.org/graduation-rates-are-insufficent-as-an-accountability-measure/