College Readiness Reports: A Few Concerns and A Lot of Questions

As part of its Seven Keys Initiative, MCPS is now tracking high school graduates. The tracking seems limited to determining if graduates enroll in college and persist through college to degree obtainment. The National Student Clearinghouse is being used to track graduates. Using its Clearinghouse data, MCPS recently released a number of reports which reveal college enrollment numbers for over 33,000 graduates. Reports also reveal how many or our graduates actually received a degree.

In my opinion, tracking our graduates is a worthwhile investment, but after reading the first set of public reports, I’m left with a number of concerns and questions.

· First, the number of MCPS graduates reported in these college readiness reports does not match previous MCPS reports of the number of MCPS graduates. The graduating classes in question include the classes of 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. So focusing on just these four classes, I added up all of the Hispanic graduates from an official MCPS SAT report (http://sharedaccountability.mcpsprimetime.org/reports/list.php?selection=613). I counted 4,729 Hispanic graduates in this report. But the college readiness reports only count 4,214 Hispanic graduates. The difference of 515 is fairly large—10.8%. There also is a fairly large difference for African American graduates. By my calculations, the percentage of missing African American graduates is 8.3%. Where did the extra graduates disappear to? Are the missing graduates those who never enrolled in college at all? Or are they simply graduates no one was able to track down?

· Second, the graduation rates reported in these college readiness reports come without any benchmarks. MCPS is always telling the world how much better its students perform than others, but it may have hesitated to do so this time because our graduation rates are lower than the national averages. So, for example, MCPS reports that approximately 27% of its African American graduates earned a degree in six years. Sounds okay, right? But according to the U.S. Department of Education, the college graduation rate for black students is 42% (see the following publication: Horn, L. (2006). Placing College Graduation Rates in Context: How 4-Year College Graduation Rates Vary With Selectivity and the Size of Low-Income Enrollment (NCES 2007-161). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.) The national graduation rate for white kids is 62%, a figure slightly higher than 58% graduation rate for white MCPS graduates. So, how come MCPS graduates are doing worst?

· Third, given the size of the data file – following 33,000+ graduates, I actually thought MCPS would provide us with much more than what they recently released. For example, I’m really interested in seeing the college data broken out by FARMS participation. Pretty much all the research on college persistence and graduation tells us that money matters a lot when it comes to completing college. So, how do our poor students perform? How do our special education students perform? How do African American males perform? The latter is a group of students known to have poor college outcomes. How many of our graduates who entered Montgomery College transfer successfully to a 4-year college and earn a degree?

· Finally, I wish MCPS researchers would do a better job of explaining how they do what they do in terms of research methodologies, including providing us with information on the reliability of the information and data obtained from the National Student Clearinghouse. The MCPS college readiness reports are almost void of explaining methodology. My favorite book of college attendance and persistence and what it all means is The Shape of the River (Bowen & Bok). That book alone spends more than 100 pages explaining its methodology. From this book you can honestly figure out what the researchers did and how they did it. MCPS provides nothing in the way of details. For some of us, the details matter.

Joseph Hawkins