Domina Thurston, Ghosh-Dastidar Bonnie, Tienda Marta
University of California, Irvine.
Educ Eval Policy Anal. 2010 Jun;32(2):324-346. doi: 10.3102/0162373710367515.
The No Child Left Behind Act requires states to publish high school graduation rates for public schools and the U.S. Department of Education is currently considering a mandate to standardize high school graduation rate reporting. However, no consensus exists among researchers or policy-makers about how to measure high school graduation rates. In this paper, we use longitudinal data tracking a cohort of students at 82 Texas public high schools to assess the accuracy and precision of three widely-used high school graduation rate measures: Texas's official graduation rates, and two competing estimates based on publicly available enrollment data from the Common Core of Data. Our analyses show that these widely-used approaches yield inaccurate and highly imprecise estimates of high school graduation and persistence rates. We propose several guidelines for using existing graduation and persistence rate data and argue that a national effort to track students as they progress through high school is essential to reconcile conflicting estimates.
《不让一个孩子掉队法案》要求各州公布公立学校的高中毕业率，美国教育部目前正在考虑一项强制要求，以规范高中毕业率的报告。然而，在如何衡量高中毕业率的问题上，研究人员和政策制定者尚未达成共识。在本文中，我们使用纵向数据追踪了得克萨斯州82所公立高中的一批学生，以评估三种广泛使用的高中毕业率衡量方法的准确性和精确性：得克萨斯州的官方毕业率，以及基于公开可用的《核心数据》入学数据的两种竞争性估计。我们的分析表明，这些广泛使用的方法对高中毕业率和留校率的估计既不准确，精确性也很差。我们提出了一些使用现有毕业率和留校率数据的指导方针，并认为全国范围内跟踪学生高中学习进程的努力对于协调相互冲突的估计至关重要。
