(FRANKFORT, KY) – The Kentucky Department of Education’s (KDE) Family Partnership Council discussed KDE’s Early Warning, Insights and Persistence to Graduation Data Tools to support dropout prevention efforts during its meeting on Nov. 6.
Florance Chang and Judi Vanderhaar, educational program consultants in the KDE Division of Student Success, shared the overall data on graduation rates across the state and potential ways for families to get involved in supporting their students.
“We thought it would be good for council members to know what data is accessible within the school beyond the (Kentucky) School Report Card, which is the publicly facing data,” said Chang.
Vanderhaar said Kentucky’s overall graduation rates for the 2022-2023 school year was about 91%. Although Kentucky did see about a 1% increase in rates the following year, she said there are still disparities when it comes to graduation rates among different groups of students.
“We see the lowest rates among students who are in foster care, and we know that a lot of this has to do with the transients and movement with different placements in school, followed by English language learners,” Vanderhaar said.
Vanderhaar shared the results of a study called “7 National Represented Studies Spanning 5 Decades: Understanding Why Students Drop Out of High School, According to Their Own Report,” showing the top three reasons students said they dropped out of high school, with 49% responding they felt they were being pushed out.
“This can include anything from students not feeling like they can keep up in the classroom and on their schoolwork,” she said, “missing too many days, students who have been suspended and even interpersonal conflicts with teachers.”
Thirty-seven percent of students said they were being pulled out of school for personal reasons and 14% of those students responded by saying they were failing out of school.
“Dropout is a process of disengagement that occurs over years …,” Vanderhaar said. “A majority of the students start seeing this disengagement actually starting in elementary school.”
Vanderhaar said early warning in Kentucky is based on attendance, behavior in at least one class, course performance and stability. Stability includes factors that other areas of warning may not include, such as demographics of the student, number of years the student has been at the selected school and the number of phone number changes.
The Early Warning Tool uses statistical modeling to measure a student’s dropout risk based on students who previously dropped out from the same school. Every student is assigned a GRAD (Graduation-Related Analytic Data) Score based on a multitude of changing data points such as attendance, behavior, grades, enrollment history, demographics, test scores, guardian involvement, household demographics and school type. Schools are able to use this information to determine which students may be in need of additional support.
A visual dashboard allows a view of the entire school and each individual student score in relation to other students in the school. Within the Early Warning Tool, users can filter, utilize ad-hoc groups and create a watch list of students. Analysis can be generated anytime and by multiple users.
“Our early warning tool basically takes everything that Infinite Campus knows about each individual student and compares that to past and present students within the same school and looks at what their outcomes were,” said Vanderhaar. “So it is taking in a million calculations, but it is very robust and sensitive because it is specific to the school.”
By using the early warning tool systems, she hopes that these comparisons and calculations help catch students who may not have been on the school administrations’ radar as needing support.
“We know that you are going to use other resources as well, but these early warning tools are a great place to start,” Vanderhaar said.
Additional early warning tool and resources can be found on the KDE’s Early Warning, Insights and Persistence to Graduation Data Tools webpage.
Other items shared:
- Kentucky United We Learn Council updates
- Karen Dodd, the chief performance officer in the KDE Office of the Commissioner, shared with the council members how local accountability has a role in the framework for the new assessment and accountability system. She asked for feedback on local accountability and members discussed when they receive data or reports about their child’s progress from the school, and what aspects make it easier or harder for these members to understand the data and feel confident about it.
The next Family Partnership Council meeting will be on March 25.
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