Second looks improve Bentonville's graduation rate

BENTONVILLE -- The School District's 2015 graduation rate improved nearly four percentage points after one administrator hunted down errors in the state's data.

Leandra Cleveland, who is in her first year as the district's assessment and data management director, told the School Board this week the 2015 graduation rate, initially reported as 88.7 percent, is actually 92.5 percent.

Graduation rates

Here are the latest graduation rates reported for Northwest Arkansas’ four biggest school districts.

• Bentonville: 92.5 percent

• Rogers: 91.8 percent

• Springdale: 87.0 percent

• Fayetteville: 85.4 percent

• State average: 85.7 percent

Source: Bentonville School District

That was the best rate among Northwest Arkansas' four biggest districts and nearly 7 percentage points above the state average, according to numbers Cleveland provided.

Before graduation rates are published each year, the state allows school districts to dive into the data and correct any errors.

The state offered districts two chances to do corrections this year, once in the spring and once in the fall, on 2015 graduation data. The second correction window was offered because the 2015 data will become the baseline for a new accountability system.

"The Every Student Succeeds Act that was signed into law by President Obama has created an opportunity for our state to revisit how we'll be held accountable, what things they will grade us on each year," Cleveland said. "And they wanted to make sure our baseline data was absolutely, positively correct."

Cleveland said the state identified 117 students who didn't graduate, but 44 of those students weren't classified in the correct cohort and counted against the district for more than one year.

She pointed out, for example, a student who was classified as an 11th-grader at the start of the 2014-15 school year. Her classification changed to 12th grade at the start of the second semester because she was half a semester ahead of her peers, Cleveland said.

"So they thought she should have graduated in '14-'15 when in actuality she should have graduated in '15-'16, and she did graduate on time with her class," Cleveland said.

"These corrections are not that anyone went out and made more students graduate. It's just that we are now able to correctly report our graduation rate. And it has been inaccurately reported for many years, unfortunately," she said.

Bentonville's reported graduation rate ranged from 82.7 percent to 88.1 percent for the five school years before 2014-15.

Cleveland said she's in the process of examining the 2016 graduation data. She calculated the initial rate at 89 percent and so far has corrected it to about 91 percent, she said.

Cleveland occasionally finds errors that, if corrected, would have a negative impact on the graduation rate. She corrects the errors regardless of the impact they will have, she said.

Superintendent Debbie Jones said the state's system of determining a cohort for the purposes of calculating graduation rates has been "intensely complex" since it came out about 10 years ago. Cleveland is the "perfect person" for the data job, Jones said.

"There are so many restrictions and so many laws, so it's good to have somebody to check that," Jones said.

Bentonville's graduation rates also improved for subgroups of students identified under the targeted achievement gap group, known as TAGG. The group includes students who are economically disadvantaged, who are English language learners or who have some kind of disability.

Its graduation rate for students in that group was initially reported at 74.6 percent for 2015. It's now 79.6 percent, which is short of the state average of 81.9 percent.

NW News on 12/10/2016

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