Only 23 percent of students who graduate from D.C.’s public high schools end up graduating from college or any other postsecondary institution within six years, according to an estimate from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.
Of 1,969 students who graduated from DC Public Schools and charter schools in 2005, 76 percent went on to a university, community college or trade school. But OSSE has been able to confirm only that 454 students from the class of 2005 ever graduated from a postsecondary institution.
Now, school officials plan to use newly won federal grant money to better track where students go to college, whether they enroll in remedial courses or transfer schools, if and when students graduate, what careers they go on to, and how much money they make in those careers.
| By the numbers |
| High school graduates: 1,969 |
| High school graduates enrolled in postsecondary: 1,505 |
| High school graduates graduating postsecondary within six years: 454 |
| Source: Office of the State Superintendent for Education |
“For the first time we are going to have a real understanding of the question ‘Are students prepared for college when they enter?’ ” said Jeff Noel, director of data management for the public schools.
Many D.C. students don’t graduate from high school at all: Only 59 percent of the class of 2011 graduated within four years.
Noel said the number of graduates finishing college may be higher than 23 percent because OSSE was unable to verify a significant number of students’ outcomes.
Melissa Salmanowitz, a spokeswoman for DCPS, said the number of students succeeding in college may have increased since the class of 2005 because DCPS has expanded the availability of college-level courses in high schools and begun paying for students to take the PSAT to prepare for college.
Once the new data tracking takes hold, District high schools will receive “feedback reports” based on how their graduates are performing in college and will be encouraged to make changes based on those reports. For instance, if a university notices that students from a particular high school can’t write five-paragraph essays, that high school’s ninth- and 10th-grade English teachers would be asked to re-examine their curricula.
School officials said Tuesday that DC Public Schools and charter schools could choose to use the data to inform their teacher evaluations. OSSE announced recently that schools could use data points other than standardized test scores, such as high school graduation rates, to evaluate a teacher’s performance.
Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, said high school students receive support from their K-12 teachers but are more on their own in college, which could explain part of why so many students don’t graduate.
“What if college professors’ paychecks and job security were directly related to students getting good scores?” Saunders said. “That, I think, would be an interesting dynamic.”
The District will use the $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education and spend about $4.5 million in city funding over the next five years to build a tracking system using college data from the National Student Clearinghouse and employment data from the Baltimore-based Jacob France Institute.
