Education
High School Graduation Rates
Description: This indicator measures the graduation rates of public high schools across Arizona’s counties. It is based on a measure of four-year graduation as a share of students who comprised the original ninth-grade class, plus transfers in, minus transfers out and minus deceased students.
The dashboard displays five years of data of the four-year graduation rate, from the 1999-2000 through 2003-04 school years, for Arizona and each of the 15 counties. The graduation rate is calculated specific to a cohort: for example, those entering ninth grade in the 2000-01 school year comprise the cohort measured by the 2004 data. The graduation report no longer is published by the Arizona Department of Education.
Rationale: Innovation requires the steady input of human capital into the workforce and into institutions of higher learning. The graduation rate is designed to measure the addition of human capital (in the form of high school graduates) to the workforce. In this context, the graduation rate is not simply a measure of the success of the public school system, but a measure of the rate that educated human capital is eligible to enter the workforce or to pursue higher education.
Data Sources: Arizona Department of Education, Research and Evaluation Section http://www.ade.az.gov/ResearchPolicy/grad.
Comments on the Quality of the Data: The graduation rates in some counties are highly erratic from year to year. Further, the graduation rate calculation is greatly hampered by the difficulty in tracking individual students over time. A high proportion of those shown as not graduating in reality are in the “status unknown” category. For example, a student who moves to another state without notifying his Arizona school is shown as not graduating. Thus, considerable caution is advised in using these data.
