Hearty congratulations are in order for the stunning turnaround of the graduation rate at The Dalles High School.
After years of a gradually improving grad rate that still lagged well behind the state average, the class of 2016 knocked it out of the park, leapfrogging the school’s rate to eight points above the state average.
The graduation rate went from 68.3 percent in 2015 to 83.2 percent in 2016, a nearly 15-point jump. The state average is 75 percent.
The community may have been slack-jawed, but these two people weren’t: The Dalles High School Principal Nick Nelson and Vice Principal Kurt Evans.
They have known for years that this class was performing well and was on track to do good things.
They both arrived in their positions the same year the class of 2016 entered the high school as freshmen. They began implementing programs to boost teaching acumen, help English learners, and closely support struggling students. They added AP classes and drew more Hispanic students to them, and expanded career/technical classes.
They also credit hard working teachers who are all pulling in the same direction.
Nelson and Evans worked hard and they worked smart — and they had a sharp class to work with.
But the magic doesn’t just happen within the four walls of the school building.
They both said community support has been noticeably growing and is an essential ingredient of the school’s success. That includes everything from the newly revitalized booster club to the new state-of-the-art weightroom installed through community fundraising led by the Mid-Columbia Health Foundation. Even a steadier economy plays a role, since more students are staying put once they get here.
Another intangible is simply success itself, which breeds more success.
There are far more concrete steps that directly help too, like making sure students who move away are accounted for elsewhere, otherwise they become a dropout statistic. The school is doing better at tracking such students.
Shifting a graduation rate this far this fast is wonky work.
Evans is a numbers guy. He taught math back in the day and uses predictive analytics to study student data and find —and plug — the weak points. Predictive analytics is new on the education scene: The New York Times recently wrote about the arrival of “Big Data” on college campuses to boost student success.
Data crunching isn’t the only arrow in their quiver. Nelson has championed a variety of programs to help students and has taken extensive training on their implementation.
Nelson stresses that the next step after achieving this milestone is sustaining it. The school district already knows that maybe the next set of grad data won’t be as eye-popping, but even better things are on the horizon: The current sophomore class, for example, is on track for an 86 percent graduation rate.
One perhaps unsurprising reaction in this cynical world of ours is that some see the sharp spike and instead of offering congratulations, they suspect “fake news!”
Cheating is frowned upon across all school settings, of course, and the state actually has checks in place to prevent school districts from cooking the books. That’s one of the jobs of the folks in the accountability and reporting division of the Oregon Department of Education.
Indeed, as one state education department spokesman said, if cheating was a doable thing, all school districts would have fantastic graduation rates. The district surely would’ve spiked its rate long ago, no?
There are three main ways districts could influence graduation rates, other than by graduating a higher percentage of their students, a state official said.
One is to report more students as graduates than really occurred. If a school reports a student as graduated, they cannot claim any additional funding for the student’s enrollment. So if a student is behind and may take five years to graduate, the district would deny itself the next year’s funding by claiming an on-time graduation.
Second, schools can report more transfers out than really occurred. The state audits districts with exceptionally high transfer out rates to ensure they were documenting those outcomes appropriately, and The Dalles didn’t warrant such an audit.
Finally, districts can transfer struggling students to alternative schools. For The Dalles, that’s the Wahtonka Community School, which opened two years ago. That seems to be a likely contributor to the graduation rate increase, an official said, but it would not be the only factor.
The state has a data quality process to help the district report data correctly, with data quality checks through each school year. Programming is continually improved to identify potential errors.
So, the mundane — yet uplifting reality — is that it took lots of hard work by lots of people to get here, and it has simply paid off spectacularly.
— N.C.
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