The Good News is the Bad News

March 12, 2012

SHARE

http://www.oregonlive.com/education/index.ssf/2012/03/better_paperwork_was_the_main.html

Portland’s on-time graduation rate is one of the worst in the state and lower than that of many large urban districts with much higher poverty rates.

For the class of 2010, Portland’s rate was 53.6 percent — a figure that turns out was artificially deflated by the district’s failure to properly account for hundreds of students who transferred to schools in other states, allowing them to be miscoded as dropouts.

The district’s “very archaic, very obsolete” electronic record-keeping system that doesn’t permit schools to document that students transfer to other states or countries over the summer was largely to blame, says Tiel Jackson, the district’s manager of state reporting.

Tigard-Tualatin’s strategy, said Tigard High registrar Shana Beckman, is to maintain a separate spreadsheet at each high school for noting whenever an out-of-state school requests a transcript for a former Tigard or Tualatin student. Each school also makes sure to document when a student returns to Mexico, she said.  “shocked that they were so lax in record keeping”