Dear Parents and Community Members: 

First, let me apologize for the length of this message. Since we all have a stake in the reputation of our district, I believe the information is important for you to know and to share with others. Please take the time to read it. 

The Children at Risk organization released its annual report on high school rankings in the Houston area published in the Houston Chronicle last Sunday. I know many of you saw it and were as distressed as I was to see where our schools had been ranked compared to others on the list. If you remember, there were issues on the same rankings list last year that ranked our schools lower than they should have been ranked. We have problems again and I thought you would want to know the rest of the story.  

One of the indicators used in the rankings is the high school graduation rate for the Class of 2006. (These reports are always a year behind.) After analyzing the formula they used and talking with the director of the organization, he admits an error in their calculation that impacted Pasadena ISD schools.  Essentially, the formula used by the organization to compute its high school rankings failed to take into account the opening of Memorial High School and the impact that event had on the size of the ninth grade and subsequent graduating classes at Pasadena, Rayburn and South Houston. As a result, 422 graduates from Memorial who would have graduated from one of the other three schools did not get counted in the calculation. Therefore, the graduation rates for Pasadena, Rayburn and South Houston were incorrectly calculated and artificially lower than they should have been using their formula. In fact, the organization listed graduation rates at Rayburn and South Houston, for instance, at less than 40%. We know that’s not true. Had they calculated the rate accounting for the loss in enrollment caused by opening Memorial, the three schools would have seen graduation rates more comparable to districts higher in the rankings. I also believe Dobie’s ranking was negatively impacted to a degree by the double digit enrollment growth they experienced during the four years Children at Risk used to estimate the freshman cohort, based on what I understand of their formula. Memorial was again not included in the Children at Risk report because it did not open until 2003-04.  

How to accurately calculate graduation rates has been heavily debated across the country. Children at Risk uses a variation of an extremely conservative approach used by the Manhattan Institute in New York which estimates…let me say that again…which estimates the size of the freshman cohort (including repeat freshmen) by averaging four years of ninth grade enrollment, ultimately inflating the denominator in its formula. On the other hand, the graduation rate computed by the state of Texas actually tracks each individual student and counts them as a dropout if they are not enrolled in a school somewhere the following year. If they are “no shows” they count against our graduation rate. According to the state data for the Class of 2006 (the most recent class available in the AEIS Report), the graduation rates for our five high schools are as follows:

Dobie               80.4

Pasadena          68.8

Memorial          74.3

Rayburn           69.0

South Houston  69.5 

These are numbers I’ve shared with the community in some of my presentations. The completion rates as computed by TEA, a figure that includes repeat freshmen and those who stay around for their fifth year of high school in order to graduate, are as follows: 

Dobie                89.0

Pasadena           83.1

Memorial          85.3

Rayburn            81.4

South Houston  80.0 

While better than Children at Risk estimated and reported, our graduate rates are still too low. We all know that. We must keep pushing for more and more of our students to graduate and graduate on time. That’s one of the primary reasons we are so heavily engaged in Expectation Graduation. Remember, the Class of 2006 was not a class that experienced any of our Expectation Graduation initiatives. Progress is being made, but we have a long way to go. I just felt you needed the rest of the story so you could share with your friends and neighbors the facts and the errors in assumptions made in the Children At Risk report. 

I’m sorry this message is so long, but I felt it was critical that you knew the rest of the story. I hurt for the staff and students who have such pride in their campus. It’s unfortunate that one news article can taint the excellent work that is being done on each of our campuses and the reputation they have worked so hard to build.

Kirk Lewis
Superintendent