When Chad Moorehead saw that Tennessee’s education department had concluded that a third of graduates received a diploma without meeting the state’s requirements, his first instinct was to find out how many of his own students had fallen through the cracks.
“We’re so small,” said Moorehead, superintendent of Moore County Schools in Middle Tennessee. “We usually have a pretty good handle on what our kids are doing. If we’re missing something in our one high school, I want to know what it is and how to fix it.”
He quickly got an answer from the state: Only 62 percent of recent graduates in Moore County had actually met requirements.
That didn’t seem accurate to Moorehead, so he went through all of his students’ transcripts by hand. He couldn’t find a single one who had gotten an undeserved diploma.
Department officials said he was right. They had counted students who took math and English at a local community college as not having taken those courses at all.
Moorehead wasn’t the only superintendent with questions. State officials quickly started examining graduation data — and reached a new conclusion.
While state officials continue to check districts’ data, it appears that about a third of what looked like missing requirements were in fact data errors. For the remainder, students had actually been allowed to graduate without taking required courses.
That means that only 22 percent of Tennessee graduates had not met requirements, not the 33 percent originally identified by the state.
“It’s better than we thought,” Education Commissioner Candice McQueen told Chalkbeat on Wednesday. “It’s helping us move forward with more clarity.”
McQueen said the state is taking several steps. At the top of the list, she said, is working with the companies that manage student information to improve data entry.
But she said officials also would work with districts to make sure all students fulfill requirements. Sometimes, graduates had been improperly allowed to substitute courses for requirements. In other cases, waivers that were originally designed for students pursuing career training instead went to students who should not have been eligible, she said.
“Waivers are not meant to be used all of the time,” McQueen said.
She said she believes confusion, not wrongdoing, led to some districts overdoing course substitutions and waivers.
“These are misunderstandings that add up,” she said.
The revised report is likely to restore damaged confidence in Tennessee’s much-touted graduation rate gains. But they raise new questions about how the department is managing crucial information about the success of its schools.
“The state department did this research, they got this alarming statistic,” Moorehead said. “Why didn’t they reach out to districts to check the data and start to solve the problem before announcing it to the world?”
Correction, February 16, 2017: This version corrects that, based on current information, only 22 percent of Tennessee graduates did not meet requirements. In a previous version, Commissioner Candace McQueen misspoke regarding the percentage of missing requirements attributed to data errors.