High Schools in the United States: How does your local high school measure up?
PROMOTING POWER for 2004, 2005, AND 2006 IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE.
High schools with promoting power over 100% are schools in which transfers into the school exceed transfers out and nearly all freshmen are being promoted to 12th grade in the standard number of years. The one exception to this is when two or more schools are consolidated into one.
High schools with promoting power of 20% or below are schools in which transfers out of the school exceed transfers in and very few freshmen are being promoted to 12th grade in the standard number of years. Another explanation is that there has been a district shift in students either because of a phasing out of a school or a consolidation.
High schools which have extreme shifts in promoting power from one year to the next (changes of 25 percentage points or more) may well be high schools in which the size of the student body is changing due to the opening of new schools, the consolidation of existing schools, or changes in attendance boundaries, or rapid changes in in or out migration.
What is promoting power?
Official “dropout” statistics neither accurately count nor report the vast number of students who do not graduate from high school, and the multiple ways that states calculate their graduation rates produce misleading figures. However, another indicator, developed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, and called promoting power,1 can serve as a warning sign — a “check engine light” indicator — because it consistently compares the number of seniors enrolled in a high school to the number of 9th graders enrolled in the high school three years earlier, and provides a measure of how efficiently and effectively high schools promote their students from grade to grade. Schools with high percentages of successful passage to the next grade are described as having “high promoting power.” Alternatively, schools that struggle to keep students in attendance and experience high rates of dropouts have “low promoting power.” To learn more about the confusing ways that graduation rates are calculated, nationally or by individual states, read the Alliance’s fact sheets on Understanding Graduation Rates.
Promoting power is a good indicator of high schools’ graduation rates. It is very likely that high schools which have 60% or fewer seniors than freshmen three years earlier will have unacceptably low graduation rates by state and national standards. About 15% of the nation’s high schools produce close to half its dropouts. These 2,000 high schools are the nation’s dropout factories. They have weak promoting power — the number of seniors is routinely 60% or fewer than the number of freshmen three years earlier — and large numbers of their students are not making steady progress to graduation.
1 Promoting power is an indicator developed by researchers led by Bob Balfanz and Nettie Legters at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Social Organization of Schools. More information on their research is available at http://www.csos.jhu.edu/pubs/grad.htm.
