On Wednesday, October 8 the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) will release On-Time Graduation Rates for every school district in the state. The On-time Graduation Rate, unlike other methods of calculating graduation rates, tracks individual students over the four years of a traditional high school career to determine the percentage who graduate on time. To ensure the community understands the significance of this new way of calculating graduation rates, Virginia Beach City Public Schools has developed a question and answer fact sheet. It is posted online at http://www.vbschools.com/school_data/OnTimeGraduationRate.asp.

The information the VDOE will release includes districts’ aggregate graduation rates as well as graduation rates by student subgroups. The VDOE is planning to report results separately for African Americans, Caucasians, Hispanics, Asians, males, females, students with disabilities, limited English proficient students and economically disadvantaged students.  This information will also be provided on a high school by high school basis.

“Historically graduation rates have been based on simple estimates such as comparing the number of graduates in a given year to the number of ninth grade students four years earlier or more complex estimates that attempt to take dropouts into consideration.  The advantage to the On-Time Graduation rate is that it is not an estimate.  It is based on individual student-level data tracked over time and should ultimately provide a more accurate picture of students’ progress toward graduation,” says Jared Cotton, Virginia Beach’s assistant superintendent for the department of research, evaluation and assessment.

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