**Four-Year Regulatory Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate**

**School Year 2010-11**

**Provisional Release: Data Notes**

***Source:***

· State submissions to the U.S. Department of Education’s ED*Facts* Reporting System:  File Specification 150, Data Group 695 (rates) and File Specification 151, Data Group 696 (cohort counts).  Details about the file structure can be found at the following location: http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/edfacts/sy-10-11-nonxml.html. 

· State-level graduation rate data have been and will continue to be included as a required component of each state’s Consolidated State Performance Report (CSPR).  Up to and including the 2010-11 school year, graduation rate data were lagged in the CSPR (e.g., the 2010-11 CSPR contains 2009-10 graduation rate data).  Starting with the CSPR on the 2011-12 school year, the adjusted cohort graduation rate data have been aligned, so that the school year 2011-12 CSPR will contain school year 2011-12 adjusted cohort graduation rates.  The 2010-11 data are being made available through this special release because they will not be included in the 2011-12 CSPR.

· Data were extracted from the ED*Facts* Data Warehouse on September 20, 2012, and reflect the most recent submissions of data as of September 19, 2012.

***Cohort Graduation Rate Definition and Calculation:***

· The four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate is the number of students who graduate in four years with a regular high school diploma divided by the number of students who form the adjusted cohort for the graduating class.  From the beginning of 9th grade (or the earliest high school grade), students who are entering that grade for the first time form a cohort that is “adjusted” by adding any students who subsequently transfer into the cohort and subtracting any students who subsequently transfer out, emigrate to another country, or die.

· The following formula provides an example of how the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate would be calculated for the cohort entering 9th grade for the first time in the 2008-09 school year and graduating by the end of the 2011-12 school year: 

· Some states have proposed to the Secretary and been approved to calculate five- or six-year adjusted cohort graduation rates, which allow these states to count as graduates students who take longer than four years to graduate.  This file includes only the four-year graduation rates.

· Although the regulatory adjusted cohort rates are more comparable across states than were rates submitted in previous years under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) as amended, there are still some differences in how states have calculated their rates.  These differences include:  how students are identified for inclusion in certain subgroups, how the beginning of the cohort is defined, whether summer school students are included, and which diplomas count as a regular high school diploma.

· Detailed information on the adjusted cohort graduation rate can be found in the Department’s 2008 High School Graduation Rate Non-Regulatory Guidance: http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/guid/hsgrguidance.pdf. 

***Interpreting the Data File:***

· Reporting by race/ethnicity:  Under the ESEA, a State educational agency (SEA) has the flexibility to determine the major racial/ethnic groups it will use for reporting on components of its accountability determinations, which include graduation rates.  The subgroups that an SEA uses are approved through its Accountability Workbook.  As a result, there is some variation in how SEAs report data by race/ethnicity.  The absence of a racial/ethnic subgroup for a state may mean that the state is not required to report on that subgroup under its approved accountability plan.

· Asian/Pacific Islander Subgroup and Asian/Pacific Islander Detail:  Because of the flexibility allowed for subgroup reporting, some SEAs report on Asian and Pacific Islander students in combination, and some SEAs split students into “Asian” and “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander” subgroups.  The “Asian/Pacific Islander” column in the main table displays either the value that an SEA reported for “Asian/Pacific Islander” or the aggregation of the “Asian” and “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander” subgroups.  Some SEAs (the SEAs for Colorado, Florida, Mississippi, Nebraska, and North Dakota) reported graduation rates only for the subgroup of “Asian” students, so, for those states, the column includes the graduation rates only for Asian students.  The Detail table shows the breakout of those categories when the SEA reported those categories separately.

· Notations:

***State Specific Notes:***

· Idaho, Kentucky, and Puerto Rico have received “timeline extensions” from the Department, pursuant to which they are not yet required to use an adjusted cohort graduation rate that meets the regulatory requirements.  Accordingly, they will not submit data based on the regulatory requirements for 2010-11.  Instead, they will submit data based on their previously approved methodology.

· Oklahoma has a pending request for a timeline extension.

· The Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) reports all students it serves as “American Indian,” even though some non-Indian students are educated in BIE schools.

· California includes a category for Filipino students.  The reported graduation rate for that subgroup is 89 percent.  Students reported in the Filipino category were included within the aggregation performed by the Department to report California’s data for that subgroup within the “Asian/Pacific Islander” column.

***Comparability to Other Graduation Rates:***

· For school years prior to 2010-11, graduation rates reported to ED*Facts* and used in public reporting were not required to be calculated using the regulatory adjusted cohort graduation rate.  States used any one of a number of methodologies, including a “leaver rate,” a “completer rate,” an average freshman graduation rate, or a non-regulatory cohort rate.  Comparisons should not be made to data from prior school years without knowledge of the prior-year methodology.

· The Department’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) calculates an Average Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR).  The AFGR is an estimate of the percentage of an entering freshman class graduating within four years.  For 2009–10, it equals the total number of diploma recipients in 2009–10 divided by the average membership of the 8th-grade class in 2005–06, the 9th-grade class in 2006–07, and the 10th-grade class in 2007–08.  Ungraded students were allocated to individual grades proportionally to the reported enrollments by grade.  The adjusted cohort rate may differ from the AFGR for the following reasons: 

· AFGR may be lower than the cohort rate due to net out-migration:  The AFGR does not account for out-migration after the initial cohort size is set, whereas the adjusted cohort rate does account for such cohort size changes directly.  If a state experienced a net out-migration of high school students over the period of time during which a specific graduating class was progressing through high school, this would result in the denominator for AFGR being too large, as the denominator is set at the beginning point of a cohort’s progression through high school and is frozen at that number.  Diploma counts for the rate are not taken until four years later and would fall in proportion to out-migration.  Thus, while the numerator would be correctly adjusted downward for out-migration, the denominator of AFGR would not.  Too large of a denominator deflates the graduation rate.

· AFGR may be higher than the cohort rate due to net in-migration:  This is the reverse situation from that described above.  In the event of net in-migration of high school students over the period of time during which a specific cohort was progressing through high school, the AFGR’s cohort size would not increase—resulting in the denominator for AFGR being too small.  However, the diploma count would reflect the additional graduates among the students transferring into the state.   Thus, while the denominator would not adjust upward to account for the incoming new cohort members, the numerator would be allowed to increase to account for graduates among the additional cohort members.  Too small of a denominator inflates the graduation rate.

· AFGR may be higher than the cohort rate due to the inclusion of 5+-year graduates in the numerator, but not the denominator, of AFGR: As defined in the Title I regulations, the adjusted cohort rate assigns graduates who take longer than four years to graduate to their initial cohort.  The AFGR does not have a means of adjusting for students who take longer than four years to graduate.  As such, students taking n+1, n+2, etc., years to graduate (where n = 4) are included in the “year n” graduate count for AFGR and inflate the numerator of the rate.  However, they are not counted in the AFGR denominator for the n-year cohort.  For example, AFGR for 2009-10 has graduates from the class of 2010, plus graduates from the class of 2009, plus graduates from the class of 2008 mixed into the numerator.  The denominator, however, is designed to reflect only the class of 2009-10 when it first started 9th grade in 2006-07. 

· Averaging enrollments in grades 8-10 may inflate AFGR over the adjusted cohort rate.  The AFGR cohort is smaller than the cohort in the adjusted cohort rate due to treatment of 9th-grade dropouts:  In particular, the net effect of the 3-year averaging is to reduce the contribution of 9th-grade dropouts, which deflates or underestimates the number of first time freshmen used in the denominator of AFGR.  This would then inflate the AFGR relative to the adjusted cohort rate.

� Cohort counts from Data Group 696 were used to determine privacy protection needs and, in some cases, to allow for the aggregation across sub-categories for reporting by larger categories that had not been explicitly reported by the State educational agency.  The cohort counts are not included as part of this release.