The data on the State Education Department web site quantify the dropout problem. These data report the % of the cohort of the class that graduated in 2011.
Here are the data for all students, by school division, ranked from worst first:
Richmond is the gold bar, with a 14.1% dropout rate. The red bars, from the left, are Norfolk, Newport News, and Hampton.
The leaders (at the right side of the graph) are West Point and Highland County, both with zero dropouts.
Here is the same graph with the numbers for students with disabilities. Richmond is the yellow bar at 15.9%, up from 15% the previous year. The red bars, from the left, are Norfolk, Newport News, and Hampton. The leaders here, all with zero percent, are Bath, Charles City, Clarke, Craig, Dickenson, Henry, Page, Patrick, Poquoson, and Radford. Nine jurisdictions had fewer than ten in the cohort and are not reported.
If ten divisions can maintain a dropout rate of zero, we can wonder why Richmond loses almost sixteen percent of the cohort. (And, Mercy! What is happening in Lunenburg County, where the dropout rate of students with disabilities is 40%?)
The other side of this coin is the graduation rate. The graduation rate reported in VDOE's Table 5 is the number of graduates as a percentage of the 9th grade membership four years earlier. This number does not account for the kids who move in or out of the division during the four years of high school. To adjust for that, the VDOE now is reporting the on-time cohort graduation rate, which is on-time graduates divided by (first-time entering 9th graders 4 years earlier + transfers in - transfers out). The cohort numbers are surprisingly larger than the "graduation rate" reported by the old system, particularly for Richmond (61.3% from Table 5; 72.7% cohort).
This becomes less of a surprise when you notice that the on-time rate allows for "adjustments (pdf) for students who are allowed more time to earn a diploma while still being counted as 'on-time' graduates." Any time you see "adjustments," you can be certain the numbers are bogus. For examples of this, see the discussions, here and here.
Moreover, both sets of numbers are bogus in that they count all forms of diplomas: Along with the standard and advanced diplomas, they count the the modified standard diploma (secondary student with disability, unable to meet requirements for standard diploma) and the special diploma (student with disability who does not meet requirement for other diplomas) (data from the new database here).
The graphs show Richmond's students with disabilities disproportionately receiving the inferior Modified Standard and Special diplomas. Given Richmond's abuse of the VGLA (as one parent said, the kids sail thru elementary and middle schools on the score-inflating VGLA and then hit the wall in high school when they have to take the SOL), this hardly is a surprise.
The Feds, to their credit, are not buying the state's data manipulation: They require the actual rate of Advanced and Standard (i.e., real) diplomas. The large numbers of the nonstandard diplomas lead to an interesting comparison between the State's "on-time" 4-year rate and the 4-year federal rate:
The disparity between the federal and state graduation rates discloses the abuse of the nonstandard diplomas to boost the graduation rate:
Yep. They're all doing it. With poor Petersburg and Richmond far in the "lead."
As we have seen, what is going on here is that the elementary and middle schools have been mislabeling kids as "disabled" so they can test them under the VGLA and boost their SOL scores. But no Richmond high school offers the high school equivalent, the VSEP (because the State grades the VSEP, which makes cheating tough, while the local schools grade the VGLA), so the kids who have coasted through taking the VGLA hit the wall in high school, where they either drop out or are jammed into one of the special diplomas.
Finally, here, from VDOE's shiny, new database, are the relative numbers of advanced and standard diplomas at the Richmond schools and statewide.
Here we see TJ within shouting distance of the state average and the other mainstream high schools lagging dismally.
One further matter: VDOE does not report graduation data for Maggie Walker. Thus, as with the SOL and SAT scores, we can be certain that RPS is misreporting the scores of the Maggie Walker students at high schools those students do not attend. That is, Richmond cooks the numbers and still gets the lousy results you see above.
Your tax dollars at work.