In metro Atlanta, school districts reflected the nearly flat statewide rate of change, with slight gains or losses.
The Atlanta Public Schools graduation rate fell 0.4 of a percentage point to 71.5 percent in 2016, and DeKalb County slipped to 70.3, down from 70.9 in 2015.
Meanwhile, Cobb County rose to 81.4 percent from 83.8 percent; Fulton County, which hasn't yet reported all schools, was up 0.7 percentage points to 86 percent; and Gwinnett County rose from 78.1 percent in 2015 to 79.6 percent.
Not so long ago, a third of Georgia high school students failed to graduate on time.
Now, after five years of steady gains, the four-year graduation rate is pushing 80 percent, with more than 100,000 seniors earning a diploma in 2016.
It’s a stunning overall increase to an all-time high under a new method of calculating the rate, but the years of steady gains may be coming to an end. The rate of 79.2 percent is up only slightly — 0.4 of a percentage point — from the class of 2015, which had gained 6 points on the class of 2014.
The slowing increases may be the inevitable byproduct of early successes. The rate has increased 12 percentage points since 2011, when the federal government required school districts nationwide to calculate graduation rates in a new, uniform way.
Future gains may be harder to come by, said Stephen Dolinger, a former Fulton County school superintendent who runs an education think tank in Atlanta.
“When you start getting into this 80 percent range, you’re not going to see those big gains anymore,” said Dolinger, the president of the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education, of GPEE. “It’s going to be incremental.”
The 2016 numbers could yet change. State officials say they are preliminary because a statewide online school and eight school districts, including Fulton County’s, have not submitted all the required information. Dolinger said it appears that as many as one in 10 seniors may not have been included in this count.
The count does not capture all students who earn a diploma in a given year. Instead, the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate, as it is called, is calculated using the number of students who graduate within four years of starting high school. Before 2011, the rate included students who took longer than four years.
Because it is a national standard, it allows comparison between the states. The U.S. Department of Education has not released national numbers for 2016, but Georgia lagged the national average in 2015, when the state average was 78.8 percent and the national average was 83.2 percent.
Though Georgia’s rate of increase is slowing, it’s still moving in a positive direction for most minorities and other “subgroups.”
The rate for students with disabilities increased by 2.1 percentage points, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The rate for Hispanics was up 1.2 points. Blacks, “economically disadvantaged” and multiracial students were all slightly in positive territory, with an increase below one percentage point. Whites, Asians and those for whom English is not a native language declined, but by 0.1 of a percentage point. Native Americans saw the only big loss, 7 points, but represent less than 0.2 percent of enrollment.
Dana Rickman, the head researcher for GPEE, was impressed at the gains despite rising poverty. The percentage of students eligible for subsidized school meals keeps rising despite a recession that is years in the rear-view mirror, Rickman said. It was more than 62 percent when last reported in October 2015.
“The employment rate has recovered but wages have not,” Rickman said.
Experts generally agree that poverty is an obstacle to academic achievement.
It’s unclear how much of the gains in recent years was due to classroom improvement and how much to outside factors.
Schools have focused on academics, harnessing testing, attendance and other data to identify students who need help. They've also intensified academic support, implementing more online credit recovery programs, though their effect is uncertain. (The AJC recently reported that in many cases students are earning credit online without actually mastering the material.)
But last year's big jump was widely attributed to a change in graduation requirements. State lawmakers did away with the old high school graduation tests beginning with the class of 2015. Students are still tested in certain subjects but no longer need to pass the test to earn a diploma.
Also, after the federal government imposed the four-year cohort method in 2011, many districts improved their bookkeeping. A failure to track students who transferred to another school rather than dropping out could suppress the originating school’s graduation rate, they realized. Many districts retooled, hiring central office personnel and implementing new systems to keep track of students so officials could document that they had re-enrolled elsewhere.
The four-year method had led to a sharp drop in the graduation rate. Before 2011, Georgia officials were touting a graduation rate of nearly 81 percent. It plummeted to 67 percent in 2011 under the four-year cohort calculation. Now, it's within 2 percentage points of the pre-2011 high.
Newsroom data specialist Jennifer Peebles contributed to this article.
You can find information about your school, such as test scores, graduation rates and school climate rating at the Ultimate Atlanta School Guide.
