Database Will Track Fates of Students
Monitoring From Pre-K to College Will Help System Determine Its Effectiveness

By V. Dion Haynes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 9, 2007

The D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education is establishing a database to track the city's public school students from pre-kindergarten to college graduation, a spokesman said yesterday. The tracking system would continue to collect information on students who transfer schools, including those who switch to private schools or leave the city.

D.C. schools officials have long acknowledged that, because of poor records, they have been unable to compute accurate dropout and graduation rates or determine what happens to students once they graduate or transfer from the public schools. Such weaknesses, they have said, have made it difficult to assess the curriculum or determine how well students have been educated in the system.

To correct that, officials are using a $5.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to establish the database within the next few months, said John Stokes, spokesman for the state education office.

Stokes said the office would like to know how many graduates are in college and how many are working or unemployed. Officials will also use the database to monitor performance as students move through the system so schools can catch problems "before they get to a critical point," he said.

"We want to give parents and educators useful information about education," Stokes said. "We will learn what are the attributes of teachers who contribute to achievement and where and why student achievement has occurred."

Deputy Mayor for Education Victor Reinoso said in a recent interview that he is overseeing a separate study of students who dropped out of school or transferred to other systems.

To accurately measure dropout and graduation rates, the school system must follow a cohort of freshmen for four years. Officials could then determine whether students who left one school ended up transferring to another or dropping out, and whether transfer students ultimately graduated.

Such tracking has not occurred, Reinoso said, because school administrators are overworked and databases are unreliable.

Once students leave D.C. public schools, the system "doesn't have any idea where they went: a charter school, dropped out or got a job," he said.

"There are too many ninth-graders who start in a cohort who aren't there when it reaches the senior year," he added. "Because we don't track that, we can't plan interventions and figure out ways to attract them to alternative education options or get them on a path to gainful employment."