TEA Graduation Rate Under federal guidelines, TEA calculates a graduation rate, which is reported to the Department of Education.

TEA tracks a cohort or class of students, meaning the group of students who start ninth grade for the first time and the students who leave and enter that class over a four year period, to calculate a graduation rate. The graduation rate only represents the percent of students who graduated high school within four years with a high school diploma. Since this number does not account for continuers who may or may not finish, it does not reflect for the fact that some students take longer than four years to graduate. While this rate reflects a common public understanding of what it means to finish high schoolgraduatingit is not used for state accountability purposes. For this calculation, some students, based on leaver codes, are removed entirely from the cohort and not included in the graduation calculation if they leave the public school system. Students removed from the cohort are those who have left the public school system to enroll elsewhere: those who leave to attend private school, a school outside Texas, or to be homeschooled are removed from the cohort. In addition, students who leave to return to their home country, who are expelled, or die are removed. In addition to leavers, TEA also removes students from the calculations for whom TEA cannot find records in their system. Since TEA is unable to tell how many underreported students are dropouts, TEA reports them separately from graduation, completion or dropout rates. i Removing leavers and underreported students from their cohort results in a higher graduation rate. CHILDREN AT RISK Graduation Rate In 2009, CHILDREN AT RISK developed a new methodology to calculate graduation rates across the state. This methodology is unique in that it tracks first-time freshmen (those enrolled in ninth grade for the first time) to determine whether the cohort of students graduated from any Texas public school within a specified time frame (in this case, six years). Utilizing data from the Texas Education Agency, this measure relies on the states ability to track individual students anywhere in the Texas public school system. CHILDREN AT RISK starts with the same first-time freshmen cohort the TEA Division of Accountability Research uses for their own calculations. Historically, CHILDREN AT RISKs calculation has not removed students from the cohort who leave school, regardless of the reason. A benefit of this is that students who have not been well-documented to have left for home schooling or left the country, for example, are not preemptively removed from the calculation. However, in 2011 CHILDREN AT RISK began removing students who passed away before graduating from their first-time freshmen cohorts. In addition, this calculation does not penalize schools for transferring their students to other schools in the state by including students who graduated from the same campus or a different campus as graduates. CHILDREN AT RISKs graduation calculation can be summarized as the number of students who went on to graduate from any public high school in Texas divided by the total number of first-time freshmen minus students who died before graduating from high school.

Texas Education Agency, 2010.