The school funding model proposed by American Institutes for Research (AIR) and endorsed by the 2020 Commission to Study School Funding uses graduation rates among high schools as an important measure of student outcomes.  The New Hampshire Department of Education (DoE) has published these rates every year for decades.  AIR evidently used an average of eleven years of graduation rates for each high school in its statistical modeling.

This paper looks at high school graduation rates in New Hampshire in a number of ways.

Class of 2019 Public High School Graduation Rates

Table 1 displays the graduation rates of all New Hampshire public high schools for the graduating Class of 2019.[i] This is the rate for those who entered their freshman year in the fall of 2015 and graduated in the spring/summer of 2019. The schools are sorted by graduation rate for that class, from highest to lowest rate. The reason the Class of 2019 is used is that national data on the Classes of 2020 or 2021 are not yet available.

Within New Hampshire, there was a wide range of graduation rates among public high schools.[ii] Hinsdale High School, Lin-Wood Public School in Lincoln, Pittsburg School, and Sunapee Senior High School all reported high school graduation rates of 100 percent that year. Five other high schools reported graduation rates above 97 percent.

Comparison to the Nation

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) collects data from every state and publishes summaries and analyses.  NCES requests that states use a common set of definitions about what constitutes graduation. The reported graduation rate is the percent of students who entered grade 9 and graduated at the end of 4 school years, known as the 4-year “adjusted cohort rate”. This is what is used in Table 1 for New Hampshire public high schools. By using this common definition, we can compare New Hampshire to other states.

The average rate for the Class of 2019 in New Hampshire was 88.4 percent. That is good and placed New Hampshire as the state with the thirteenth highest rate among the 50 states.

But it is also important to acknowledge that our average does not represent all public high schools.

Table 2 shows three of our public high schools with rates above that of Alabama, the two schools with rates closest to the New Hampshire average, the two schools with rates closest to the national average, and three schools with rates below that of New Mexico.

The most recent data from NCES is for the Class of 2019.[iii]  As noted above, New Hampshire’s rate that year was 88.4 percent, while the national average was 85.8 percent. The fact that New Hampshire was graduating students at a rate higher than the national average is certainly a positive statement. Again, New Hampshire was 13^th among the states. Alabama had the highest rate at 91.7 percent, while New Mexico had the lowest rate at 75.1 percent.

Graduation Rates and Small High Schools

The use of single-year graduation rates for particular schools can be misleading. There is a natural statistical variation from year to year and this is particularly true for smaller high schools.

Groveton High School’s average graduating class size has been as few as 26 students in recent years. Its graduation rate of 93.8 percent for the Class of 2017 was followed by 78.8 percent for the Class of 2018, a difference of roughly 15 percentage points. The situation in that high school and other small schools should not be judged by any single year.

To smooth out these annual variations we can use 5 year averages of high school graduation rates. The Classes of 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 are the most recent data available for New Hampshire.  Table 3 shows the average graduation rate for each New Hampshire high school over that span.

Five Year Graduation Rate

Some students require more than four years to graduate. While they may be known as the “Class of 20xx” they may actually graduate in 20xx+1. Typically, this happens because they have insufficient credits at the end of their fourth year. Those who may continue for at least part of a fifth year and then graduate are not counted in the published cohort rates. NCES only collects the four-year rate and thus DoE only reports the four-year rate. NHSFFP requested and received from the DoE data on the number of graduates after five years for the classes of 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.[iv]

Based on DoE’s published data, the 4-year cohort graduation rate for all public schools in New Hampshire for the Classes of 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 combined was 89.2 percent. However, once students who graduated in five years during that time frame are included, the graduation rate climbs to 91.4 percent. The students that comprise that additional 2.2 percent are indeed high school graduates, but just not counted in the 4-year cohort data.

The difference for some high schools is greater than the average of 2.2 percent. Table 4 lists the high schools in order of the amount of change in graduation rate when 5 years are included.

In a few cases, judging a high school by its 4-year cohort graduation rate may be a little misleading.  White Mountains Regional High School, for example, has a 4-year rate of 87.1 percent in this analysis, which is below the state average.  But once students who graduate in their fifth year are also included, that high school’s rate becomes 92.0 percent, slightly above the state average for the 5-year rate.

Of the students who entered their freshman year of high school in 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014, 50,609 had graduated with their class in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. An additional 980 students also graduated after their fifth year.

Charter High School Graduation Rates

The DoE reports on graduation also include public chartered schools with high school grades. Table 5 displays the graduation rate for those schools for the class of 2019. This is similar to Table 1 for public high schools.

The charter schools are much smaller than the public high schools and therefore are even more adversely affected by statistical variation from year to year.

Table 6 contains the graduation rates by combining the four classes of 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. As was done with the public high schools in Table 4, both the 4-year cohort rate and 5-year cohort rate are displayed. This table is in alphabetical order.

The graduation rates among chartered high schools are much more diverse than among the public high schools and are also, on average, much lower.

After 4 years, 60.8 percent of charter school students graduated, compared to 89.2 percent of public school students.  After 5 years, the graduation rate of charter school students increased to 73.7 percent, still well below the rate of 91.4 percent for public high school students after 5 years.

 

 

 

 

 

[i] When citing class years, the spring of the year they would graduate after four high school years is used. The graduating Class of 2019, for example, entered high school in the fall of 2015.

[ii] https://www.education.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt326/files/inline-documents/cohort_report_17-18.pdf

[iii] https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/tables/ACGR_RE_and_characteristics_2018-19.asp

[iv] The fifth year of the Class of 2019 ended in the spring of 2020. Graduation data for 2020 and 2021 were not available at the time of our request.