ST PAUL, Minn. — The Minnesota Department of Education released a report Thursday showing the state's four-year graduation rate in 2023 was down .3% from 2022 after several notable increases the previous year.
State education officials say the slight decline can likely be attributed to an increase of .4% in a category referred to as "unknown," which tracks students who were incorrectly recorded or not reported as enrolled in another district. MDE says this re-enforces the need for schools to keep track of and report every single student during the course of their high school career.
At the same time, high school students who graduated last year were just freshmen when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, and Johnson Senior High School principal Jamil Payton says many students suffered academically and socially. He says the class of 2023 was smaller than the previous year.
"According to the report that came out, we dropped down," Payton said. "We have to look at as a school, as adults, like what are we doing that's working and what are we doing we might need to revise?"
MDE reports just 68% of St. Paul students graduated, a 7% drop from the previous year, and the district's third consecutive year to see a decline.
However, assistant superintendent Adam Kunz says it's important to include summer graduates in total graduation rates. Doing so would increase St. Paul's graduation rate to 73%, which would still be a decline from the previous year, but not as steep of a decline.
"In other years, summer graduates would have been counted in the overall total," Kunz explained. "The story isn't about the declining graduation rate for me. It's about the hard work those students have done to get out of that hole and to then succeed and graduate whether or not it was on time or really close to on time."
Similarly in Minneapolis Public Schools, the state report showed an almost 9% drop in graduation rates, but the district says when summer graduates are included, the dip is closer to 3%, not 9%.
District-wide in St. Paul there are several opportunities to make up class credits, Kunz says, and many of them are not just for seniors.
"We have experiential credit recovery which is something we're really proud of where students get to do things like canoe with Wilderness Inquiry as a part of a way they re-earn science and health credits," he said. "They get to learn about welding as a part of physical science and they explore culinary arts and things like that too."
According to its website, SPPS is taking the following steps to support on-time graduation:
- Implementing fair and equitable grading practices, which includes support for teachers and students in measuring and showing their learning. In the first two quarters of the 2023-24 school year, 10% fewer failing grades have been recorded and passing rates in core classes have increased by 1-2% in SPPS high schools.
- Continuing to support and develop 9th grade academic support classes at all SPPS high schools
- Increasing access to student internships, certifications and work-based learning opportunities to bring real-world experiences into the classroom
- Offering multiple credit recovery options, including online and experiential learning programs. SPPS students earned 13,860 credits last summer, putting 624 seniors on track to graduate with the class of 2024
At Johnson High School, there's a Freshman Focus class to help freshmen acclimate to high school, and a job and college readiness program called Frameworks for juniors. The national academic support program, AVID, is offered to all grade levels.
Payton says changes were also made this year to help more students graduate. The class of 2004 is set to graduate June 3 at Roy Wilkins Auditorium.
"This year we had an interventionist and a teacher, so the teacher was able to really work with their colleagues to find out what these students were missing," he said. "The further we become removed from the pandemic, I think we'll see things change because kids will know how to do school."
To find out how students in your child's district and school performed, check out the 2023 Minnesota Report Card on the MDE website.
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