(The Center Square) – The 2023 four-year graduation rate is 87.5% for Iowa’s schools, up 0.1% from 2022’s adjusted graduation rate.
Officials with the Iowa Department of Education said Friday that graduation rates from previous years were adjusted after it was found students who transferred to another district and then dropped out were not counted.
“Calculating graduation rates is a complex process that requires examining four years of student-level data and includes taking into account multiple change events, such as when students move between districts or initially drop out but choose to re-enroll at a later date,” said Jay Pennington, bureau chief of Information and Analysis Services at IDE said in a news release. “Upon a fresh review of the legacy code that had been used to calculate prior graduation rates, we identified that the code had not properly sequenced certain events.”
The graduation rate for 2022 dropped 2.5 percentage points to 87.4% while the 2021 rate is down 2.4 percentage points to 87.8% due to the changes.
The adjustment did not affect the state’s dropout rate, education officials said. It declined to 3.02% in the 2022-2023 school year from 3.04% during the 2021-2022 school year, according to the department.
Iowa’s four-year graduation rate is higher than four of its neighboring states, according to the education department. Minnesota’s rate is 83.3%, Nebraska comes in at 87.2% and South Dakota is at 84.1%. Illinois’ rate is only one percentage point higher than Iowa’s at 87.6%. The only border states with rates higher than Iowa are Missouri at 89.9% and Wisconsin at 90.5%.
“The Department is committed to empowering Iowans with accurate, actionable information on education outcomes,” said Iowa Department of Education Director McKenzie Snow. “Focused on transparency, the Department identified, corrected, and communicated the error in the underlying code, which has existed for at least 10 years, and its impact on previously reported graduation rates.”