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DC High School Graduation Rates: How Does Your School Compare?

Monday, March 16, 2015 - 2:45pm

Kevin Lang contributed to this post.

Last Friday the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) announced the 2014 graduation rates for the District’s public schools. Among OSSE’s findings were that DCPS’s graduation rate increased two percentage points from last year while charter schools’ rate dropped by almost 7 percentage points.

To get a clearer picture of how graduation rates vary by school, we made two interactive graphs for you. The first, below, compares schools’ 2014 graduation rates for all students and subgroups of students, like those who are low-income or receive special education services. It shows that the schools with the five highest graduation rates are all DCPS schools with competitive admissions. For special education students, though, four of the top five schools are charters. Other interesting patterns emerge when you look at different subgroups of students. SEED Public Charter School, for instance, is one of three schools that has a 100% graduation rate for girls. Click on the graph below to see the graduation rates for different student populations.  Note that graduation rates are displayed only for schools with 10 or more students scheduled to graduate in a given category.

View an interactive version of the graph below

2014 DC Metro area tax burdens

The second interactive graph we made shows how individual schools’ graduation rates have changed since 2011 for different types of students. As you can see, there can be a lot of variation within a school. At Wilson High School, for instance, the graduation rate for black students has increased but it’s dropped for special education students. Click on the graph below to see school-by-school graduation rates.

View an interactive version of the graph below

Four-year high school graduation rates in DCPS

What exactly is this data?

These are the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rates from the DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education. You can download the data here.

Correction: A previous version of this post said that schools with fewer than 25 students in a given category (white, LEP, etc) would not show up in the interactive graphs. In fact, schools with fewer than 10 students in a category don’t appear. These thresholds refer to the number of students scheduled to graduate, not the number of students in the entire school.