Steve Sarsfield shares with us this classic tale of IQ Trainwreck-ry from Atlanta Georgia.

An analysis of student enrollment and transfer data carried out by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reveals a shocking number of students who appear to be dropping out of school and off the radar in Georgia.  This suggests that the dropout rate may be higher and the graduation rate lower than previously reported.

Last year, school staff marked more than 25,000 students as transferring to other Georgia public schools, but no school reported them as transferring in, the AJC’s analysis of enrollment data shows.

Analysis carried out by the State agency responsible was able to track down some of the missing students. But poor quality information makes any further tracking problematic if not impossible.

That search located 7,100 of the missing transfers in Georgia schools, state education spokesman Dana Tofig wrote in an e-mailed statement. The state does not know where an additional 19,500 went, but believes other coding errors occurred, he wrote. Some are dropouts but others are not, he said.

In a comment which should warm the hearts of Information Quality professionals everywhere, Cathy Henson, a Georgia State education law professor and former state board of education chairwoman says:

“Garbage in, garbage out.  We’re never going to solve our problems unless we have good data to drive our decisions.”

She might be interested in reading more on just that topic in Tom Redman’s book “Data Driven”.

Drop out rates consitute a significant IQ Trainwreck because:

• Children who should be helped to better education aren’t. (They get left behind)
• Schools are measured against Federal Standards, including drop out rates, which can affect funding
• Political and business leaders often rely on these statistics for decision making, publicity,  and campaigning.
• Companies consider the drop out rate when planning to locate in Georgia or elsewhere as it is an indicator of future skills pools in the area.

The article quotes Bob Wise on the implications of trying to fudge the data that sums up the impact of masking drop outs by miscoding (by accident or design):

“Entering rosy data won’t get you a bed of roses,” Wise said. “In a state like Georgia that is increasingly technologically oriented, it will get you a group of people that won’t be able to function meaningfully in the workforce.”

The article goes on to highlight yet more knockon impacts from the crummy data and poor quality information that the study showed:

• Federal standard formulae for calculation of dropouts won’t give an accurate figure if there is mis-coding of students as “transfers” from one school to another.
• A much touted unique student identifier has been found to be less than unique, with students often being given a new identifier in their new school
• Inconsistencies exist in other data, for example students who were reported “removed for non-attendance” but had  zero absent days recorded against them.

Given the impact on students, the implications for school rankings and funding, the costs of correcting errors, and the scale and extent of problems uncovered, this counts as a classic IQTrainwreck.