State auditor: It is time to fix Mississippi’s education data
As a young public school student in South Mississippi, I took art from one of my best teachers: my mother. She always said art was important because it was students’ best opportunity to learn to be creative.
A few hours later, I would walk down the hall to math class. Math, in contrast, is not the place to be creative. What is correct is correct. There is no room to be “creative” when trying to determine what two plus two equals.
Today, as state auditor, I fear that the education system is leaving too much room for “creativity” when it comes to the numbers describing how we’re doing. Put differently, I’m not sure the state’s education data are accurate.
My office has issued three reports over the last few months that point to potential data reliability problems.
First, we released a report about the state’s graduation rate. In 2006, Mississippi lawmakers told the Mississippi Department of Education to improve the state’s graduation rate to 85% by 2019. At the time, the graduation rate was around 61%. Shortly after MDE was given this order, they changed the way the graduation rate is calculated. Changing the calculation method boosted the graduation rate by nearly 10%. When my office revealed that the calculation method had been changed, every lawmaker I told was stunned.
Second, we conducted an audit of the software system that tracks student attendance. What we found was not encouraging. Many school districts did not have good security policies in place for the software. What that means is too many employees have too much access to the system. It leaves too much room for human error. We also found that school districts were calling some absences “excused” when they didn’t have paperwork showing the absence was excused. And some districts called students present in one attendance-tracking software but called the same students absent on the same day in a different piece of software.
These data problems are important. We use student attendance numbers to determine funding for school districts. If the attendance numbers are wrong, the funding is wrong.
Third, we studied Mississippi’s career and technical education (CTE) program. This is the program where high schoolers prepare for college or a career by learning a skill like carpentry or engineering. CTE is supposed to track whether its students go on to graduate and get a job. But the program failed to follow kids if they participated in CTE early in high school and then later dropped out of it. We have no idea if those students then went on to get their diploma or take a job in the industry they were learning.
In addition to that, in one year, we found the Department of Education submitted the same number of CTE participants from the previous year. Clearly the exact same number of students did not participate. The numbers can’t be right.
Again, this is important. CTE is critical to our success as a state. Public school students need to be learning real skills that translate to jobs here in Mississippi. If we don’t teach them this, they may be dependent on entitlement programs later in life. Or businesses thinking of moving here will shy away if they find our workforce isn’t adequately trained. CTE addresses what might be the most important issue for our state’s future. And we’re not sure how well the program works because the data is unreliable.
Lawmakers, the Department of Education, and school districts should work together to address these issues. Each of the three reports I mentioned contain recommendations for fixing our data accuracy problems. The recommendations include routine internal audits and better data security practices. You can find these reports and recommendations at www.osa.ms.gov under the “Reports” tab.
I’m committed to using my office to make our public schools as strong as they can be. It’s hard to make improvements, though, if we don’t have a clear understanding of how many kids are in school or what percentage are graduating. It’s not time to get creative with the numbers. It’s time to accurately measure our results and ensure we’re making decisions based on accurate information.
Shad White is the 42nd state auditor of Mississippi.