Case: High School Graduation Rates

Abstract

This chapter extensively covers what working with the data team^TM procedure is like in practice. It describes a team working on a school-wide problem regarding low graduation rates at their high school. It is loosely based on our experiences during the “Datateams” project, for which we supervised 37 teams as they worked with this method. In this chapter, a data team works on the following problem definition: “We are unhappy about the fact that an average of 32% of the students failed to graduate over the past three years. Next year, no more than 25% of the students may fail to graduate. The year after that, we want to reduce this percentage to no more than 20%.” The team investigates several hypotheses, concerning local graduation requirements and state requirements, student motivation, middle school scores, students cutting classes, feedback, and supervision. In this chapter, we describe how the data team investigated these hypotheses, what their conclusions were, and how they were able to improve graduation rates based on the collected data.