The Nevada Department of Education today published the Nevada Report Card, www.nevadareportcard.com, which also includes preliminary four-year high school graduation data.
The preliminary four-year graduation rate for the Class of 2015-16 is 72.62 percent an increase of 1.85 percentage points from the Class of 2014-15. In the meantime, districts and NDE will work together to review graduation data before the final four-year adjusted cohort graduate rate for 2015-16 that will be published on Dec. 15.
“I am encouraged by the preliminary graduation rates from the Washoe (77 percent) and Clark (74 percent) school districts increasing by 2 percentage points this year,” said Steve Canavero, Ph.D., Superintendent of Public Instruction. “Governor Sandoval and our State Legislature have made a commitment to improving our PreK-12 education system so this is one more step in the right direction.”
The statewide five-year adjusted cohort graduation rate for the Class of 2014-15 is 72.03 percent which is a gain of more than 2 percentage points from the 2013-2014 four-year graduation rate. The five-year adjusted cohort graduation rate tracks the movement of all students entering high school in a given year and determines how many students graduate with a regular high school diploma within five years.
The graduation rate data is available online along with the Nevada Report Card, which is required by both federal and state law. The website includes statewide, district and school level data on enrollment, demographics, several assessments, graduation, discipline, retention and more.
The Nevada Report Card website allows users to generate customized reports that sort and compare between schools and districts. In addition to containing valuable information about schools and districts the Report Card contains state-level information that provides an overview of education in Nevada.
Included are results from the successful administration of the Smarter Balanced assessments for the first time in 2015-16. Because of the failure of our previous assessment vendor to successfully administer the 2014-15 assessment. Nevada will use these results as the baseline data to calculate student growth in next year’s Nevada School Performance Framework (NSPF).
“The Nevada Report Card is where we provide multiple measures of our state’s accountability to parents and the public,” Canavero said. “Our children’s education is a vital piece of Nevada’s new economy and we are confident that it is here where we can begin to tell the story of Nevada becoming the fastest improving state in the nation.”
For the third year in a row statewide enrollment grew by at least 1 percentage point increasing from 459,095 to 467,527. The state saw a slight decrease in the annual dropout rate (grades 6 through 12) from 2.8 percent (2013-14 school year) to 2.7 percent (2014-15 school year).
“There was an increase in the number of reported cases of student discipline and bullying,” Canavero said. “It is possible that the enhanced focus on discipline and bullying created by the new social worker program, the establishment of the Office of Safe and Respectful Schools, and related training to school districts by that office led to cases that otherwise would have gone unreported being included on this year’s Report Card.”
