The good news is that Mississippi’s graduation rate is showing improvement. The bad is that it’s hard to tell how much of the improvement is real and how much is illusory.
That’s because the state Board of Education, in 2014 and further so in 2015, reduced the importance of state tests in determining whether students know enough to graduate from high school.
It will still be a couple of years before all these changes take effect, so until then, it will be difficult to make a statistically valid comparison.
Under current standards, Mississippi’s graduation rate is 82.3 percent. That’s significantly better than 2013, when the graduation rate was 74.5 percent. But in 2013, state tests meant everything.
