Usually when a school district contracts with the National Student Clearinghouse to track postsecondary outcomes for its high school graduates, the idea is to use the information internally to assess how well the district is preparing its students for college.
Within District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) — which serves approximately 48,000 students in the nation’s capital — administrators are using the data for an entirely different purpose, namely, to determine how well their graduates are faring at particular institutions of higher education.
And if it turns out that there’s a particular college or university where DCPS graduates don’t fare so well — specifically where the graduation rate for DCPS or Pell Grant-eligible students is less than 40 percent — that institution doesn’t get to come to DCPS’s college expo, and DCPS students can’t use money from the district’s college tour fund to visit the school.
The idea is to use the National Student Clearinghouse data to steer DCPS students toward colleges and universities where they are likely to succeed.
“What we realized is that whenever possible, we should be looking at college completion data at the most granular level for our students,” says Dr. Erin Ward Bibo, deputy chief for college and career education at DCPS.
“What we are trying to do is empower students and, more importantly, the staff who work with students with the data,” Bibo says. “We feel they need to make smart college choices. The reality is students and their families and staff haven’t always had this data and so they’ve been going off of whatever they had.”
DCPS is among a small but growing number of public school districts that are taking this approach, according to officials at the National Student Clearinghouse, a Virginia-based nonprofit that tracks student outcome data for member schools and districts.
