Public School Graduation Rate

The graduation rate is the percentage of high schoolers who obtain their high school diploma after four years of study. Matriculation from high school is very important for future success, as it opens the door to a much broader set of college and career opportunities than are available to those who do not graduate. Earnings are also much higher among high school and college graduates than those who drop out of high school. While five-year graduation rates are available, they are not very different than four-year rates. The data below pertain to students enrolled in public schools.

Trends Over Time

The JCPS graduation rate has increased to 82.3% since 2013. While this rate is trending in a positive direction, JCPS continues to lag behind almost all Kentucky public school districts.

Trends by Race

The graph shows that the gaps between racial groups and between JCPS students and KY public school students have not decreased since 2013.  Across all racial groups, KY public school students are graduating at higher rates than their JCPS counterparts.

Differences Based on Sex

The gap between males and females persists both in JCPS and in KY public schools. Male and female students in KY public schools are graduating at higher rates than their JCPS counterparts.  Across KY and in JCPS, females graduate at much higher rates than males.

Differences Based on Free or Reduced Lunch Status

Across Kentucky, students who are eligible for free/reduced lunch graduate at a lower rate than students who are not, however that is not true of JCPS, where students receiving free/reduced lunch graduate at a higher rate than their counterparts from families with higher incomes.

Explore the Data by School

Continue Exploring with Related Data

Kindergarten Readiness


Multidimensional Poverty


Unemployment


Transition Readiness


Print Page

Natural Breaks Algorithm

For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.

Z-Scores

Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).

Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.