BY MARK J. CRAWFORD
Telegraph Editor
Florida’s record-setting year for high school graduation rates included remarkable improvement in Bradford and Union counties.
The state’s graduation rate reached a new high of 88% for the 2022-23 school year. According to the Florida Department of Education, this was an increase of 0.7 percentage points over the previous school year and a 1.1 percentage point increase over the pre-pandemic graduation rate in 2018–19.
(School years 2019–20 and 2020–21 are an exception. During the pandemic years, graduating rates were higher because graduating classes were exempt from statewide, standardized assessment requirements.)
The state also pointed to greater success graduating members of multiple subgroups, including a 4.9 percentage point increase for students with disabilities, a 0.9 percentage point increase for economically disadvantaged students, and a 1.7 percentage point increase for Black students.
Bradford and Union both experienced lower graduation rates immediately following the pandemic, but in 2022-23, Union surpassed its pre-pandemic rate and Bradford is on its way. (An asterisk denotes pandemic years.)
Bradford County
2018-19 87.7%
2019-20* 88.2%
2020-21* 85%
2021-22 76.1%
2022-23 82.5%
Bradford High graduated 175 of 212 students in the cohort. This included 82.7% of its 52 Black seniors, 74% of 50 ESE seniors and 75% of 64 at-risk seniors.
Union County
2018-19 84.4%
2019-20* 79.6%
2020-21* 88.3%
2021-22 77.8%
2022-23 85.9%
Union County High graduated 146 of 170 students in the cohort. This included 86.4% of its 22 Black seniors, 73% of 37 ESE seniors and 70.8% of 24 at-risk seniors.
Clay County came within one percentage point of besting its pre-pandemic graduation rate.
Clay County
2018-19 91.9%
2019-20* 93.4%
2020-21* 92.7%
2021-22 89.9%
2022-23 90.9%
Keystone Heights High graduated 176 of 194 students in the cohort, for a 90.7% graduation rate, just slightly lower than the county average. The school did not have a large enough group of Black students in the cohort to include in the ranking. The school did graduate 54.5% of its 11 Hispanic seniors, 97.1% of its ESE seniors and 77. 1% of 35 at-risk seniors.
Florida first began using the Federal Uniform Graduation Rate in 2010-11, and it replaced the National Governors Calculation the following year. The federal rate is considered the most difficult as it counts only standard diploma recipients, does not remove adult education program transfers from the student cohort, and credits all students enrolled in Department of Juvenile Justice facilities back to their home school.
When first calculated using the federal uniform rate, Florida’s graduation rate was 70.6% compared to 81.2% under the governors rate. When the federal rate was calculated back to the 1998-99 school year, Florida’s graduation rate was just 52%. It would take more than a decade of these backward looking calculations for the rate to reach over 70% in 2010-11.
Since the federal calculation method has been used, the state graduation rate has grown nearly twice as high in around the same amount of time.
