Graduation rates for all county and city school systems as well as the overall county rate are available in pdf. Click here.
Beginning with the 2010-2011 school year, the U.S. Department of Education under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 will require all states to use the 'four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate' in the calculation of graduation rates. Until the data are available for calculating this more refined measure, many states are using the 'average freshmen graduation rate' as a proxy. The data used in computing graduation rates for 2000-2007 for Alabama counties were downloaded from the Alabama State Department of Education website at http://www.alsde.edu/html/home.asp under 'Reports,' then 'SDE Public Data Reports.'
The 'graduation rate' is defined as the estimated percentage of public high school students who graduate on time with one of four “qualifying” diplomas (advanced, regular, career tech advanced, or career tech regular). The number of students receiving qualifying diplomas in the year of their graduation is divided by the size of the ninth grade class four years earlier multiplied by 100. The size of the ninth grade class is estimated by summing the enrollment in the eighth grade in the prior year, the enrollment in the ninth grade in the next year, and enrollment in the tenth grade in the subsequent year and dividing by three. This procedure for estimating graduation is referred to as the “average freshman graduation rate.”