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- History
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- The
first GFS database was assembled in the spring of 1993 by Jerry Litzenburger as
a feasibility study. For five participating school districts, the high
school graduating class of 1992 was tracked in the initial version.
There were ten volunteer school districts for the follow-up of the class
of 1993. Participation has
increased every year since, and the GFS now covers most of the high school
districts in Washington.
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- Data Notes
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- Initial data for the Washington Graduate Follow-up Study
comes from the annual P-210 data submission on fall student enrollment provided
to OSPI by each school district. Using
this database, members of the graduating class are identified.
Outcome information comes from a number of sources including
Washington’s community colleges, private career schools and apprenticeship
programs; four-year public colleges in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho; and
several private four-year colleges. The
Washington Employment Security Department provides employment information from
state wage record files, and they facilitate similar matches with neighboring
states (Oregon, Montana, Idaho, and Alaska) as well as military and federal
employment records. As we conduct
the Graduate Follow-Up Study, we are committed to protecting the privacy of
students. Student confidentiality
is assured by reporting only the aggregated results of groups of students, never
reporting the results of small groups of students, and securing and eventual
destruction of all information about individual students.
For information about the contents of the GFS database, click here.
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- Caution
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- Because participation by school districts in the Graduate
Follow-up Study is voluntary, not all schools are included every year.
Therefore, strict comparisons from year to year are not possible.
Further, even for participating school districts, identifying information is not
adequate to provide reliable follow-up information on 100% of the graduates. Thus, while reports based on the GFS database provide
valuable indicators and insights on the short-term outcomes of high school
graduates, the samples are not precisely representative of differences among
districts or over time. Therefore, formal tests and rules of thumb for significance cannot be applied to
differences between schools or districts, between subgroups of graduates, or
between graduating classes. Observed
differences may be due purely to differences between two non-random
partially-representative samples.
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- For a different reason, strict statistical
comparisons between vocational completers and other graduating students should
also not be made. Because
participation in vocational programs is both voluntary and non-random, we should
expect there to be differences in the outcomes between vocational students and
other students entirely independent of the effects of their programs of study.
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- For
more information about the GFS, contact us.
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