When Alabama voters go to the polls on November 8, they will be asked to consider adding 35 more amendments to the Alabama Constitution. PARCA has compiled a summary of each of the 14 amendments that will appear on the ballot statewide.

Alabama already has the nation’s longest constitution — about 12 times longer than the national average. Since its adoption in 1901, the Alabama Constitution has been amended 895 times.

In principle, constitutions are meant to lay out the fundamental powers of government and establish a statewide framework for its operation, leaving the state legislature and local legislative bodies the task of carrying out work within those limits. Alabama’s Constitution, by contrast, is minutely detailed with a multitude of amendments that create local exceptions that apply to individual jurisdictions, as well as provisions that apply statewide.

The problem stems from the constitution strictly limiting the powers of local governments. Almost immediately after its adoption, the constitution began to accumulate amendments, most of which created local exceptions to state constitutional principles. November’s ballot continues that practice. Of the 35 amendments proposed, 25 apply to a single jurisdiction. Of the total, 14 amendments will be voted on statewide. Of those, 10 will affect the state as a whole, and four pertain to an individual locality but are being voted on by voters throughout the state.

Of those local amendments being considered statewide, one is a proposal to raise the maximum age of the probate judge in Pickens County to 75. Voters statewide will also decide whether the citizens of Etowah County can create a personnel board for employees of its sheriff’s department.

Four statewide amendments, Amendments 3, 4, 5 and 6, make a modest effort to clean up some of the problems with the Constitution. These amendments are the result of the work of a nonpartisan commission chaired by former Governor Albert Brewer, PARCA’s founder and chairman emeritus.

In addition to PARCA’s summary, more information on the proposed amendments can be found on the Secretary of State’s website including summaries and explanations compiled by the state’s Fair Ballot Commission.

Read PARCA’s analysis of the proposed amendments.

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What percentage of the graduates from your local high school go on to college?

Where do they go? To four-year universities or two-year colleges? In-state or out-of-state? Private or public?

Answers to those questions can be found in new data provided by the Alabama Commission on Higher Education. The data, drawn by ACHE from the National Student Clearinghouse, provides college-going data both for the state as a whole and for all Alabama public high schools. It’s just the second year this comprehensive set of data has been available. Previously, ACHE’s college-going statistics could only report on high school graduates entering public colleges and universities in Alabama. The more comprehensive data captures enrolling in public and private colleges throughout the country.

Alabama’s high school graduation rate reached 89 percent in 2015, and thanks in part to that, the state’s public high schools produced more graduates who entered higher education at both two-year colleges and four-year schools. The number of students who graduated but did not enroll in college the year after graduation also increased.

Of the students in the graduating class of 2015, 64 percent enrolled in higher education: 32 percent at a two-year college, 32 percent at a 4-year institution. Meanwhile, 36 percent did not enroll in that first year after graduation.

Of those that graduates who went on to college, 91 percent went to college in the state of Alabama and 9 percent enrolled in out-of-state institutions; 7 percent of graduates enrolled in private colleges and 93 percent went to public colleges and university. Using the selection boxes below you can look at the statistics for any high school in the state.

When making comparisons of college-going rates, it’s important to keep the socio-economic composition of the various schools and systems in mind. Students from families with higher incomes and whose parents went to college are more likely to go on to higher education. Those students tend to have great exposure and access to higher education and also have greater ability to afford college. The National Student Clearinghouse annually publishes a report on college-going rates and persistence through college. The report includes comparisons of the results from schools with varying demographic compositions. The Student Clearinghouse study looks at enrollment in the fall after graduation, while the ACHE data looks at enrollment at any time in the first year after graduation from high school. Regardless, the Student Clearinghouse data shows clear differences in the college-going rates between high-poverty and low-poverty school systems. The chart below represents college enrollment rates in the first fall after high school graduation for the U.S. national class of 2014, from public non-charter Schools, by poverty level. Further discussion can be found in the Clearinghouse report: High School Benchmarks 2015: National College Progression Rates.

With those distinctions in mind, the comparative data from Alabama shows striking differences in college-going rates and the destination of students after graduation.

Systems with low poverty rates, like Mountain Brook and Vestavia Hills, send most of their graduates on to four-year colleges and universities. Other systems with somewhat higher poverty percentages still send a large percentage of graduates off to college. However, more of those graduates start at a community college.

When comparing individual high schools, it is also important to keep in mind that some high schools, like Loveless Academic Magnet Program (LAMP) in Montgomery or Ramsay High School in the Birmingham City System, are academic magnets. Those magnet schools also tend to send a higher percentage of students on to higher education. In fact, the top four Alabama high schools in terms of college-going rate are magnets: three Montgomery magnets — LAMP at 98 percent, Booker T. Washington at 94 percent, and Brewbaker Technology Magnet at 93 percent — plus Birmingham’s Ramsay at 93 percent.

With two years of data from ACHE, it is now possible to note year-over-year changes in the percentage of students going on to higher education from various schools. When looking at those year-to-year changes, it is important to keep in mind that smaller high schools will see bigger fluctuations because a few more students going on to college can make a bigger change in the percentage of graduates going on to college. Comparing the graduating classes of 2014 and 2015, the biggest change in college-going rates occurred at Sunshine High School in Hale County. Because Hale County has now closed Sunshine, its 2015 graduating class will be its last. But that class showed a remarkable jump in college-going. In 2014, Sunshine produced 14 graduates, and half of them went on to higher education. In 2015, the school produced 23 graduates and 85 percent of those graduates enrolled in higher education the year after graduation. According to Hale County Superintendent Osie Pickens, the Hale County High School counseling staff made an extra effort to place that last class of graduating students from Sunshine resulting in the jump in college-going rate.

The tool below presents five different views of the data. The first tab contains a graph that presents each high school’s college-going rate along with the percentage of its students from households in poverty. The second tab is a chart that presents college-going at the system level, including the percentages of graduates going to four-year colleges, two-year schools, and the percentage that didn’t enroll. The third tab presents the same information at the school level. The fourth tab presents system-level statistics for the numbers of graduates, the percentage of graduates going on to higher education, and the percentage point change in college-going for that system between 2014 and 2015. The fifth tab presents the same statistics at the school level.

A newly formed Joint Legislative Task Force on Budget Reform meets for the first time this week in Montgomery: a group of House and Senate members tasked with studying and recommending changes to the state’s broken system for budgeting. That is the same issue PARCA examined at its 2016 Annual Meeting this February.

The Task Force meeting is scheduled for 2 p.m. Wednesday, at the State House, Room 200.

The Legislature is just coming off yet another special session, called this year by Governor Robert Bentley to stave off severe Medicaid service cuts that would have resulted from General Fund budget passed in the 2016 Regular Session.

In 2015, Bentley called the Legislature back twice to cope with the same problem: a persistent structural deficit in the General Fund. Since 2000, there have been 16 special sessions called by governors. While not all of those have been called to address budget issues, many have, including the past three special sessions.

The Joint Resolution creating the new Task Force acknowledges that the Legislature’s most recent temporary solution to its budget woes – using money from the BP Oil Spill Settlement to supplement state support for Medicaid for the next two years — doesn’t solve the essential problem. As the resolution put it: “The expenditures of state government within the General Fund are projected to continue growing at a level that will outpace available revenues.”

Why do we have this recurring problem?

1. Alabama is short on money. Alabama state and local governments collect less in taxes, per capita, than governments in any other state in the United States (PARCA Perspective, Dec. 2015).

2. Alabama’s General Fund is supported by taxes that don’t grow. Agency expenses rise, but the funds available to pay for them don’t keep up. (PARCA Perspective, Oct. 2015). In light of that, the Legislature applies one-time revenue sources to plug budget holes. And that guarantees the shortfall will recur when those one-time revenues are exhausted.

3. Alabama needs, but does not have, an effective budgeting process, one that identifies priorities and goals, pushes for efficiency, and maximizes effectiveness.

In the interest of improving budgeting in Alabama, the Task Force has been asked to examine the following questions:

1. Should we implement biennial budgeting — drafting budgets that cover two years, rather than one?

2. Should we require state entities to undergo greater performance and program reviews?

3. Should we unearmark funds in order to provide for greater legislative oversight and appropriating flexibility?

4. Should we review existing state tax credits and deductions and creating a policy to ensure that future tax credits effectively provide economic gain to the state?

5. Can we identify areas to provide tax relief to Alabama families without significantly impacting state budgets?

At PARCA’s 2016 Annual Meeting, we presented a summary of the current budget process, its problems, and potential solutions. To put Alabama’s budgeting process in a national context, the PARCA program featured William Glasgall the director of State and Local Programs for the Volcker Alliance. The nonpartisan Volker Alliance is working nationally to encourage greater truth and integrity in state government financial reporting and budgeting. Glasgall’s presentation identified national budgeting best practices, and compared Alabama’s, noting areas where the state compares favorably and where it needs work.

Based on research presented at the Annual Meeting, PARCA developed a series of basic recommendations for improving the budget process:

Recommendation #1:  Good fiscal decisions require clear, concise information. State government should present continuous, clear, and meaningful information on state revenues and expenditures.

These reports should be regular and timely and include a narrative explanation the numbers. Reports should:

1. Clearly identify one-time sources of revenue

2. Evaluate the cost of tax incentives and the benefits produced

3. Disclose debt costs and trends, including long-term forecasting of revenue and expenditure growth

Recommendation #2: The executive and legislative branches should reexamine and reconcile their budgeting process based on the requirements of the Alabama’s existing Budget and Management Act, making adjustments where improvement is needed.

1. The Governor’s budget should include strategic planning and explanation of budget choices, goals, and plans.

2. Agencies should make reasonable requests that include performance measures.

3. The Governor and Legislature should work toward agreement on:

– consolidating the information gathering process

– identifying relevant and meaningful expense data and performance measures to be tracked

– a budget process that encourages both cost reduction, innovation, and success in meeting state policy priorities

Recommendation #3:  Ultimately, revenues must match expenses. The State should recognize and address the chronic structural deficit in the General Fund.

Alabama’s habit of earmarking revenue limits transparency, flexibility, and better budget management. Reducing earmarking should be pursued. However, considering Alabama’s low per capita tax revenues, and low comparative spending on big-ticket items like education, prisons, and Medicaid, un-earmarking is unlikely to solve recurring financial problems. Along with improvements to the budget process, a stable, revenue source that will grow over time, along with expenses, should be added to the General Fund.

PARCA will provide updates on the work of the Budget Task Force throughout the fall.

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In 2015, for the first time, all high school seniors took a new assessment test, WorkKeys, designed to determine whether students are learning the skills they need to enter the workforce.

The results from that first WorkKeys assessment are in and are now available for local systems and schools.

Statewide, 60 percent of high school graduates tested were deemed workforce ready, according to the results. By the State Department of Education’s definition, a student who earned a Silver certificate or higher is workforce ready.

The WorkKeys test was developed by ACT, the same company that offers the ACT, the widely-known test of college readiness. The content of the test was developed using a similar approach to the ACT. ACT surveyed employers to develop a catalog of the foundational skills needed to succeed in the workplace, across industries and occupations. ACT then developed a test to measure whether prospective employees or, in this case, high school students, had those necessary skills to perform in the nearly 20,000 occupations ACT evaluated.

WorkKeys has three core skill assessments: Applied Mathematics, Locating Information, and Reading for Information. The assessments are then graded, and test-takers are assigned a skill level.

Those scoring at the Platinum Level have demonstrated the skills needed for 99 percent of the occupations in the ACT jobs dataset. Those earning a Gold level certificate should be ready for 93 percent of jobs in the database. Scoring at the Silver level indicates a candidate has the skills necessary to succeed in 67 percent of jobs in the ACT database. Those earning a bronze certificate are judged to be ready for 16 percent of jobs.

Additional information for understanding WorkKey’s scores can be found on ACT’s website.

Statewide, 1 percent of Alabama’s 2015 high school graduates earned a Platinum certificate; 16 percent earned Gold; 44 percent earned Silver. Those graduates were, by the State Board of Education, to be career ready. Graduates who earned a bronze level certificate, 27 percent of graduates, and those who failed to earn a certificate, 13 percent of graduates, did not earn the college and career ready stamp.

When the state’s strategic plan for education, Plan 2020, was adopted by the State Board of Education, the board set a goal of achieving a 90 percent graduation rate.

At the same time, it set a goal of having all those graduates ready for college and career. Earning a Silver WorkKeys certificate is one way a student can be judged as college and career ready. They can also demonstrate college and career readiness by:

1. Scoring at or above the college readiness benchmark on one of the tested subjects on the ACT

2. Earning a passing score (3 or above) on an Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exam

3. Receiving an industry-recognized credential recognized in the appropriate business sector

4. Earning college credit through dual enrollment at a two-year college or university

5. Successfully enlisting in the U.S. military.

In 2015, 89 percent of Alabama high school students graduated on time, four years after entering the 9th grade. A preliminary State Department of Education analysis found that 68 percent of those graduates met one or more of those college and career ready measures.

ACT WorkKeys assessments have been used for more than two decades by job seekers, employees, employers, students, educators, administrators, and workforce and economic developers. The assessments are designed to measure both cognitive (“hard”) and noncognitive (“soft”) skills tests.

Using the results, students should be able to determine their skill levels, identify skills needing improvement, and match the measured skill levels to specific job requirements.

The results can be provided to employers to demonstrate that a job applicant has the skills needed for workplace success.

You can explore the results for Alabama’s public schools and systems in the interactive charts below.

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We now have the 2015 results for the ACT, the widely-known test of college readiness. With interactive charts posted below, you can explore how well your local public school system or high school is doing preparing students for college.

This is the first set of results in which all Alabama high school students took the ACT.  In the past, only students who were college bound took the ACT. Now, all high school students take the test in their junior year, and the results reflect the percentage of students who graduated from high school ready to succeed in college-level courses as measured by the ACT.

Because the universe of students taking the test has widened to include all students, this year’s results for the state and for schools should not be compared to previous years or to national averages.

The ACT is one of several measures the state and local schools use to determine whether their graduates are ready for college and career.

In addition to succeeding on the ACT, a student can be classified college or career ready if he or she:

1.  Scored at either the silver, gold or platinum level on WorkKeys, a test that measures workplace skills

2.  Earned a passing score (3 or above) on an Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exam

3.  Received an industry-recognized credential recognized in the appropriate business sector

4.  Earned college credit through dual-enrollment at a two-year college or university.

5.  Successfully enlisted in the U.S. military.

Statewide, the Alabama’s high school graduation rate climbed to 89 percent in 2015. The state Department of Education reported in January that 68 percent of graduates had met one of those definitions of career/college readiness.

On the ACT, the state counts a graduate as college ready if he or she scores at or above the college-ready benchmark in one of four subjects on the ACT: English, reading, math, or science. According to ACT, if a student meets or beats the college-ready benchmark in a subject that student has a 50 percent chance of making a B or better in a college-level course in that subject and a 75 percent chance of making a C or better.

Statewide, 52 percent of students scored college ready in English; 33 percent in reading; 22 percent in math; 24 percent in science. Only 15 percent of students statewide scored met or exceeded all four college-ready benchmarks.

This year’s ACT results follow a similar pattern to results on the Aspire, the standardized tests given to children in grades 3-8. In systems with lower rates of poverty, a higher percentage of students meet or exceed the college-ready benchmark. In systems with higher poverty percentage, a lower percentage of students score at or above the benchmark.

In systems with lower rates of poverty, a higher percentage of students meet or exceed the college-ready benchmark. In systems with higher poverty percentage, a lower percentage of students score at or above the benchmark. While it is important to keep poverty rates in mind when judging schools and systems, a school’s demographics don’t dictate results. Judging by the results, some schools are more effective at preparing students for college.

That is especially noticeable at the school level. The school with the highest rate of graduates testing college ready on all subjects is Montgomery County’s Loveless Academic Magnet Program (LAMP) High School. In general, magnet schools like LAMP, which draw the most academically advanced students and which offer the widest selection of college-level courses, tend to produce higher percentages of college-ready students.

Note: Results have been updated to include access to results for the 2015-2016 graduating class.

Want to explore how your local public school system or school performed on the statewide benchmark test, the ACT Aspire?

Using Aspire results, PARCA works with local school systems to analyze performance, building comparisons with similar systems and with the state as a whole. In grades 3-8, students are tested in reading, math, and science. In 10th grade, the tested subjects are English, math, and science. Our key metric is the percentage of students tested who score proficient on a particular test. By scoring at or above proficient, a student is considered to be “on track” for his or her grade level. Students who stay on track should be able to succeed on the college readiness test, the ACT. A student meeting or exceeding the benchmark on the ACT is judged to be ready for success in college.

While systems are often judged on the test results generated by “all students” taking the test, it is important to look deeper at comparisons of how the various subgroups of students perform. Students from low-income backgrounds, as a group, don’t perform as well on these types of tests as students from more higher-income backgrounds. Thus, a school system’s performance should be judged in context. Are nonpoverty students in a school performing as well as nonpoverty students elsewhere? How do the results for poverty students compare to results generated by other systems?

New for 2015 is the ability to compare a school or system’s performance with its results from 2014. Did a school or system improve performance from one year to the next?

The interactive charts below allow you to build your own comparisons between peer schools and systems. Are students in your school succeeding at the same rate as those in the comparison schools? Tabs at the top of the chart allow you to look at the data in various ways.

If you dive deep in the data, you may notice that there are some schools and systems that don’t display results on some measures. There are a couple of reasons for this. In some circumstances, the tested population for that measure is very small. In that case, the State Department of Education doesn’t release results in order to protect student privacy. A second reason data might not be available has to do with the way schools and systems identify poverty students. Traditionally, students who were eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunches under the National School Lunch program were identified as students in poverty. In recent years, schools and systems with higher concentrations of poverty have had the option of providing free lunches to all students. In those schools and systems, all students are identified as poverty students. This leaves us unable to compare the performance of poverty and nonpoverty students in those schools.

PARCA’s Annual Meeting was held in Birmingham on Friday, February 5. Its focus was Alabama’s process for formulating budgets.

PARCA’s description of current budget issues can be accessed here.

The presentation made by William Glasgall of the Volcker Alliance describing budget issues in a national context can be found here.

If you want to look at Governor Robert Bentley’s Budget proposal for FY 2017, it can viewed or downloaded here.

For comparison, the links below provide a look at the budget documents from other states.

South Carolina

Virginia

Tennessee

Georgia’s Budget in Brief and links to other budget documents

Mississippi

One resource for understanding budgets is the Budget Fact Book published by the Alabama’s Legislative Fiscal Office.

As February approaches, the Legislature is preparing to return to Montgomery for yet another tough session of struggling with Alabama’s budgets.

The Governor’s Office is in the process of crafting a proposed plan and budget. The Legislature has already begun its process of reviewing budget requests from state agencies.

PARCA’s annual meeting, to be held Friday, February 5 at the Harbert Center in Birmingham, will focus on Alabama’s budget process: how it works now and how it might be improved. The meeting agenda features William Glasgall of the Volcker Alliance, a national nonpartisan effort to rebuild trust in government and improve its effectiveness. Glasgall serves as the Program Director for the Alliance’s State and Local Accountability and Improvement programs, which has focused its research on ways to improve state budgeting and financial practices. Leaders from the Legislature’s budget committee will participate in a panel discussion of the budget process and the challenges the state will face. Gov. Robert Bentley will deliver the luncheon address.

In preparation, PARCA has compiled a sampling of resources available to those who want to better understand the budget process.

You can find an overview about how the various states pursue budgeting in Budget Processes of the States from the National Association of State Budget Officers. The publication explains terms like programs, performance, and zero-based budgeting, and compares states on the approaches they take. The Volcker Alliance’s website features several publications recommending improvements in the way states budget.

Closer to home, the basic law describing how Alabama’s budget process is supposed to work is the Budget Management Act.

For those of you who want to follow the blow-by-blow of the budgeting process during the coming session, here are some key links:

The Executive Budget Office

When the Governor publishes his budget in the coming weeks, it will be posted here as the executive budget, along with budgets from previous years. The Finance Department website also includes budget summary spreadsheets that offer comparisons of the governor’s proposed budget with those of prior years.

After they are introduced, The Legislative Fiscal Office also publishes spreadsheets of the budgets under consideration.

Annually, the Fiscal Office also publishes and posts A Legislator’s Guide to Alabama Taxes, with detailed information about tax collections and descriptions of Alabama and also the annual Budget Fact Book, with information about each agency’s budget and performance measures.

For the super budget geeks:

You can find reports on state revenue and spending at Open.Alabama.gov.

In a different spot on the Web, the Department of Finance publishes Quarterly Budget Management Reports that detail year-to-date revenues and expenditures for each agency and Quarterly Performance Reports that are supposed to provide insight into how agencies are doing carrying out their various missions.

But a word of warning, the Budget Management Reports are detailed and dense. The pdf file that includes all spending and revenue by state agencies is 2,627 pages long.  The Quarterly Performance Reports for all state agencies are over 200 pages long, and the depth of information varies widely agency-by-agency.

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In January 2016, The Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama conducted its annual poll of public opinion. This is the 10th year of the survey. This year, the survey focuses on revenue and spending in state government. The survey touches on multiple topics: taxes, education, Medicaid, highways, public safety, courts, state parks, and others. The complete survey results are posted in presentation form above. Text of the questions and results are presented at the bottom of this post. Highlights are featured below. An in-depth audio-visual presentation of the of the results is also available here.

The survey of 466 Alabamians was conducted between January 4 and January 21. Randolph Horn, Samford University Professor of Political Science and Samford’s Director of Strategic and Applied Analysis, collaborated with PARCA on the design of the survey and directed the polling operation. The results were weighted to reflect the demographic makeup of the state.

Respondents ranked education as the most important investment the state makes followed by health care, public safety, and highways. All four areas are underfunded in Alabama, according to a majority of respondents.

In the areas of education and health care, majorities said they would be willing to pay more in taxes the avoid cuts or achieve adequate funding. In the areas of public safety and highways, less than a majority would be willing to pay more in taxes to avoid cuts or achieve adequacy.

A majority said the state needs more revenue to support state services.

Respondents perceive that state and local taxes fall more heavily on lower-income Alabamians than higher income range. A plurality of respondents say that lower-income residents pay too much in state and local taxes and a majority say that that those in the upper-income group pay too little.

Given options for how the state might increase tax revenue, the only option receiving majority support was to make the state income tax more progressive by increasing the percentage of income that high-income individuals pay in state income taxes.

Looking more closely at more targeted areas of state investment, a majority of respondents said state parks and state troopers are not adequately funded. Opinions were more mixed when it came to state courts and driver’s license offices.

But none of those areas received majority support when respondents were asked if they were willing to pay more in taxes to support them.

A majority of respondents support expanding Medicaid to cover more people. The same question was asked last year and received the same level of support.

On most questions, Alabamians, whether Democrat or Republican, black or white, are relatively united in opinion. However, the response to the Medicaid question does show a partisan divide with majorities of Democrats and independents supporting expansion while a majority of Republicans support maintaining the system as it is.

Strong majorities felt that officials in Montgomery did not care about their individual opinions. This is consistent finding over time.

That distrust of elected officials is perhaps reflected in respondents’ support for earmarking state revenue. Earmarking is defined as designating revenue raised from a particular source to be spent for a particular purpose. An example would be Alabama’s earmarking of income and sales tax revenue for public education.

When it comes to education spending in Alabama, respondents had particularly strong opinions: 69 percent said the education budget should be kept separate from the budgets funding other state services; 70 percent said too little is being spent on education; over 80 percent said the level of funding for schools makes a difference in educational quality; 86 percent said that the state should make up the difference if a community is too poor to support schools adequately.
In terms of what areas are most need of investment in education, respondents showed the strongest support for spending more on teacher’s salaries, with 71 percent supporting increasing teacher salaries. Increasing spending on technology infrastructure, hiring more classroom teachers, school security, classroom technology, and music and the arts all received majority support.

The full text of questions and results is included below.

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The Alabama Commission on Higher Education has produced a new set of data that gives a more complete picture of the college-going rate statewide and for individual high schools. According to the data, of the 45,760 students who graduated in the spring of 2014:

–     33 percent enrolled in two-year colleges

–     32 percent enrolled in four-year colleges and universities

–     35 percent of graduates did not enroll in higher education in the year after their graduation

Historically, ACHE, the state’s coordinating agency for higher education, has surveyed Alabama public colleges, both two-year and four-year, in order to determine the number of Alabama public high school graduates who enrolled in college the year following their high school graduation. In determining college-going rates, that data had limitations because it only tracked those students who enrolled in Alabama public colleges. Students who went to private schools or went out of state were not counted.

Now, drawing from data compiled by the National Student Clearinghouse, ACHE can follow the enrollment of all public high school graduates whether they go to public or private schools after graduation, both in-state and out of state. The new data that gives a more complete picture of college-going rates.

That data is presented in the interactive charts below.

Plan 2020, Alabama’s strategic plan for public education, sets a goal of having 90 percent of students graduate on time and that those students who do graduate are ready for college and/or career. To some extent, this college-going rate is a reflection of how well schools are doing at producing graduates who are ready to go into higher education. However, it is very important to realize that college-going is highly correlated with a student’s socio-economic status. High schools that have a more affluent student population will see a much higher percentage of their students proceed directly into college. Schools that work with more low-income students will have a lower college-going rate.

Regardless of their demographic makeup, all schools and systems should be looking for ways to promote college access for their graduates. A study published this month by the Pew Research Center found that the middle class is shrinking as a percentage of the population. According to Pew’s analysis of government data, education levels are a key factor in an individual’s economic prosperity. Individuals with a bachelor’s degree or higher are experiencing economic gains, with and increasing share of them moving into upper-income brackets. On the other hand, those without a college degree are slipping farther behind.

Along with the broad effort by public schools to improve students’ preparation for college, there are also targeted efforts underway to increase college-going rates by better connecting students with the resources they need to pay for college. To access financial aid available to help pay for college, students must fill out a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The FAFSA form is notoriously difficult to complete, but successful completion of the form greatly increases the chances a student will enter college. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 90 percent of students who complete a FAFSA form attend college the following fall. Cash For College is a statewide FAFSA completion campaign coordinated by Alabama Possible, a non-profit working to combat poverty. Alabama Possible is working with the Alabama State Department of Education, local schools, and higher education institutions to boost FAFSA completion. The organization provides tools, data, and strategic approaches that schools can use to boost FAFSA completion rates, with an end goal of helping more students enter and pay for college.

Cash For College is a statewide FAFSA completion campaign coordinated by Alabama Possible, a non-profit working to combat poverty. Alabama Possible is working with the Alabama State Department of Education, local schools, and higher education institutions to boost FAFSA completion. The organization provides tools, data, and strategic approaches that schools can use to boost FAFSA completion rates, with an end goal of helping more students enter and pay for college. Information on how to participate is available on the Alabama Possible website.

The charts below allow you to examine the rate of college-going by county, by system, and by individual school. The charts allow you to look at the percentage of students who enroll in four-year schools, two-year schools, and the percentage of graduates who haven’t enrolled. This set of data looks at the high school students who graduated in the spring of 2014. The National Student Clearinghouse database was then checked in July of 2015 to determine whether those high school graduates had enrolled in higher education the year following their graduation.