Standards for reporting high school dropout rates needed
Not waiting for Congress to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush has directed Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings to establish by edict a common formula for schools in all 50 states to use to calculate high school graduation and dropout rates. Such a formula is long overdue because using data released by different states and different school districts within the states makes it currently impossible to determine just how many students are not graduating from high school.
Nationwide, the graduation rate is assumed to be 70 percent, with as few as half the students completing high school in many urban areas. But to read the numbers reported by individual schools, the graduation rate is much higher than that.
The Southern Regional Education Board reports that when the number of graduating seniors reported by Kentucky high schools in 2003 is compared with the number of high school freshmen four years earlier, Kentucky’s graduation rate was 73 percent, or just below the national average of 75 percent. However, at the same time individual high schools in the state were reporting very low dropout rates.
Why the discrepancy? Well, some school systems count only the percentage of seniors who graduate, omitting everyone who dropped out in the ninth, 10th or 11th grade. Some states count GED recipients as graduates, and others counted as graduates are dropouts who only promised to get a GED.
Suppose a student informs his high school that he is transferring to another school, but he never enrolls in the new school. Instead, he drops out. But his old school counts him as transferring to a new school instead of dropping out, and his new school doesn’t count him as a dropout because he never enrolled there.
After a period of public comment, Spellings plans to announce a common formula for calculating graduation and dropout rates that all schools must implement by the 2012-13 school year. Of course, by that time Spellings will no longer by secretary of education and the formula her department devises may be long forgotten. Nevertheless, we commend her for belatedly attempting to establish a universal formula.
A common formula will make for transparency, a reliable database and state-by-state comparisons. And it is hardly a new idea. In 2005, the National Governors Association endorsed a common formula and proposed the relatively simple measure of dividing the number of graduating seniors by the number of ninth-graders who entered the school four years earlier.
In some ways, No Child Left Behind encourages school districts to fudge on graduation rates in order to look good. However, in an era in which those without high school degrees are not even likely to qualify for the most basic of jobs, it is important to know just how serious the nation’s dropout problem is. If we can’t even define the size of the problem, we are not likely to solve it.
2 comments:
It's too bad the federal government has to force Kentucky educators to come clean on our inflated graduation rates. The interim formula Secretary Spellings proposes will drop the state's claimed graduation rate by about 10 points. That represents around 4,400 students who currently just disappear from Kentucky high schools without a trace, or an acknowledgment.
The fact that neither education leaders nor our legislators care enough about this serious problem to demand accurate reporting is very disappointing.
Say what you will about NCLB, in this area at least the law is definitely moving education in a better direction -- transparency and data integrity concerning how many kids don't graduate.
Richard Innes
Yes...and 49 other states too.
I'm sure that blaming Kentucky educators is fun, and for some profitable, but this is a national problem.
It is part of a larger conversation that involves national standards and other inter-state efforts.
Talk about herding cats! Since education belongs to the states, we can count on states to go their own ways...and screw stuff up from time to time.
National coordination is reasonable in some cases, but my sense is that most folks prefer to keep state control. NCLB's heavy-handed yet half-supported intrusion has produced more problems and resentment than hope for better education.
But I certainly agree that for data to mean anything there must be uniform definitions and formulas for calculating graduation rates...or whatever one measures. This is a good move. This federal solution will unify requirements for all states, but it has nothing to do with NCLB. It is an executive order outside of NCLB.
The fact that legislators don't care enough about the more serious problem of inadequate funding is even more disappointing.
We are a poor, undereducated state. We're poor because we're undereducated because we're poor because we're undereducated because...
Forgive me if I'm grumpy this morning. But in a few hours I expect the CPE to cut tuition @ EKU - and my job with it. Next year my 400+ students will be taught by someone with less experience and lower qualifications.
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