COUNTING GRADUATES

No area of life is more charted, graphed and tabulated than education yet in at least the recent past state reports of their graduation rates have been, to be polite, a crock. Even as broad state policies were established based on these numbers, they were plainly suspect – more about bragging than accounting – so a recent study by The Education Trust that shows only some states using more consistent measuring tools was both evidence that misreporting continues and relief that it wasn’t worse.

It could, of course, have been better. Some states still only count their drop-out rates in the last year or two of high school when those who quit are most likely to in ninth or 10th grade. Other states figure that once a student disappears, the word “transferred” on a record looks better than “dropped out,” though where that student might have gone is unknown. Still other states simply do not count accurately; a couple seemed to have a hard time demonstrating they counted at all. No Child Left Behind, the federal education act that is cursed from coast to coast, is forcing schools to add uniformity to the way they count dropouts, especially including minorities and the poor. The result should make for better policy.

All states go through the exercise of where to put education dollars – whether to fund more college scholarships, provide smaller class sizes K-12, demand more rigorous courses. Graduation rates play a vital part in these policies. Maine, for instance, has focused on getting its students into college because its college-going rate was low while its high-school graduation rate was very high. According to the Trust’s report, the state might revisit that assumption. More important, however, states that do not recognize the extent of their dropout problem will not act to correct it and will lose young men and women to low-end, subsistence work rather than finding ways to keep their educations going. Getting this number right matters.

For instance, Maine uses the federal standard of counting dropouts in all four years of high school to derive its overall graduation rate, which was 87 percent for the 2002-03 school year examined in the report, the same as the two previous years. Curiously, that number already exceeds the state’s graduation-rate goal under the federal education act, the Education Trust says.

How accurate is the number? A survey by Christopher Swanson of the Urban Institute, according to the report, concludes it is way off. Mr. Swanson took federally reported numbers for each state and compared the change in student population by year – so the number of 10th-graders in one year, for instance, vs. the number of ninth-graders in the previous year. He called this the cumulative promotion index and his conclusion for Maine was that its graduation rate for 2000-01 was 72 percent, a very large difference. Another reported gap: Maine reports its Native American graduation rate at 75 percent. The cumulative promotion index says it is 33 percent.

Figuring out accurate graduation numbers, school district by school district, is worth doing because there are students behind these numbers, and if the state is failing to accurately assess how many students are graduating it should tighten its reporting. The Education Trust isn’t the last word on this, but it is a prod to look carefully at an area that historically has been badly tracked.