Dropping out

Few measurements are more important to a public school system than its high school graduation rate. Whether a child enters a particular school district in kindergarten or the 10th grade, the ultimate goal is the same: receiving a meaningful diploma. If a student fails to do so after as many as 13 years of instruction and guidance from one district, it’s a strike against the system.

“That’s the pinnacle measure we use for success,” Clark County Superintendent Walt Rulffes said earlier this year of his district’s graduation rate. “There are endless opportunities for people in this world who are educated.”

You’d think such a significant measuring stick would be uniform across the country. But state to state, how each school system comes up with its magic number varies widely and changes frequently — and whatever methodology is used is largely unknown to taxpayers and elected officials.

Graduation rates aren’t calculated solely for the interest of parents, administrators and School Board members. They’re central in satisfying federal mandates and qualifying for billions of dollars in federal subsidies. Members of Congress and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings are concerned that they’re cutting checks and issuing kudos and reprimands based on dishonest numbers.

“I think we need some truth in advertising,” Secretary Spellings said in an interview with The Associated Press. She said that if Congress doesn’t impose equivalent standards in calculating and reporting graduation rates as part of a reauthorized No Child Left Behind Act, she might use her executive authority to order a uniform formula.

Two years ago, the nation’s governors agreed to adopt a single standard in calculating graduation rates, but so far, only a dozen or so states are using that method.

Some states, such as Florida, lump students who receive General Equivalency Degree certificates with those who received diplomas in determining their graduation rates. Others, such as New Mexico, simply divide the number of graduates by the number of 12th-graders enrolled at the start of that academic year.

North Carolina used to calculate its rate by ignoring early dropouts and reporting the percentage of graduates who finished school on time. Only students who graduated late — not dropouts, but late graduates — counted against its rate. That kind of math enabled North Carolina to boast a 95 percent graduation rate. When North Carolina switched to the tougher standard approved the nation’s governors in 2005, that rate fell to 68 percent.

As Johns Hopkins University researchers pointed out this year, more than 1,600 American high schools are “dropout factories,” typically losing at least 40 percent of each graduating class between their freshman and senior years. Calculating graduation rates by comparing graduating seniors against ninth-grade enrollments produces discouraging numbers in almost every large public school system.

Of course, not all states count dropouts the same, either. In some systems, if a district employee cannot document contact with a student or his parents to confirm that he has quit school, that student is classified as a transfer. The data can be sketchy at best.

“If you use dropout data, you need to be very concerned,” said Chris Swanson, director of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center.

Nevada school districts go the more honest route in reporting their rates, excluding those who receive certificates of attendance or adjusted diplomas from the ranks of graduates, and including dropouts from ninth through 12th grades in their calculations. Students who vanish from class are generally removed from the dropout rolls only when they request that transcripts be forwarded to another school system. Those factors contributed to the Clark County School District’s 63.5 percent graduation rate for the Class of 2006, its highest in three years.

We’d prefer that the federal government have no role in determining public education policy. It should be left to the states to operate, regulate and fund their public schools.

In addition, a high graduation rate doesn’t guarantee that a district is succeeding. Contrary to what the schools’ self-esteem movement dictates, not all children come to high school with equal abilities and potential. If academic standards must be lowered even more to ensure that every child receives a high school diploma, administrators might as well hand out parchment at recess — a diploma is a worthless symbol of achievement if it has no value in the workplace or within institutions of higher learning.

But under the current system, in which state education bureaucracies eagerly feed at the federal trough until their bellies ache, it makes sense to force them to play by the same rules.