From the New York Times, Wednesday, October 29, 2008. See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/opinion/30thu2.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slog29
Editorial
Numbers Game,
Americans should be deeply alarmed by new data showing that the country is continuing to lose ground educationally to its competitors abroad.
The United States once had the world's top high-school graduation rate. It has now fallen to 13th place behind countries like South Korea, the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Worse still, a new study from the Education Trust, a nonpartisan foundation, finds that this is the only country in the industrial world where young people are less likely than their parents to graduate high school.
Most American parents never see these damning international comparisons, which are based on census figures and labor force statistics. Instead, parents who want to know how their schools are doing in terms of vital statistics like graduation rates must rely on phony calculations cooked up by state governments that are determined to hide the truth for as long as possible.
With these problems clearly in mind, Margaret Spellings, the secretary of education, has issued new regulations for how school graduation rates are calculated and reported to the public under the No Child Left Behind Act. States will now be required to keep track of students from when they enter high school until they receive regular diplomas, counting as non-graduates any students who choose to leave school before that time.
Until now, the states have been able to calculate graduation rates any way they chose. For many states, that meant writing off students who leave school early and reporting a clearly bogus graduation rate based only on the number of students who began the senior year. Other states have tried to dress up abysmal rates by counting as graduates dropouts who later received G.E.D.'s.
Under the new counting rules, the states will be required to set clear goals for improving graduation rates and to demonstrate "continuous and substantial improvement" toward those goals.
For the first time, the states will also be required to report graduation rates by race to ensure that black and Latino students, who have significantly higher dropout rates than whites, get the special attention they clearly need. And instead of concealing graduation statistics - as many states have done up to now - state governments will be required to report them both to the federal government and the general public.
For too long the states have been allowed to talk a good game while piling up phony statistics and doing little to improve their schools. Our children and the country are paying the price.
