States Inflate Their High-School Graduation Rates, Report Says By ERIC WILLS
Every state that reported a high-school-graduation rate last year came up with an inflated figure, compared with the rates estimated by an independent analysis, according to a report released on Thursday by the Education Trust. In some cases, the reported rates were 20 to 30 percentage points higher than the independent calculation.
Many states used definitions for graduation that "defy logic and common sense," ignored certain students who failed to get diplomas, or filled in missing information by making inferences that benefited their overall rates, says the report, "Getting Honest About Grad Rates: How States Play the Numbers and Students Lose."
"The education pipeline is an important concern to everyone," said Ross Weiner, policy director at the trust, a nonprofit organization that aims to improve the academic performance of high-school and college students. "We don't just have a leaky pipeline, we are hemorrhaging students before high-school completion."
The trust compared the graduation rates reported to the U.S. Department of Education by 47 states with figures from the Urban Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy-research organization. Using data from the U.S. Department of Education, the institute has developed a measure, known as the Cumulative Promotion Index, that estimates the percentage of students who entered high school and made it to their second year, as well as how many of those students made it through each subsequent year until their projected graduation year.
In the Education Trust's comparisons, the Cumulative Promotion Index figures are for the 2000-1 academic year, and the state-reported data are for 2002-3.
The Cumulative Promotion Index determined that more than 1.2 million students entered ninth grade in 2000-1 but did not graduate in 2003-4. More than half of them were African-American, Latino, or American Indian students.
The trust's report says the best way to calculate graduation rates is to track the progress of a defined group of students from the day they begin high school to the day they receive their diplomas. Students who leave during that time and do not return to a diploma-granting high school should be counted as dropouts. In order to have accurate data, states need to be able to track students if they leave one school district and enroll in another.
The full text of the report is available on the Education Trust's Web site <http://www2.edtrust.org/NR/rdonlyres/C5A6974D-6C04-4FB1-A9FC-05938CB0744D/0/GettingHonest.pdf>.