Legal Clips, [April 2008]Moving to sweep away the tangle of inaccurate state data that has obscured the severity of the nation’s high school dropout crisis, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will require all states to use one federal formula to calculate graduation and dropout rates. The requirement would be one of the most far-reaching regulatory actions taken by any education secretary, experts said, because it would affect the official statistics issued by all 50 states and each of the nation’s 14,000 public high schools. Ms. Spellings was to announce her action Tuesday at a so-called dropout prevention summit in Washington organized by America’s Promise Alliance, a group beginning a national campaign intended to reduce dropout rates. Her statements underline the rising urgency among policymakers and corporate leaders to address the nation’s dropout epidemic, as well as the administration’s growing sense that efforts in Congress to rewrite the law this year may not succeed.
The adoption of a federal graduation formula would correct one of the most glaring weaknesses of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Although the law requires states and high schools to report their graduation rates to the federal government, it allows states to set their own formulas for calculating them. As a result, most states have used formulas that understate the number of dropouts, and official graduation rates are not comparable from state to state. NCLB establishes no national school completion goal. Senior Education Department officials said Ms. Spellings would publish the proposed graduation formula requirement in the Federal Register, opening a period of public comment that often lasts several months, before issuing the final regulation later this year.
Ms. Spellings is not expected to outline the specific graduation rate formula that she intends to require states to adopt at the summit. But in her remarks, she noted that all 50 governors in the National Governors Association signed a compact in 2005 agreeing to eventually calculate their graduation rates according to a common method. Under that formula, graduation rates are calculated by dividing the number of students who receive a traditional high school diploma in any given year by the number of first-time ninth graders that entered four years earlier. The governors’ agreement lacks the force of law, and a few states have moved to enact the governors’ formula more vigorously than others. Many states still use dozens of other graduation rate formulas that vary in reliability.
According to a report issued by the alliance, 1.2 million American teenagers drop out of high school every year. Christopher B. Swanson, the report’s author, said that to use the governors’ graduation formula, a state must have a statewide school record system capable of tracking each student through four years of high school. Many states have made progress toward building such systems, Dr. Swanson said, but some have not, raising questions about how the Department of Education could require states to calculate a rate that is beyond their technological capacity, he said. The department might have to establish an interim graduation rate formula for use by some states until they can develop their tracking systems, and that could mean that graduation rates might for a time still not be comparable across states, he said. Amy Wilkins, a vice president at Education Trust, a group that has pushed for more accurate reporting of graduation rates, said Ms. Spellings is “tired of seeing flaws in the law limit its effectiveness. She has the power to make changes, and so she is.”
Source: New York Times, 4/1/08, By Sam Dillon
[Editor’s Note: Like the science of calculating graduation rates, the science of counting schools is an inexact one, but the number of public high schools probably is closer to 20,000 than 14,000. See the table below by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The press release with the Secretary’s remarks, the Alliance report, and a USA TODAY article on the report’s findings also are below. At the next link, NSBA’s Center for Public Education provides user-friendly resources to help the public understand the “straight story on high school graduation rates” and to help local leaders make accurate calculations. See also the Center’s resources on dropout identification, intervention, prevention, and recovery, including a review of “Dropouts: Myths vs. Realities.” This week also saw the filing of a lawsuit, described at the next link, against a Florida school district over its low graduation rates for minority students. Information on other administrative changes to NCLB is available starting at the final link.]
NCES table on high schools
ED press release on graduation rate formula
USA TODAY, 4/1/08, Greg Toppo
Alliance high school graduation report
Center for Public Education on high school graduation rates
Center for Public Education on dropouts
NSBA School Law pages on Palm Beach County lawsuit
NSBA School Law pages on NCLB changes